The day after the horse riding and the hike, I did the Golden Circle and made my first visit to the Secret Lagoon.
It didn’t start particularly brilliantly. A lot of my stuff was wet from the previous day. My waterproof jacket fortunately dries very quickly and my coat had never got soaked so they were both ok. I’d brought enough spare clothes that it didn’t matter that everything else had been wet. My hat weighed ten times its usual weight and was taking its sweet time drying out but I’d brought two hats so that was ok too. I’d dried out my camera and my GoPro before I’d even dried out myself so they were ready to go. I’d taken two lots of swimming stuff because I knew I’d be in the water pretty much every day so it was one on and one drying – I hadn’t bathed in the hot river but I’d gone to the pool to warm up afterwards – so that was ok. The major difficulty I had was footwear. My boots were still drenched. If I’d put them on, they’d probably still have sloshed. It wasn’t a sandals day but I’d brought them with me so I could wade into the river in them, forgotten to take them up the river, and now I’d have to wear them for my day out. It’s one thing turning up to a Golden Circle tour in sandals in July but on a wet cold day in April, I felt a fool.
I knew it was a small group tour – adding the Secret Lagoon to a Golden Circle tour is a slightly niche thing to do; most people will just do the Golden Circle on its own and that takes an entire day – but I wasn’t really prepared for squeezing eighteen of us into a nineteen-seater minibus. I had the sense to pick the single seats on the starboard side rather than risk sitting squished up against a stranger in the double seats on the other side of the tiny aisle but it did mean squashing my bag and my coats and my hat around my legs for the entire day. In hindsight, if I’d known the road conditions were going to be so clear, I’d have hired a car, stayed out in the countryside and done this day by myself.
First stop, Þingvellir. We were dropped by the viewpoint and given about an hour to walk down to the car park at the bottom of Almannagjá. It’s not exactly a guided tour – usually your leader takes you to the viewpoint and explains what you’re seeing, takes you to the Law Rock and gives you the history talk and so on – but as I’ve been here so many times and know it all, I enjoyed the freedom. I looked at the view, I walked down the gorge, I paused at the Drowning Pool – and then I looked across the valley.
I still had half an hour and the minibus was maybe two hundred metres away. I wanted to go across to the other path and see the lake from right down in the valley. The only trouble was that the path was blocked by two large puddles. But oh hey, I had my sandals on! They’re mountain sandals, they’re made for going in the water and climbing and all sorts of rough stuff. I knew the water would be cold but I could paddle through the puddles. So I did.
In 2012, a tour guide who’d been shocked by my sandals awarded me the title “seal feet” by the end of the day as I’d waded casually through rivers and returned to help the boot-wearers who balanced precariously on wet slippery stepping stones. I’ve put my feet in some cold water in my time. But this was cold. The first puddle was ok but I guess the blood rush to my feet was really zapped by the immediate second cold plunge. It hurt so much! I filmed it for a video I plan to make and I have no idea whether I caught the sweary-sweary on camera. So cold. So agonisingly cold. But once you’ve been walking for a minute or two, the blood comes back and they warm up again and the only problem is that the sandals become a little slippery for half an hour. I walked up to the little flooded fissures which are so pretty in summer and then back to the minibus. Shortest trip ever to Þingvellir but I’d done my daily walk, frozen my feet and got out the minibus for a while.
Next was Gullfoss, via Gljásteinn, a farm that belongs to our guide Bára’s friend. We paused for ten minutes to meet the sheep and horses and look around the tiny shop where they sell stuff made from their own wool. The sheep pen stank to high heaven and the sheep were ready to lamb any minute – I know people love that but no, I don’t want to see that. I’ll see the lamb once it’s 100% out – but it was nice to see the horses and to hear my tour-mates’ cries of “they’re so small!”. I don’t encounter many horses in my day-to-day life. Icelandic horses are the only ones I’ve ever really been close to and so I hadn’t really realised how small they are. In fact, when we went for our ride yesterday, I was surprised how big they were. Anyway, one quick stop, one hand-wash, back to the minibus to Gullfoss.
Gullfoss is my least favourite stop on the Golden Circle. That’s mostly because it’s the least obviously interesting to me and because the visitor centre has a good restaurant, it’s usually the lunch stop so you’re there at least an hour and a half. I find that frustrating when there are geysers ten minutes down the road that I’m going to get rushed around. Today this was not our lunch stop and we were only there long enough for me to appreciate the waterfall from several angles before we had to rush back and also to run off for a selfie with the biggest glacier truck in the car park – its tyres are taller than me!
Last time I was here, you could go down the path and onto the rock that sticks out into the waterfall but that’s been closed. Whether it’s because an unprotected rock sticking out into a massive waterfall is an incredibly dangerous thing or whether it’s because it’s still icy around here, I don’t know. Will it re-open later on? No idea.
