The plan for my last day in Iceland was to hit up the "Golden Circle", hitting up the sites of Žingvellir National Park, the Fontana Hot Spring, Gullfoss Waterfall, and finally Geyser. Since the sun doesn't come up until 11 am in these parts we slept in, in our tiny bed at the Hilton Nordica, and headed into town to see the Koloportid Flea market. I was hoping to score some cool stuff but it was a big disappointment. It reminded me of one of those crappy flea markets in the subway of Shanghai, selling ...... T-shirts, overpriced wool, CD's, and books in Icelandic. After wasting 15 minutes of my life doing that it was time to get some coffee and hit the road!
I'm the one in red parked like an idiot
The first stop was Žingvellir National Park, which is the site of the first parliment of iceland, and has a giant siesmic rift in the ground. Upon arrival you have to buy a parking pass, but someone leaving gave me theres.... the site is undergoing a massive expansion and they're building the facilities to handle the bus tour crowds
According to my guidebook "Top 10 Iceland", this is the number one attraction in Iceland, and the views are gorgeous:
Back in the day criminals were thrown into these rapids...
Next we drove about 40 minutes north towards Laugarvatn Fontana, which is a spa near to Geyser. This was a pretty cool steam seap where they generate electricity, power some greenhouses, and have a pretty cool spa complex.
The views made the drive easy:
The Fontana Spa is a money factory for Mr.Fontana. We decides to do a bread tour, buffet lunch, and entrance to the spa, costing up about 75 bucks a piece. I know this sounds like alot but is pretty average for iceland. We pigged out on the badly needed food, and drank about 15 cups of coffee:
Next was the bread tour. Basically they make bread by placing it into a geothermal seep for 24 hours, and it comes out piping hot and delicious. Our Bread today was a sweet rye. The bread was quickly raided by a chinese tour group who were chased off by the staff. We got lucky in that there were 8 people on the tour, but it was supposed to be 80!
Digging out the bread:
The star of the show, to make it edible we basted it in butter:
Now its soak time. Note here in iceland they want you to shower nude before going in, and they take it pretty seriously. I'm doing my thing when two drunk british girls showed up in the shower and started to undress before noticing they were in a room full of naked men. After a few laughs they fled, but should really look into putting in a door or something. Now here is the great hot spring:
soaking away
they even have a cold pool to jump into after being in the sauna. I chose to do this, and had the feeling of death and burning as I got in, but now my skin is silky smooth and I picked up a lot of credit from the drunk brits:
Next we went to Gulfoss, which is the big waterfall. Easy drive, park your car and walk up to the falls:
These pictures do not do this waterfall credit, its actually two tiered, and was nearly dammed but luckily people successfully protested it back in the 1920's.
Finally we drove about 15 minutes to Geyser... where you can see.... Geysers!
The main one goes off every 5 minutes while the rest go off less, but there were some pretty small ones going off across this steamy, sulfury landscape:
going off!
geyser field:
Finally time to head home, taking about 90 minutes to get back to Reykjavik from geyser, making it back before it got pitch black
