Laugarvatn

During the night we heard a male voice trying to get into our accommodation. So we didn’t have the place to ourselves after all.

We got up at 8am after a decent nights sleep & had toast & hot chocolate for breakfast. During breakfast the other mysterious guest appeared. He was a 20 something male who was from Switzerland, but originally from Moscow. He was cycling around Iceland on his mountain bike & he weirdly asked me for advice on road conditions in the nearby mountains. Funnily enough I couldn’t help.

Our first stop of the day was Geysir Hot Spring Area. Accounts from the 19th century mention that the Great Geyser could reach up to 170 meters (558 ft)! After being dormant for years, the Great Geysir was revived by an earthquake in 2000 and erupted for a couple of times a day for several years, but sadly the Great Geysir currently lies dormant.

Luckily for us, the most active geyser, Strokkur (the Churn) still sprouts hot water as high as 30 meters (100 ft) into the air every few minutes. It gave us the opportunity to see it & in Jackie’s case, film it close up.

We marched around the area for half an hour or so taking photos & both came to the conclusion that without the Great Geysir, it was a somewhat inferior version of Yellowstone National Park. I’m not complaining because it was free to visit.

Next stop on the Golden Circle was Gullfoss (Golden Falls) a mesmerising and voluminous two-tiered waterfall. Every second, around 80 cubic metres of water plummet 32 metres into a narrow chasm. It was spectacular & we viewed it from every vantage point available to us.

It was now lunchtime, so on the way to Þingvellir (Thingvellir) National Park we stopped at the N1 service station in Laugarvatn. We bought 2 coffees, with an undeclared espresso & a chicken tikka wrap to share.

We then continued to Þingvellir (Thingvellir) National Park, a historic site and the 3rd of the big three on the Golden Circle.

We parked up & walked firstly to Öxarárfoss, a waterfall we could get close up & personal with, then almost a kilometre along a dark narrow canyon to Langistígur. This was the Walk of Death or Execution Trail, where men were beheaded or hanged to death for offences as minor as theft & women were drowned or burnt at the stake for suspected crimes including witchcraft. Seventy two people are known with certainty to have executed here between 1602 & 1750 at place names such as the Drowning Pool, Execution Block Spit, Fire Gorge & Gallows Rock.

We then walked back south along the park canyon to Alþing (Althing), the site of Iceland's parliament from the 10th to 18th centuries & Lögberg (Law Rock), a rocky outcrop where the laws were made & enforced.

The park sits in a rift valley caused by the separation of 2 tectonic plates, with rocky cliffs and fissures like the huge Almannagjá fault, which we walked over on a wooden walkway.

Finally we walked down to Þingvellir church, originally built a 1,000 years ago to celebrate Iceland’s conversion to Christianity. Beside it is Iceland’s National Cemetery with the graves of some famous Icelandic poets and a house that we discovered was the summer residence of the Icelandic prime minister.

We returned to Duster & drove back to Laugarvatn, where we had booked accommodation in the Héraðsskólinn Historic Guesthouse at a very reasonable price. It once was a girls boarding school & in one of the rooms, Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel prize winning writer wrote his most famous book Independent People in Room 12 on the 3rd floor of the building. Now despite retaining all it’s furniture & artefacts, it is now nothing short of a hostel. We had to take our boots off before entering the building & we definitely have a shared bathroom. The men have just one shower in a room with a lock, whilst apparently the ladies have 2 showers divided by a privacy curtain & no lock on the door.

We enquired about dinner and was informed the chef would be in to serve up a lamb dish at 8pm. We decided to check out Lindin Bistro Cafe, that was highly recommended in the Lonely Planet guidebook & by our receptionist. We both ordered the reindeer burger with chips & an accompanying beer & glass of house wine. It was very pleasant, but as Jackie pointed out it was still just a burger & the bill was around £60.

We returned to the hostel, through a cloud of midges that had appeared due to the sunny still evening & retired to our room for the night.

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