In Iceland, the most famous tourist thing to do is the Golden Circle. In the Golden Circle tour, you visit the three main natural tourist attractions: Gullfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir.
Gullfoss is a waterfall. Being so close to Niagara Falls, I thought Hmph, how good can this waterfall be?; but I was impressed. In terms of size, it is nowhere near as large as Niagara; but it is the largest waterfall that I’ve been to where you can do whatever you want (such as fall into the waterfall).
There’s three stages in the waterfall, the first two stages are not a large drop, but the third drops into a ridge between two cliffs (I don’t think you can actually see the bottom). There are rocks at the middle stage which you can walk onto but there are no fences or signs, so you could wash your feet in the falls if you so liked! Our guide did warn us that the rocks are slippery and there was a heck of a lot of mist (kind of like Maid of the Mist on land).
Geysir is a geyser which I thought would be a shot of water straight into the air (like in a water fountain). It unfortunately was not like that at all. Geysir itself is now dormant but a nearby one named Strokkur is still active. Every few minutes it sends a cylinder of water into the air due to some geothermal effects which I don’t remember. I suppose it is an impressive feat of nature that will cause water to randomly shoot up like that, but it was not so interesting to me. This was the most disappointing part for me.
I expected to be disappointed at Þingvellir as I had read that it was the site of the oldest parliament. So I expected some historical plaques and displays about history. In fact, Þingvellir is a national park and the location where the North American and European tectonic plates collide. This results in a lot of ridges, crevices and interesting rock formations. With all the rocks, I thought that our pictures would turn out great, but unfortunately the colours ended up being somewhat muted.
We booked our tour with a smaller tour company because they had the ability to show us a couple of other sites in the Golden Circle. While we covered the three main sites, we also saw a couple of other parts which I will describe in part two.
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