Iceland's much-promoted "Golden Circle" lives up to its fame

If you're going to find a crowd anywhere in Iceland outside Reykjavic and the Blue Lagoon, it will be on a much-beaten tourist track called "The Golden Circle".

The furthest point in this loop of key sights in the southeast of the country is about 2.5 hours from the capital, where most visitors stay.  Thus they're the easiest things for most people to access in a country where 4-wheel drives are a necessity and motoring can be a real challenge.  Ease doesn't take away from the wonder, however.  The Golden Circle would be worth a much longer trek.

The essential points are the waterfall of Gulfoss, the geyser field at Haukadalur and the national park at Thingvellir.  We added the church at Skaholt.

Though our route was probably the same as the 300km circle most people cover from the capital, our starting point was our hotel on Whalefjord.

So instead of setting out through city and suburbs, we circumnavigated the fjord and then spent 30 minutes cutting across a broad lowland valley, empty but for the livestock, the rare farmhouse and the single gravel road.  We saw perhaps five other cars in the first hour of the trip. If you like being alone in wide-open spaces, Iceland is for you.

We emerged onto the main road near Thingvellir, to which we would return, but pushed on so we could reach the top of the circle before making our way back.  First stop: the geyser field.

Each of these geothermal blowholes has a name.  The biggest one is Geysir, giving us the name in English for all such features.  These days, Geysir just sits to one side and steams, while Strokkur is the one that blasts with enough regularity (every seven to 10 minutes) to make it likely you'll both see it spout, and get a decent picture.

But you're not just here for a single jet of water.  The whole field has a mystical feel; it's a place that makes Norse gods, trolls and silversmithing dwarves perfectly plausible.  You're looking at a hillside gently sloping toward more ubiquitous black peaks.  Reforestation has placed a ring of small pines around the edge, but your focus is drawn first to the steam.  It rises from more than a score of points across the field, sometimes in plumes like a steady chimney, sometimes in great billows.  Streams of water run down the hill, their heat sending off more mist.  Only a very foolish visitor would need the signs that warn people not to touch; it's obviously scalding.

The whole area smells of sulphur, the stench that alternates with the perfume of pristine fresh air to define the aroma of Iceland.  Once you're walking in the landscape you come upon the pools.  Some the size of a child's bath, others as big as a small suburban swimming pool.  Some bubble, but most sit placidly.  The water is crystal clear and the minerals within each have encrusted the stone with accretions of white, green and red.  Gazing at this beauty would be worth the trip.   When Strokkur spits out its plume, it's icing on the sightseeing cake.

There's also a large visitor centre here with a cafe and the best gift shop we saw outside of Reykjavic airport.  If we had it to do again, we would have seen Gulfoss first and then come back here for shopping and lunch.

Two people on the promontory top left give a sense of scale

Gulfoss ... Golden Falls in English ... is just 20 minutes beyond Haukadalur.  Again, you're looking at the transforming power of water on a  landscape.  But this time, rather than the scalding geothermal liquid forcing its way from the underworld, it's icy glacial runoff.  We expected something cascading down one of those mountains, but Gulfoss is actually in a valley, completely hidden from the road.  Park at the visitor's centre and start walking across the volcanic plain and there's no view of river or falls; only a dull rumble in your ears tells you something's ahead.  And then, suddenly, you come upon a crevasse to look down upon falls just as impressive as Niagra or Victoria, if somewhat smaller.

There are actually two cascades here, a top falls and a lower one, and though your best photo is from above, you need to scramble down the 109 stairs to the viewing platform at the bottom to get the full effect.  (Turns out you can drive down there, too, but the road isn't signposted.  It's the turn just south of the visitor centre.)  From there, a well-maintained path takes you along the length of the falls.  You can get close enough to feel the spray, shake with the thunder and be more than a bit frightened by the water's destructive power. 

This being Iceland, I named him "Our Lord of the Blue Lagoon"

From this top point of the circle we turned south for Skaholt.  Iceland may operate on a giant scale in the natural world, but its human scale is much smaller.  Skaholt is, arguably, the Canterbury or Rome of Iceland.  It's technically a cathedral, the seat of Iceland's senior bishop and at the centre of much history.  Yet today it's a modern church, smaller than many a humble village parish in England, surrounded by a handful of buildings.  Of the thousands of people who once lived here, there is no sign.  You can see the appeal of the place, however, as this is a beautiful spot.  A broad, rolling, grass-covered valley with several lakes, ringed by mountains high enough to give some shelter but low enough to allow easy passage.  Once there was an enormous wooden cathedral here, shipped in from Norway and assembled on site.  Today's church is a testament to the Scandinavian ability to find beauty in simplicity, all white walls and sharp lines.  This makes the arresting modern mosaic of Christ, emerging from shifting tides of blues and greens, all the more striking.  (This being Iceland, I immediately thought of him as Our Lord of the Blue Lagoon.)

