Hrunalaug

Iceland heard Craig's concerns about us going to a hot spring prior to exercise rather than after so this morning it served up a 3km straight uphill hike to get to a Thermal River. We got up early to do the hike because it's very popular and gets busy. Luckily, we had about an hour alone in our chosen spot (which was one of the best because it was quite deep). It feels so lovely and serene bathing in nature. We left when it started to get busy and we walked past many many people on our hike back, it would not have been anywhere near as enjoyable if we didn't get our private corner.

Next on the list was Haifoss (Iceland's 5th largest waterfall) but once we turned onto the road leading to it we decided it was a bit too rough for our car so turned back. This took us to Hjalparfoss which is much smaller but it's kind of cool to see the two streams of water joining. Ethan thinks that after millions of years the rock in the middle might wear away to make it one big waterfall. We paid a quick visit to a place called Stönga which is one of the best known and preserved archeological sites in Iceland of an 11th century Viking hall! It was deserted due to a volcanic eruption in 1300 but was excavated in 1939. Supposedly the “greatest Viking hero of Iceland” Gaukar Trandildson lived here. It was very mesmerising to look at and we were glad we got to see a real Viking headquarters.

Next we journeyed to the Golden Circle which is most people's first stops and has many day tours from Reykjavik arriving. There we saw Gullfoss which was a very impressive 3-tiered waterfall with lots of power changes of direction. Then we chilled for a while at the Geysir area, which was one of Iesha's favourite thing on the whole trip so far, she wanted to keep watching them explode. One of the geysirs there is actually the original geysir and the reason why we use that word, but that one doesn't explode very much anymore. It's little brother Strokkur explodes every 5-10 minutes so we stayed around to watch 4 eruptions (getting wet from one). This was such a cool experience to see, Ethan thought it would be like the blowholes but to actually be able to the water bubbling away, contracting and pulsing before erupting was absolutely awesome.

We finished the day watching the sunset in the provided hot tub at our campsite. This has to be the best campsite of the trip and it's even cheaper relative to our other stays.Read more