The plan for today was a privately arranged tour, organised through people on the Cruise Critic forum. The original organiser arranged about 5 different tours over the two days we're in Reykjavik, but then she had to pull out of the cruise, so she passed them all on to another lady. That lady in turn at some point decided that she would need 'captains' for each of the tours and I stupidly volunteered after no-one else would. Never again! - it wasn't all that dramatic but it was a whole heap of stress I didn't need.
Anyway, the day started with us all standing around outside the ship, in the rain, waiting for our tour bus to arrive. It did eventually, and we all got on the bus - including two people who weren't actually booked on our tour. I wouldn't have minded them staying, but they had already paid for a different tour and they'd have been really annoyed at having to pay again :-)
Anyway, the first stop was what looks like a fairly mundane shopping centre (Thrastarlundur). However, when you go inside, you can see that part of the floor is made of glass, and when you look down through it there's a rift in the earth. Apparently they were going to build a four story building here - they had no idea that the rift existed until they started doing the foundations. Once they found the rift, instead of abandoning the site they changed the plans to a single story building and made a feature of the rift - as well as the floor there are quite a few displays about earthquakes etc.
Looking down through the floor at the rift.
Next stop was the Kerio implosion crater. It was raining even more heavily by the time we got there, and absolutely no-one wanted to get off the bus, particularly since it looked like we were about to be shown an absolutely unimpressive sight.Boy, were we wrong!
None of our photos do it justice - basically you walk up this little rise and then all of a sudden a huge crater appears at your feet, and way down at the bottom is a beautiful lake. It must be a glorious sight in the sunshine.
Next two stops were waterfalls - Faxi and then Gulfoss. Again, I'll let the pictures do the talking, first Faxi:
And Gulfoss:
We also had lunch at Gulfoss - unfortunately we had to eat while sitting on the bus as there was nowhere else available. Lunch was quite nice apart from the inclusion of some prawns - but Paul and I managed to swap his prawns for something from my plate without causing his allergy to kick in.
It's still raining at this point, and it seems to be getting colder - at each stop everyone is adding another layer of clothes :-) While we were at Gulfoss, a bunch of about 6 or 7 Ford Expedition 'super-jeeps' pulled up. They're for the more exciting sorts of excursions - they have tyres that seem to be about a metre wide and they can travel on snow, volcanic ash etc. I was thinking that whoever was in them was going to be having a great time. However, when we left Gulfoss, our guide told us that he had been talking to the guys running that tour, and he was told that it was a group of people who work for Sony, on a business trip. Sounded really good until he said that they'll be camping out in tents tonight!!! No free trip is worth that!!!
Anyway, next stop was Geysir - correct pronunciation by the way is gay-zeer with a rolled 'r' at the end. The original Geysir is first mentioned in literature in the 1200's. It now only bubbles water slowly, but there's still one that shoots water around 35 metres into the air, every 5 minutes or so. I managed to be standing down-wind from it when it went off - I didn't get very wet at all but I still smelled of sulphur for a while.....
The one above is 'Litli Geysir' - the water doesn't spout up into the air but it's constantly boiling and bubbling. The two shots below are the one I managed to get caught by:
Last stop was the main reason that I wanted to go on this tour - the Thingvellir National Park. We went into a spot where you can see and walk through the mid-Atlantic ridge - the place where Iceland is being gradually pulled apart by tectonic movements. And actually, it's not that gradual - around 2 cm per year which is pretty fast on geologic terms. Here are a few pictures:
Still raining when we got back to Reykjavik and onto the ship, but it stopped after a while, so we went for a walk - just to the visitors centre to buy some internet access from them (still expensive but not as bad as the ship's internet). Then we went for a bit of a walk towards the city but we decided it was going to get too cold, so we went back to the ship.
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