After being home for less than a fortnight, we had itchy feet and we needed to travel. So we headed to Iceland for 4 days.
It was snowing as we drove in from the airport to our hotel. We went for dinner nearby and a beer was £8, £9 for a small glass of wine. We headed back to our room to enjoy the duty free wine we came prepared with.
Arriving from airport
Hotel courtesy of Avios
The next day we took the Golden Circle tour.
View of lakes
We visited Thingvellir, the site of the oldest Parliament in the world. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site. It’s in the middle of a circular plain surrounded by mountains and on the fissure between the North American and European tectonic plates. The fissure is growing about 10cm a year so you can keep coming back and almost see it moving apart.
Thingvellir Parliament
The Parliament accepted Christianity in 1,000AD but allowed the pagan religion to continue. It still has 3,500 devotees today.
The Icelandic language is fascinating. It’s the closest to old Norse and hasn’t “modernised” like Norwegian. School kids can still read the old Norse Sagas from 1,200AD. More than I could do with Shakespeare! Apparently there aren’t really any dialects either so everyone can understand everybody else. Great language design!
Then we headed for something hot and steamy. Strokkur erupts every few minutes. It’s roommate Geysir is sleeping now but claimed immortality by spawning the English word Geyser.
Strokkur geyser erupting
Icy and steamy
A bit further on is the Gullfoss waterfall. Much more impressive than Niagara. Water straight from the glacier.
Gullfoss waterfall
Iceland gets all of its energy from renewable sources. Geothermal, hydro, wind.
Steamy landscape
They use geothermal heating for greenhouses to grow tomatoes and bananas. Hardly any insects survive here so they don’t need pesticides.
The Icelandic ponies are the purest bred horses in the world. They haven’t allowed any other horses in for hundreds of years. Even used saddles etc. cannot be brought in to avoid disease. They have an extra gear between trot and canter which is smooth and fast. DNA tests have now shown that the genetic mutation happened in York, England. The Vikings pillaged and brought horses and women to Iceland. A huge proportion of the female DNA is from Ireland. With a small, remote population inbreeding was an issue and Icelanders are all related only 6 generations back. But don’t worry. There’s an app for that. So you can check a date out before things get too heavy.
We had to do the Blue Lagoon. Fresh snow on the lava rocks all around.
The water is from a geothermal source and is a very pleasant 38 degrees. We stayed so long in the Blue Lagoon we came out looking like a prune.
