Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009: Golden Circle Tour around Reykjavik, Iceland:
Morning: Thingvellir and Geyser Area

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we were up on Deck 13 to watch the Jewel ease into the harbor at one side of Reykjavik. The first thing Monika noticed was a slight sulphuric tang in the air, which she thought might be due to the geothermal activity in the Reykjavik area. I was impressed by the stark, rounded mountains on the horizon that stood out clearly in part because of the total lack of forests on their slopes. Instead they were covered by green moss, lichen and small ground-hugging plants just like the mountains we had seen in Greenland during Wanderung 18.

The tallest one, Mount Esja I think, was already capped with snow! Our guide later informed us that Mount Esja was used as a kind of weather guide for the local inhabitants. When clouds curled over the top they expect a cold north wind, and when snow dusts the summit they know that winter is really approaching.

When we finally eased up to the wharf, Reykjavik, with a population of 170,000 (over half of Iceland's total population!), looked interesting but the dockyard area around the port was the pits. Brutally functional and totally graceless buildings like warehouses, recycling centers, and miscellaneous industrial sites littered the foreground, making it hard to appreciate either the city skyline or the natural beauty of the surroundings. The skyline is, in any case, rather low as Icelanders typically build low rise buildings that are spread across the landscape rather than the high rise buildings of the more densely populated urban areas of other countries. But the thermal activity of Iceland was already visible in the form of plumes of steam rising from the town.

Returning below deck, we met with Lois and Phyllis in the Stardust Theater to start our "Golden Circle" tour. We ended up on a big, lime-green tour bus with a good driver and a very nice, informative tour guide for the day-long tour. Skirting the central district of Reykjavik, we headed East along a broad valley between the mountains. We passed a large, beautiful lake called the Thingvallavatn on our way to the Thingvellir, the historical site of the early Icelandic parliament.

The Thingvallir is a large rift valley in which meetings of the parliament, called the "Althing", were held. That parliament functioned roughly between around 930 A.D. and 1262 A.D., when Iceland came under Norwegian control. The Althing apparently met each year for 2 weeks in early June at a special site on one side of the rift valley, a part of a crustal rift zone that crosses the island of Iceland from the southwest area near Reykjavik to the northern coast. Scenically, the setting was quite spectacular as the tearing apart of the crustal plates has formed a deeply fissured and cracked valley at one end of the Thingvallavatn lake.

I regard the Althing as the first functioning western republic of modern times, and for that reason I was as happy to see that simple, unadorned rift valley as I would be to see the beautiful ruins on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, that represent to me the site of the origins of democracy in the ancient world. The buildings don't, after all, really matter nearly as much as the origin and development of the profound idea of a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people".

One practical reason for using the Thingvellir for meetings of the Althing was that the absolutely vertical cliff just behind the "speaker's stone" where the law-giver had stood. That vertical cliff would act to reflect the voice of the law-giver to the assembly in the area just below. This was important because the law-giver was the man required to memorize Icelandic law and recite relevant passages as needed in the meetings of the Althing. It would have been critical that the entire mass of people would be able to hear the law giver. It still worked, of course: I noticed as our tour guide was speaking how the rock wall acted as a sound reflector and bounced her voice back out over the valley. In the mind's eye of my imagination, I saw hundreds or perhaps even thousands of Icelanders congregated around the speaker's stone, debating the issues of their day.

The Althing resolved disputes or political issues affecting the entire island. The prominent status of the law-giver indicates clearly that it was a government of laws rather than of men even though the laws were in oral tradition rather than being in a written form. Laws which apply to all regardless of social status are to me one hallmark of a real civilization. So finally seeing the site of the Althing had the same emotional impact on me as a deeply religious person would probably get from a pilgrimage to a holy shrine or site

From the Thingvellir we drove another hour or so along some unimproved roads to Geysir, the site of a geothermal area dating back to the early days of Iceland. Along the way we passed bucolic little towns and lakes, and some rather spectacular landscapes. The landscapes appeared suddenly as we rounded curves in the road, or slowly peeked out from beneath a layer of lowering clouds and mist.

We stopped in the Geysir area to walk among the geothermal features, and there we saw the site of the original "Geysir", an Icelandic term meaning "to spout" that has since been applied to all these eruptive fountains. Although the eruptions of Geysir back in its heyday must have been impressive, nowadays the underlying plumbing has apparently been clogged or diverted and Geysir has subsided into just being a pool of very hot geothermically-heated water. However, different little geysirs (American: geysers) still bubbled and steamed while we were there.

In fact, a geyser named "Skuddir" just down the path from the original Geysir would erupt rather spectacularly if briefly every 5-10 minutes. So all of us photography buffs naturally waited patiently around the rim of the hot pool with our cameras locked and loaded for Skuddir to erupt. Phyllis was on the downwind side of it and got quite wet but was really thrilled to finally see a geyser in action. Out of concern for the camera lenses--the water is loaded with dissolved silicates--and to get a better picture I stayed on the upwind side, which was fortunately also the sunward side. Since the eruption was so unique in sound and movement, Monika and I also took movies to try to capture the experience more adequately.

Among the other thermal features of that old geothermal field were many hot springs. Some had clear water, but one in particular had a deep, flourescent blue color that I just could not believe. I actually found myself staring at it and inspecting the surrounding area for any signs of electrical cables or light fixtures, because it looked for all the world like a swimming pool with milky blue water illuminated by some underwater lights. What a bizarre optical illusion.

We had lunch at the hotel located at Geyser before continuing on to our next stop, Gullfoss waterfall.

Please click below to view the second part of this day in Iceland: