So Golden circle tour take 2. I was not disappointed by the truck that picked me up:
So that was a good start. We headed off and I spent a long time trying to come to terms with amount of money I had spent on a tour I had largely done yesterday. One encouraging thing was that it was a cracker day and yesterday it was rainy and crap. When we got to the place where the North American tectonic plate meets the European plate I was OK with doing the tour again. See cool picture here:
I now see why Simon wanted to come here! Iceland is the only place in the world where you can see the plates doing their thing so obviously, most of the time it is all underwater. It was a pretty cool place to walk through. Also at the site is Law Rock where Iceland used to have its outdoor Parliament sessions. They also have big celebrations there occasionally. Then it was on to Gulfoss waterfall again. See sweet picture showing how amazing the day was:
The waterfall is really cool and was apparently rated in the top 10 European waterfalls to check out. It is broken into 3 tiers which were created by liquid hot magma (you better have just said that with Dr Evils voice in your head). It is pretty powerful in terms of cumecs of water and was very close to being lost at on stage to a company that wanted to build a hydro station at the site. Some Icelandic person campaigned pretty hard against it and has been unofficially named Icelands first environmentalist. Onwards we went to Geysir again and I got another cool series of shots which I won't bore you with. We had lunch at a cafe and I had "traditional" lamb soup. Back in the day it was a poor mans food but this was pretty expensive at 1600 ISK. Luckily I discovered that you got free bread and a free refill so I got those which maybe made it a luttle but more reasonable. It was damn good anyway.
Then it was on to the real part of the tour. The snow mobiles were stationed on Langokull which is the second largest glacier in Iceland/Europe (the biggest being in Iceland as well). Half way up was base camp where we suited up with helmets and warm overalls. Then we did some four wheel driving to get up to where the snow mobiles live. We had a quick briefing on how they operate and then we headed off. They were pretty simple to drive and of course we had to travel in single file at a pretty tame speed but it was still a cool experience being out on the glacier. half way through we stopped and took some photos:
On the way back some people were driving pretty retardedly and cutting the corners but this gave me some opportunities to follow the original line and go faster. The fastest I got up to was 65km/h and it was pretty awesome. I think it was probably a good thing that we had to keep in a line most of the time as if I was left to my own devices I would have probably killed myself.
On the way home we stopped at the crater site again but it wasn't more exciting the second time. We got back in about 6pm.
I relaxed a bit and wrote my blog for the day before (hence the confusing opening paragraph). I had a few beers that I still needed to drink so had a few of those but decided I wasn't gonna get through them all so I gave the remainder to the receptionist guy (who I had a bit of a yarn to the night before because he is studying Jazz/Classical guitar at university). For dinner I bit the bullet again and decided to go and eat by myself at a restaurant called "Tapas Barinn" that had been recommended to me. I got there and ordered the "Gourmet Icelandic Feast" and after getting the first dish of tasty Salmon a girl walked in and was seated in the booth behind me. I asked if she was by herself and she said she was grumpy with her drunken friends so had gone out alone and was happy to join me for dinner. We were both pretty damn stoked that we didn't have to eat dinner by ourselves. We had a massive yarn, she worked for the Denver airport in Colorado. The food was also extremely good. It started with a shot of Brennivin and for dinner I ate salmon, smoked puffin, lamb, minke whale (which was very similar to steak!), lobster, monkfish and for dessert I at a white chocolate "skyr"moose. It was all very good but it should have been for 6000 ISK! I decided that I would buy it with the Prezzy card that Mum and Dad sent me so thanks Mum and Dad for the delicious Icelandic meal, bet you never knew you were ever gonna give me that gift! I also realised that if you averaged my dinner costs over the 4 nights I was here it wouldn't be too much as I just ate two $3NZD hotdogs for the first 3 nights!
After dinner I went back to the guesthouse to pack up my stuff and had one more beer before going to bed.
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