I came down with a horrible lower digestive disease, accompanied by fever. I fought valiantly to make it through the day at work so as not to waste paid time off, but I just couldn't do it. The bathrooms at work are just so much less comfortable than our bathroom at home. Also, I was having great difficultly staying awake. While I wanted so much to be adjusted as much as possible to Icelandic time, I also felt that I needed more sleep than usual. And being awake was causing me great pain and misery.
It is fortunate that I had so much prepared in advance, because I was left quite dysfunctional and helpless at the last minute, and I greatly feared boarding an airplane in my condition. Fortunately, by morning, my bowels, while still quite painful, were at least easier to control. The fever, while not gone, was also much more under control.
We spent nearly 24 hours in transit, from the time we were picked up by the airport shuttle at 4:20 PDT, to the time we picked up our car and got on the road in Keflavík at about 11:00 Icelandic time. We got a Citroën Picasso. I was a little bit concerned about the visibility of the back end, but the Thrifty representative assured me that the only criminals in Iceland were bankers.
We immediately found everyone in Iceland to be very friendly. We sat down to breakfast in a café, and a man noticed us puzzling over all of the green lines our travel agent had drawn on our map. He came over and offered assistance. He told us his name was Christian, and he sat down and spent several minutes with us looking at the map and discussing our plans for the day. As our snorkel of the Silfra Rift at Þingveller was not scheduled until 17:00, he helped us come up with a route for seeing the rest of the Golden Circle first, so that we could get there in time and still get to our hotel in Hekla before midnight or so. He was very nice and gave me more confidence in what I had been thinking. While I always try to be friendly, helpful and welcoming to tourists in San Francisco, I admit that I have never given anyone as much help as Christian gave us.
One of the most famous tourist spots in Iceland is the Golden Circle, typically done as a day bus tour from Reykjavik. The three major sites on the Golden Circle are Þingveller (the rift between the North American and Eurasian Plates), Geysír (the geyser for for which all others are named), and Gullfoss (a large waterfall). As we had an appointment at 17:00 to snorkel the Silfra Rift at Þingveller, Christian's advice was to go in the opposite of the usual direction, going to Gullfoss and Geysír before Þingveller, so as not to get to our hotel in Helka too terribly late. Although this advice rushed us through Gullfoss and Geysír (I think Christian figured we were closer to being ready to leave the restaurant than we actually were), it turned out to be quite sound.
I think we may only have been one other place that was windier than Gullfoss, and it was the Yaquina Head Lighthouse in Newport, OR, where they warned you to park your car facing into the wind so that the doors wouldn't get jerked around by the wind when you opened them.
Þingveller is on the spreading center between the Eurasian and North American Plates. This spreading center is what makes Iceland so wonderfully geologically active. It is this spreading, in the middle of the Atlantic, that creates the geologic chaos of the Pacific Ring of Fire. As North and South America get pushed into and onto the east edge of the Pacific, and Asia gets pushed into and onto the west edge of the Pacific, earthquakes and volcanism result. I believe that similar forces are in action in the southwest Pacific as well, but I don't know the details as well. As part of our visit to Iceland, we had signed up to snorkel right between the edges of Europe and North America.
Þingveller is also a national park because of its historic significance. The Icelandic governing body, the Alþing, began to meet here in 930. The Alþing is the longest continuously-operating governmental body in the world.
I had worried that I would miss the snorkel due to my illness, but I was feeling reasonably all right by this point.
Did I mention that it was cold without even getting in the water? And sprinkling a bit? Before putting on the equipment, I was wearing my winter coat and hat. Our guide said the water would be 2C (35F) glacial melt. We'd never been in water anywhere near that cold before, and we had dived the Puget Sound.
But the dry suits were amazing. While I had to keep my hands, even in very warm mittens, out of the water, and my face got very cold, the rest of me did not get cold, even my feet. It was unbelievable. Eric even was the right size for the boss' extra-special Arctic suit. The guide said it cost 2000 somethings; it might have been USD, but I think she said euros.
The Silfra Rift was wonderful. We were headed south, drifting along with the current, with North America on our rights and Europe on our lefts. The water was spectacularly clear, as clear as Lake Tahoe, and an even deeper blue. We don't have an underwater camera, so if you want to see what it looked like, check out this fantastic picture Eric found on Wikipedia. The Silfra Rift a large fissure of rock, like a fault, but it has much more significance. It felt like a special and important place.
We came into a wider and more shallow part, where we had to fight the current a bit more. The surface below us was spotted with mineral deposits. It looked a little bit like the surface of the geothermal areas at Yellowstone.
By the time we got into and out of the gear and snorkeled the rift, it was something like 18:45. Good thing we had listened to Christian and covered the rest of the Golden Circle first! We decided to spend a little time seeing the rest of Þingveller.
We decided to hike up to the viewpoint on top of the ridge and look at Almannagyá, the larger part of the fissure.
By the time we finished this short hike, it was after 21:00. The little café in the park was open until 22:00, but they had run out of hot soup. We had to eat cold sandwiches and yoghurt for dinner, which was disappointing.
And so, of course, it was after 23:00 by the time we finally reached the Hotel Hekla. The room was small, and the bathroom was tiny. The clerk described hot tubs, but what the had were the same sort of above-ground, fiberglass, electrically-heated hot tubs that we have at home, so we didn't bother. So, the place was best described as clean and serviceable, but the homemade breads at breakfast were particularly moist and delicious, however.
On to Waterfalls and Puffins.