Of very recent construction ... so new you can still smell the cedar and it's not in any guidebooks, is a sod-roofed side church that evokes earliest Viking times.  It's as stirring, in its own way, as the official house of worship.

Our last stop of the day was Thingvellir.  We spent an hour there, which is about all you'll be able to do if you are circumnavigating the whole route.  This place, however, could easily take a day on its own.  It's a national park with miles of great views and hiking trails, sitting at the top end of a big lake in an enormous valley.  At its centre, however, lies what you're really here to see:  a site of both historic and geological impact.

The geology came first.  This is a rift valley.  It's here that the North American and Eurasian plates come together, and are spreading.  You can stand in between them, dwarfed by the ominous black basalt cliffs on the left of the photo ... America ... and the lower cliffs on your right ... Europe.  They rise straight, with jagged tops, and in between them is a mostly flat chasm, roughly 50 yards wide.  Parts of it are filled by a rushing river which turns and cascades over falls before breaking into the valley floor behind the European cliff wall.  The rest runs like a long, straight processional way.  And it's getting just a bit wider, every year, as the plates pull apart.

Below the rift lies a gentle valley of grasslands, bisected by rivers flowing into the lake.  The early Viking settlers found this to be both a verdant and convenient spot for summer meetings, and started coming together in the late 10th century to discuss how to run their colony.  These were fiercely independent people ... in many cases outcasts and rebels who struck out for Iceland for greater freedom and opportunity. Chieftans succeed on merit and could be voted out. Authority needed to be earned and rules required communal buy-in.

The settlers gathered here every summer from about 930AD to talk communal business, administer justice and make decisions on the rules and customs that guided their community. Those meetings became the world's oldest continuously operating parliament, now taking the form of the Althing in Reykjavik.  That puts Thingvellir up there with Athens or Runnymede (where Magna Carta sprang to life) as sacred sites in the history of representative government. Although the Vikings, as modern Scandinavians will quickly remind you, were far closer to our current ideas of democracy. Suffrage was broader than in either Ancient Greece or Medieval England, and Viking women enjoyed a fair amount of authority.

Of course, the people also came to this astonishingly beautiful valley to buy, sell, marry, gossip and simply enjoy their one crowd scene a year.  It must have been one hell of a party.

If you're driving yourself, do note that while in English it's Thingvellir, the Icelandic symbol for the "th" sound looks like a P.  We had a few perplexed moments unsure if we were following the right signs.  Also, note that while this site has greater historic interest, there are fewer tourist facilities here than at Gulfoss or Haukadalur.  Do your shopping and dining at one of those two and consider Thingvellir a wilderness site.

Jaw-dropping landscapes are the essence of our Icelandic experience

Iceland is all about the views.

It's a mythic landscape that makes you think of The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. It's vast, bleak, dramatic. And empty. Iceland is about the size of the American state of Kentucky but has a population of just over 300,000, mostly in and around Reykjavic. It's possible ... indeed, typical ... to drive half an hour between sightings of another car, and hours without seeing any more "civilisation" than a large farmstead or a scattering of holiday cottages.

Jagged black peaks loom over wide valleys scrubbed out by the advance and retreat of glaciers. On the coast, those valleys sink below sea level to form deep fjords, like the crazily picturesque Hvalfjörðinn (Whale fjord) on which our hotel sat. This one has a modern tunnel across its mouth. A good thing, considering that it takes nearly 45-minutes to drive down each side, on a road cut along the base of the mountains and sometimes dropping straight into the fjord, often buffeted by knuckle-whitening blasts of wind that shake your 4-wheel drive as if it were a mini.

Should you choose to circumnavigate Hvalfjörðinn you won't pass a single service station, shop or village. Lots of sheep and horses, a few pretty waterfalls, a few holiday cottages, a huddle of quonset huts that were an old British naval base and two factories. (Ironically, Iceland's abundant natural energy means it's cheaper to produce energy-intensive things like aluminium here, then ship them.) But for most of the drive, it's just dramatic wilderness. This was our introduction to the jaw-dropping scenes that would be filling our eyes, and an important lesson about driving times in Iceland. Going through that tunnel takes 15 minutes. Circumnavigating the fjord ... which anyone driving around the country would have had to do until just a few years ago ... at least 90. Iceland may not be a big place, but when volcanoes dictate the terrain, you're not going anywhere fast.

