Reykjavik; Monday, 06 May, 2019

Another early start as the pickup for our Golden Circle tour was at 9am, though on this occasion the driver of the shuttle bus had gone a different way round the city centre meaning we were the last pickup at nearly 9:15 before taking us directly to the coach depot.

Todays tour was on a full-sized coach as it’s the most popular tour that can be done on Iceland – round some of the key natural sights of the island. After leaving Reykjavik we headed North and East out of the city and up into the highlands of the interior before reaching our first stop of the day at the Þingvellir national park. This was the location for the original parliament of Iceland, and it was possible to walk down to the Lögberg (law rocks) where those first parliaments took place. The site is also important as being part of the rift valley that is slowly being formed by the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pulling apart. The two plates are pulling apart from each other at about 1cm in each direction a year, creating an additional 2cm wide strip of new land every 12 months – though its so slow it’s impossible to see – but you can see the effect that millennia of this has on the land with lots of fissures and lava outcrops across the valley floor.

After Þingvellir we got back on the bus and crossed the valley floor travelling from North America to Eurasia and further on into the heart of the country.

The next stop was at Geysir, which also doubled up as the lunch stop. The main Geysir here has been dormant for nearly 20 years, but the smaller Stokkur geyser is very active with an impressive jet of water being expelled every 5 minutes or so.

We watched a couple of explosions before wandering back past the bubbling mud pools and smaller geysirs to the information centre and café to have a bit to eat.

From Geysir the bus moved onto the final stop of the day at the Gullfoss, or Golden Falls, a spectacular two-tiered waterfall that thunders down from the high plane into a deep canyon that has been carved out by the river over time.

After a lengthy stop at Gullfoss it was time to head back to the coach and make our way back to Reykjavik. We got dropped off very close to the hotel where we freshened up before heading out to the restaurant for the evening.

This was one of the first times that I’ve actually booked a restaurant in advance, and in the case of tonight’s meal nearly 6 months in advance, but the Grillmarkaðurinn is quite often marked out as one of the best restaurants in Iceland, and they offer a special Icelandic tasting menu that lets you experience Icelandic cuisine (or at least the nice bits of Icelandic cuisine, there’s no Kæstur hákarl – fermented shark – available here!) over 8 slowly served courses.

We spent nearly three hours in the restaurant and by the end were pretty well stuffed, but in a good way. It was a slow waddle back to the hotel and to bed.