Three days in Reikiavik

The next step of our trip in Iceland implied a stay of two nights in Reikiavik, the most northern capital city in the world, as every tourist brochure says.

Our stay in Reikiavik started with a whale-watching trip. We went for an hour into the ocean and the trip was not very nice: it was extremely windy, with high waves and very, very cold. While I was there, I could only imagine how hard life of fishermen is. Suddenly, I felt horribly happy for working in a bank. Finally, we did not spot many whales, just some small part of them, we could not help feeling a bit disappointed by that. Afterwards, we went to our guesthouse and prepare something for lunch at... 6pm.We went for a walk through the city center of Reikiavik and got ourselves ready for the active nightlife in Reikiavik (that was what our travel guide boasted)... It was the second disappointment of that day: it is not so active after all (we might be biased as we were coming from Spain). We decided to go to a music festival and we could only watch two bands: one of them was playing electric violins and the other one was too heavy for all of us. Three or four "natives" decided to dance and it then turned to be surrealistic.

The next day we drove through the Golden Circle. It is composed of Gullfoss waterfall, Geysir and Thingvellir. Gullfoss was the first one of the many waterfalls we visited in Iceland and it is impressive and very beautiful. When one approaches it, it suddently feels like raining.

Geysir is a valley not far from Gullfoss where hot water is sent into the air from holes in the ground. There is a horrible smell around, due to sulphur and other acids in the water, that makes the visit not so nice after all.

Thingvellir is supposed to be where the first Icelandic parlament took place, far in the Xth century. I find it a bit hard to believe that Icelandics were worrying about parlaments and politics at that time, but leaving this aside, the landscape is very nice, with a lot of water around curious stone shapes. We also learnt there how men and women were punished in Middle Ages: women were drowned in the sea and men were sent to the inner country.

Generally speaking, the Golden Circle is crowded with tourists. Anyway, both visits are a must when one is visiting Iceland. Our next step of the trip took us to Blue Lagoon and to Reykjanes peninsula.