Charming as Reykjavic is (I'll describe it in a later blog), I was deeply relieved by our decision not to stay there. Sitting in our private hot tub one morning, I watched the sunrise trigger a pink and gold light show through gaps in racing storm clouds, enjoying the total silence. A single white church steeple was the only sign of human habitation as I looked down a hillside of beech and heather scrub clothed in autumnal reds, yellows and moss greens, leading to a few newly-mown hay fields before the wind-whipped water and the mountains on the other side. I felt sorry for anyone staying in the city. This splendid isolation was surely the point of Iceland.

The hotel at my back was the Glymur, and the only tourist accommodation we saw on the fjord. It offers comfortable lodging, a fine restaurant and genial staff. The main building, with traditional hotel rooms and several big lounges, all overlooking that breathtaking view, sits near the top of the hill. Dotted on the slope below it are a cluster of free-standing holiday cottages. A great solution for four of us, with two in each twin bedded room on either side of a good-sized sitting room with galley kitchen. A deck ran the length of the building, where the hot tub took centre stage. Ours was the house lowest on the slope so, when looking out the fjord-facing glass walls, we had no sense of any neighbours or of the hotel above us. All that lounging space meant we had plenty of room to relax in the afternoon between touring and dinner, and again after our meal. Which also helped keep the cost down, as we catered happy hours from the duty free purchases we'd brought with us.

The Hotel Glymur sits in splendid isolation

The look, both in our house and throughout the main rooms of the hotel, was comfortable and streamlined Scandinavian design. No appearance of luxury. In fact, on the website the place looks awfully simple for the price. Once there it comes across as a good deal more sleek and elegant than the photos suggest, and it all pales in comparison to the view, in any case. Pointless to compete with the magnificence out those windows.

All that wilderness, of course, means no restaurants, so we booked a dinner, bed and breakfast package. Other than stocking up on groceries when coming through Reykjavic and cooking for ourselves, there would have been no other practical option. Fortunately, the restaurant is considered one of the best in Iceland and mixes local specialties with traditional European. We had three excellent dinners, with enough menu variety not to repeat anything.

Highlights included fish soup, cod with strawberry sauce and foal carpaccio with dried figs and marinated fennel. Yes, foal. They have a lot of horses in Iceland and some of the excess young ones go into the food chain. After you get over the typical Anglo-American aversion to eating man's 2nd best friend, and embrace the local tradition, you have to admit it's very tasty. Somewhere between beef and venison.

The breakfast at Glymur is remarkable, and very much in the Scandinavian tradition. Cold cuts, cheeses, salmon (smoked and gravlax), pickled herrings and sardines, rye bread as black as the mountains. On the sweet side there's yogurt, cereals, pastries and platters of fruit. The last imported as any fruit and veg grown here needs a hothouse to ripen. The Icelander's dedication to coffee is similar to the Danes, who ruled them for several centuries. The serve-yourself vats waiting for us every morning made the argument for my (absent) husband's preference of filter over espresso. If our drip maker produced something this good at home, I'd agree with him. Maybe it's the water. All glacial, either run off or filtered through volcanic stone, it's some of the purest in the world and tastes divine. I am puzzled as to why Iceland doesn't export it more widely; they could run rings round Evian.

One valley back from the coastal fjords like the one that hosts Glymur, a thin layer of topsoil, the wind-sheltering ring of mountains, regular rains, lakes and glacial rivers mean there is an agricultural area. It's mostly hay fields, harvested as winter feed for the sheep and horses grazing wherever you look. (I'd guess there are more sheep than people; we learned the horse to human ratio is 1-to-3). It's a mostly treeless landscape, though in some places there are stretches of aspen and beech thicket, and regular plantations of young pines. (There's a movement to try to re-forest some of what the original Viking settlers destroyed.) These were the gentlest landscapes we saw, and the ones most likely to feature farms or small hamlets. We saw nothing in two solid days of driving I'd even call a village, though some spots were marked as such on the map. But even these gentler places are still vast and impressive, with memorable views wherever you look.


It's in the highlands beyond where things really get jaw dropping. There's no rain up high, so it's a desert. A volcanic desert, with miles of barren lava flow spread over the valley floor as if a cosmic chef had dumped a vat of caramelised sugar, let it harden into fantastical shapes and then bashed away at it with a hammer. Most of the valleys we saw were black stone, dotted with white algae, but some were an iron ore red. It's no wonder Nasa trained crews here; it's a dead ringer for all the moon pictures you've ever seen. And again, hanging over it all, the mountains. But here topped by the awesome spectacle of glaciers.

Views like this quickly validated our somewhat unusual choice of Iceland for the annual girls' trip. We were clearly in for something spectacular.