Today, Shazam saved us: for today, it was able to identify the parody of Total Eclipse of the Heart we had heard on our second day. The title translates (roughly) to “National Festival Awaits” and it’s about the singer debating whether or not to go to the festival (Þjóðhátíð). I think it’s a giant music festival which has our favorite Icelandic rapper from yesterday’s post. The website is unclear and my penchant for googling is waning.
Also, it’s worth noting that it is this festival which is keeping us from getting to Heimaey, the Pompeii of Iceland. Noooo … but it brought us this song. Fine, I guess.
Today, we performed the friend swap: Kari departed at butts o’clock from the airport and we obtained a Danielle. We had a few hours to kill between friendswapping so we ventured to a peninsula near Keflavik to look at some ducklings, boats, and lighthouses early in the morning. It doubled as a campground. I guess most people find Iceland pretty…in tents!
Once we acquired Danielle, we headed to Thingvellir National Park. Thingvellir is the final thing in the Golden Circle we had not seen. Two tectonic plates are pulling apart at this rift valley which was home to Althing, the site of the Icelandic Parliament from the 900s through the 1700s. It was very beautiful, and you could walk between the two plates pulling apart.
We also learned that they used to drown people as a form of execution on the site. They were drowned in the rivers near the waterfalls, or burned if they were witches. How is this place not extremely haunted?
We viewed the church and a nearby settlement, and also checked out one of the waterfalls used for drowning.
We retreated to our home for a siesta as we were mostly very sleepy. For our evening, we wanted to stay nearby, so we visited a nearby town with hot springs, Hveragerthi.
We wanted to hike to local hot springs used for bathing by locals. The town advertised its good trails and dedication to exercise and had lots of information on the trails when we got nearby. They were also particularly proud of their town pool.
Apparently none of us bothered to look too closely at the map, as we thought it was only 3km to reach the hot springs. Wrong. It was up a mountain – which was right in front of us, so not surprising. We went up about 350 meters in persistent rain. Then…we finally got to the valley 3km out which was marked on the map, which was NOT hot springs, but did have a very pretty waterfall.
The hot springs were further in probably? Oh. Well, we’ve come this far, and the rest did not look like traipsing up a damned mountain, so we continued on to find the hot springs. The rain had also stopped. All we had to do was follow our nose of course – it was very sulphuric!
We passed boiling water pits which steamed over the path if the wind blew just right (or just wrong). Most of the hillsides were steaming in some way. None of this was alarming – like hillsides just naturally steam here…and bubbled and boiled and were stinky. The river we were alongside was steaming hot and schoolchildren would cook eggs in it (would you like some extra egg smell with your egg?). If this happened in Minnesota, I’d be concerned that the end was nigh. Not here!
After a while, we found the springs. Yay! But we didn’t have our bathing suits, so we could only admire the small stream that was dammed for enjoyment. Poor planning on our part…
We traipsed back down the mountain. There was no way this hike was 3km one way. At the bottom, we checked the sign more carefully now that we knew what the springs were called.
They were 4.5km out. Oh. And there was a closer parking spot to visit them. Oh. Well done, travel team. I guess we wouldn’t have gotten to make these excited faces as we went down the mountain at the end of our 9km trek!
