The golden circle

There are many ways to travel around in Iceland, several bus tours, hitchhiking or renting a car. Before the couchsurfer meeting we decided to make a trip with a rented car, but we did not find anyone at the meeting willing to join us. Back at the hostel we met again with Fillipe a traveler from Brazil who borrowed us his umbrella a few hours before. He also wanted to get on a tour around and he was not the only one. Anas, who is from Barcelona also decided to join us.
So it have been the four of us getting next morning our sad car to make the golden circle on our own. Taking a tour is very expensive and we did not need a guide.

We left Reykjavik to the north and headed to the Þingvellir (Thingvellir) National Park. The benefit of going there on our own was that we could make several stops on the way to get there and not only at the points the guidance leads to. At the lake close by the national park we found our first hot spring and the bones of a very tiny fish. At least it looked so real, but it was only made out of wood.

Don't know who built this piles and what they mean, maybe the Vikings built them just for fun, knowing that in the future people wonder what the piles are used for.

At Þingvellir you can see how the contracting plates changed the appearance of this landscape.  It's easy to imagine the movement of the European and the North American plates at this place and also think about what would happen the next years, decades, centuries ...
Bernd was most of the time praying that there will be no earthquake when we walked through Almannagjá.

After a short drive from there we arrived at the next big tourist attraction, Strokkur the geyser. Around the geyser you can smell the sulphur in the air. Bernd had to throw up and didn't want to get any closer. Because he wanted to see the geyser erupting he bravely walked closer and tried to hold his breath as long as possible. Didn't manage to do it long, but he got better along with the smell around us.
Around the geyser haven't been too many people so we could easily get closer and did not have to wait to long, then the geyser erupted twice within a few minutes. How amazing to be that close to the eruption and luckily not in the direction the wind blew all the mist.

 

In the area around there were also some small ponds, as big as a jacuzzi inviting us to jump in, but the water was boiling hot so we did not get in.  We stayed in the Haukadalur area for long time, saw the geyser erupt for another time and hit the road to get to our next destination. When we got closer I saw some steam coming from a valley and wondered from what the steam was coming from, a second later I realised, that it was the mist coming from Gullfoss, the golden waterfall. The Gullfoss is about 20 metres high and you can get rather close to enjoy the view on it. On our way back from the waterfall we had it was harder to pass the mist and it felt like taking a shower. I was so glad, that I got my snowboarding jacket. Bernd got all wet and he could not stop his teeth from chattering. So he went back to the car to turn on the heating and get dry and warm again. The rest of us walked along the river and took a look inside the tourist information, watched some videos about the history before getting back to the car.

Cause we did not do the golden circle tour with a bus we then headed to the south of Iceland to get to the Atlantic. South of Gaulverjabær we stopped at a lighthouse to get to the beach. But we did not reach the Atlantic there or not really, there was no beach only a jagged coastline and no way getting to the ocean. But some kilometres away from there we arrived at a real beach, with black sand, letting me think of the mudflats in the north of Germany. I've never been there but I thought it must be like this place, only the color of the sand would be different.