Home again

As with all good things our holiday has come to an end and the children have returned from Switzerland. It was wonderful to see them get off the coach in Morrison's car park in Queensbury. They and the other scouts clearly had a wonderful time and are glowing with health. Mind you, we had to sort their dirty washing outside - it was pretty toxic!

It will take me a few days to reflect on our time in Iceland and what will stay with me from the experience. Time for reflection is at a premium as we still have a lot to do in our new home (and I haven't started on the study yet). We are also preparing for Greenbelt and watching the weather forecast with some trepidation.

What has struck me today is an item at the top of the news about people who cause minor accidents by suddenly braking on roundabouts, and similar scams - all related to injury claims. No longer is it individuals deliberately causing these accidents, but organised groups - they target older people and women on their own. Utterly despicable. Having spent ten days driving around a country where the roads are almost empty and people are very courteous, laid back and kind, getting back to this kind of stupid greed highlights the contrast somewhat!

The other immediate difference is air quality. The air quality in Iceland was fantastic and taking a deep breath was intoxicating, getting out of the plane at Gatwick was a bit of a let down... I don't feel I want to take deep breaths at the moment.

Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Golden Circle

Day 8

The day dawned bright and sunny! What a contrast

with yesterday. There were moments of cloud and the odd spot of rain but the whole day has been beautiful.

The 'Golden Circle' is the name of tours from Reykjavik taking in Geyser, Gullfoss Falls and Pingvellir. We, of course, were not on a bus full of other tourists but able to travel early and go at our own pace. So after an early breakfast we set of to the mud pools and water spouts at Geysir.

Arriving just after 9am meant beating most other people there and for about half an hour there were only another dozen people at the site. The original Geyser at Geysir no longer fires up, unless artificially stimulated on occasions such as Iceland's independence day celebrations. But Strokkur, it's smaller cousin steams up to 33 metres every 5 or so minutes. We were not disappointed and it was fascinating to watch this phenomenon again and again.

On leaving Geyser (after the obligatory look rou

nd the gift shop) we picked up Deanna and Julia, two hitch hikers from Italy who have spent three weeks travelling around Iceland. They were heading for Gullfoss, so we were happy to take them with us and to have another perspective on this wonderful and unique country.

The falls were thundering, on lots of levels, with spray launching 80 metres into the air. We were beginning to realise that West Iceland is much busier than the East and coach loads of tourists kept rolling up, staying twenty minutes and moving on. It was quite a bump back toreality - then I remembered those queues outside Madame T ussauds across from Church House and realised Icelandic tourist traps are rather pleasant in comparison!

Our passengers also wanted to go to Pingvellir, so we all went off together. This was a fascinating place where the convergent tectonic plates of Europe and America are pulling apart. The evidence for this is all over Iceland in volcanoes, hot springs, geysers and rock formations. At Pingvellir there is a long ridge of churned up rock face, right next to a huge lake.

Here the Alpingi parliament (means 'all things') met for over 1000 years.

Sandy's getting to play with lots of his lenses and caught this spider doing what spiders are meant to do!

We dropped the girls on the road to Reykjavik and were pleased to see they got a lift immediately - we turned back towards Hotel Ork. We have finished the day in the pool and geothermically heated hot tubs - how cool (or hot...) is that!

Running out of superlatives

Day 6

This morning dawned with blue skies and fabulous crisp views. We returned to Jokulsarlon and spent the whole morning there, first of all taking a trip in an amphibious craft onto the lake.

Getting up close and personal with ice-bergs is a wonderful experience. The colours and reflections were eery, beautiful and mind-blowing. We tasted glacial ice, which is very pure, the weight of tonnes of snow and ice having compressed all air out of it. It melts more slowly than normal ice and is truly beautiful.

We walked around the lake and down to where the river meets the North Atlantic. Here the ice blocks get pulled out to sea or land on the black volcanic sand beaches, where they shine like crystals on a coal field.

We finally dragged ourselves reluctantly away but were rewarded with the views that had been denied to us by mist yesterday.

Glacier outlets peering through mountain tops, lava flows and moraine formations creating contrasting landscapes every kilometre or so.

We passed over a huge area of 'sands' most of it was the wide mouth of a river, that runs only a few metres wide at the moment but will fill with tonnes of rushing water in Spring when the winter snows melt.

Along the way we visited a tiny church, with a turf roof, dating back to the 17th century. It was situated at the start of the treacherous route across the sands, which the local farmer or priest would guide people across. The chapel would be most welcome as a place of prayer for aid beforehand or thanksgiving when the journey was complete..

We are now staying at a farm hotel at a place with a very long and unpronounceable name: Kirkjubaejarklaustur! It is a place with a long history of involvement of church, nuns and monks - including some bawdy stories of their involvement with each other! Gossip surely - particularly in regard to the Abbot's underpants...

Without a doubt the highlight of this wonderful trip has been today's visit to the ice lake but I know there are good things to come!

Laid back, spectacular and startling

After a night in a lovely hotel near Gatwick, Sandy and I began our adventure in Iceland. We flew into Keflavick and were transferred by mini-bus to the small domestic airport in Reykjavik. On that short journey we met a couple who where on the same tour as us, but with a slightly altered itinerary - it was reassuring to find they also found it impossible to pronounce place names and where as excited and apprehensive as we are!

We arrived at the small airport two and a half hours early and were able to catch an earlier plane, which was brilliant - no extra charge, no bureaucracy - just a shrug and a 'why not?'. The flight was exhilarating, over a volcanic and glacial landscape that made sense of all those geography lessons that Mr Rocket tried to teach me long ago. Meandering rivers running through gorges and valleys, surrounded by ice-topped hills or mountains with sharp, razor like ridges, or flat topped because of millennia of glacial erosion.

We picked our car up and set off from Akureyri along the N1 - the only major road, which runs all around the island. Mountain roads, glacial lakes and perfect blue skies made for a wonderful and stunning journey. We had been told to look out for Godafoss - a spectacular waterfall. As we approached the area where it was meant to be I was increasingly sceptical, as the land had flattened out and I could not see any cliffs or hills big enough to support a large fall. Sandy pointed out some spray in the distance and we followed the tourist sign to the car park. As we turned in I was gobsmacked (technical Northern term meaning 'flabbergasted'). The waterfall was below us, thousands of years of water action had carved a horseshoe shaped basin, into which flows thousands of tonnes of water a second.

Godafoss means 'fall of the Gods' and marks the place where, in 1000ad, Porgeir Porkellson, Law Speaker in the Alpingi (world's oldest parliament), having decided that Iceland would become Christian, threw all the carvings of his family's pagan gods.

In the flow from this powerful waterfall a rock sits, stubbornly unmoving and on the rock are tiny pink flowers, clinging on against the odds. They seemed to me like the vestiges of the pagan beliefs - some rem

ain in superstition and belief in elves - others remain in more positive ways in a passionate love for creation and the environment. It would be easy to claim some sort of victory when the Speaker made his choice but it was political and to do with the security of the people. The human yearning for God was there before that decision was made, bubbling up in spiritualities that still seem attractive to some today.

We continued to our hotel, Sel at Lake Myvatn - 'Midge Lake' is sadly in no way ironic! But the lake is beautiful, our room is good and we have eaten well. It is almost 11pm and there is little sign of nightfall - in fact until 10pm there was a deep and warm golden glow across the surrounding hills.

Tomorrow - whale watching, puffins and more waterfalls. I can't wait!