The first of two days sat on tour buses, and another Icelandic "must do" - the Golden Circle.  Loads of companies offer this tour, but we picked Iceland Excursions because it mentioned a tour of a geothermal power station.  Which did not occur - instead we went to a horse place.  But nevermind!

The first big stop of the day was Þingvellir, an interesting place for several reasons.  It's the location of Iceland's first parliament, and it's a rift valley between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.  So there's all sorts of fissures and big rocky walls and things, as well as all the history about how people gathered for assemblies and sorted out important legal stuff.

hooray for polarising filters!

Mostly it's just really pretty - you can see why Silfra (one of the larger fissures - not this one) is popular for diving!

Next up we headed to Gulfoss.  It's a big volume waterfall that vanishes into a tall gorge.  I thought I'd be arty/clever and get some blurry water shots with the help of a tripod and some ND filters, but it was too bright to get a slow enough shutter speed.

I spent a lot of time wiping spray off my lens!  After a slightly rushed lunch in the café (salmon bagel, yum) it was back on the bus and off we went to see the geysers!

Geysir itself (the one that gave them the name) is dormant, but Strokkur goes off every few minutes.  It erupted not long after we got to it, which caught me off guard - very strange to suddenly have water shooting out of the ground a few metres from where you're standing!

ghostly geyser.  or just rain on the lens

It was raining pretty heavily by this point, so we had an odd mix of cool rain and hot steam going on.  There are loads of little vents/hot spots/geysers in the area - on a nicer day I'd have wandered around and taken more pics, but instead we lurked in the gift shop for 10 minutes to try and dry out before getting back on the bus.

Next stop was Skálholt, another historically important site.  This time for religious reasons.  It's a church.  There's been a church on the site for a long time.  But it did have some interesting stained glass windows and a grass roofed building next door so I'm not complaining too much.

From here we headed back to Reykjavik, with one final stop at the horse place.  Icelandic horses have five gaits (other horses just have four).  Please don't ask me what the difference is because I have no idea!

In summary, it was a very interesting and varied day.  Obviously it would be better to do it at your own pace, rather than that of an organised tour, but that's true for most things.  Certainly I'd have been happy to... continue reading »

No Comments

To celebrate this year's Significant Birthdays, last month my mum and I went to Iceland!  Very exciting, as I've wanted to go there for years We flew Easyjet from Bristol, and stayed in Reykjavik at Hotel Leifur Eiriksson.

Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) we managed to pick a rainy week so a lot of the beautiful panoramic scenery I'd hoped to see (and photograph) was hidden behind large amounts of cloud.  But I've been to Wales on rainy days, so this is nothing new!  Didn't stop me taking about a million photos, of course..

Mid June is also (almost) midnight sun, but again this was sort of obscured by cloud - certainly it was the same level of light at 3am as it was at 7pm, but no actual sunshine.

Must of the first day was spent at the Blue Lagoon, which is sort of in between Keflavik airport and Reykjavik.  If I'd gone on my own I probably wouldn't have bothered, despite it being a "must do" thing, purely because it's so expensive.  But mum really wanted to, so we treated ourselves and went for one of the packages that included lunch, scrubs/face masks and bathrobe hire.

The lagoon itself is pretty weird looking - bright milky blue water, almost glowing in the cloudy drizzly weather.  You could barely make out the power plant next door -  some might argue that's a good thing.  The lagoon wouldn't exist with out it though.

After floating around in the steamy warm water until our skin shrivelled up, we went for lunch at the Lava restaurant, where I had what was possibly the tastiest lamb I've ever eaten.  yum yum!

When we arrived in Reykjavik, I had to have yet another shower to finish washing the minerals/salt/conditioner out of my hair.  yuck.  When you turn on a hot tap, the water smells of sulphur, on account of it being geothermally heated.  So that's a bit weird at first!

We went for a wander around town, mostly along the shoreline.  This is Sólfar, which I'd seen photos of and was quite keen to view in real life.  I like the simplicity.

This next one is Harpa, the concert hall. Such a cool building!  Inspired by basalt columns, I believe. All sorts of colours and reflections, changing depending on where you look from - I had great fun playing with my polarising filter (there's even a video...)

Next up... several days of touristy stuff.  But not until I've edited another few hundred photos, argh

No Comments