My camera had been misbehaving all trip: the zoom lens makes some horrible creaking whirring noises when it opens, the lens cover doesn’t close properly and on volcano day, it had particularly upset me by absolutely refusing to focus. I’d thought I was in the market for another new camera, and I’d be finding a new brand, thank you very much. Then I dropped it in the car park at Gullfoss. I thought it was around my wrist where I usually keep it and it wasn’t! Not only that, it was switched on with zoom extended! I hurried it back to the minibus and examined it. It seemed to have survived. It seemed to work. And if anything, it seemed to be working very slightly better than before. It still makes horrible noises but it’s stayed in focus ever since. However, I did realise that every time it refused to focus, I’d flipped up the selfie screen and after that I made of point of waiting until the camera was already on before doing that, so it might just be me learning to navigate the camera’s oddities than “percussive maintenance” from being dropped.
And then we were off to Geysir! Here the group split. Half of us were going to the Secret Lagoon and half weren’t. The half that weren’t got the best part of two hours here while the swimmers got an hour, including lunch. I did forget – thought we were meeting at five to one instead of five past one and lost ten minutes of my visit – but it still didn’t feel long enough. That said, I caught at least four eruptions from Strokkur and was so engaged in filming them that I didn’t get a single photo of it. It just would be nice to take my time here, linger, enjoy the geysers for as long as possible without having to keep checking my watch.
Yes, then we met back at the minibus to go off to the Secret Lagoon. That was the centrepiece of this trip; that was the reason I’d opted to do the Golden Circle again with a tour guide again. I’ve never been to the Secret Lagoon.
A little history: it’s a semi-natural pool, in that the pool itself has been dug out of the field but the water is provided by a handful of hot springs. It’s been used by the locals as a place to relax and to teach the kids to swim since 1891, I think. By 1947, though, it had been more or less abandoned. In 2005, it occurred to the locals that tourists were beginning to come to Iceland and to enjoy the Blue Lagoon and maybe they could have a piece of that but it took until 2014 to actually open it to the public, complete with changing rooms and showers and all the necessaries.
It’s still a bit on the rustic side. It has a gravelly bottom and it’s separated from the hot springs by nothing more than a fence. There’s no temperature control – the water is whatever temperature it is when it comes out of the ground, which means it’s often a bit on the hot side. It’s about chest-deep on me which is a reasonable depth – enough to paddle around it but not so shallow that you have to hunch on the bottom to keep submerged. There are shelves around the side for sitting on and they keep a big basket of pool noodles by the changing rooms so absolutely everyone is floating around the pool on a noodle or three. There’s no in-water bar service here but you can go into reception via the back door and buy yourself a beer or glass of wine to take out to the pool – I have no idea how you pay because there are no electronic wristbands and I wouldn’t take my actual wallet and actual bank card into the hot water but I can only assume people do.
We were dropped off at 1.30 and told as we were getting out of the minibus that pickup was at 2.50. Yes, an hour and twenty minutes to get the admin done, get changed and showered, into the water, back out and dressed and ready to be on the bus. I would absolutely not have squeezed it into that timeframe if I’d been doing this myself. Golden Circle tours can often be ten or twelve hours without the hot bath. I’d have expected to be back in Reykjavik by 8, not by 5, and given us at least another hour at the Secret Lagoon if I’d been running this tour.
(I would absolutely love to run a Golden Circle tour of my own. Unfortunately, as it would cost >£800 to get a minibus licence, I’d have to do it in the biggest car I could find and I think that might be a bit small.)
The existence of the Secret Lagoon means you have two options for a swim powered by a hot spring on your Golden Circle trip. I’ve only ever been to Fontana before and I think I still prefer it of the two but for the sake of the novelty, I’d add the Secret Lagoon in the next couple of times I’m in that area on my own. Fontana is fed by hot springs on the lake shore but it’s a little more clinical, in that all the pools are nicely finished with white tiles and basalt sculptures and this just feels a bit more natural, a bit more rustic, a bit more – dare I say it? – authentic. The facilities around it are new in the last decade but I think not much has changed in the pool itself in 130 years.
I don’t know what the rest of the group did, besides have Bára’s driving time to linger at Geysir. Bára said they were going to a waterfall but she didn’t specify which and no one mentioned their afternoon after we’d been picked up. We were supposed to head straight back to Reykjavik but since we’d been such a good group, we were going to make one more stop at Bára’s “special place”.
I feel like such a ludicrous travel blogger for this but – I can’t tell you where it was. It’s a secret. That’s partly so it doesn’t get overrun with tourists but the reason they don’t want too many visitors there is because it’s an active gravel pit with heavy industrial machinery in there and we entered by ducking under the barrier. I strongly suspect we weren’t really supposed to be there ourselves. We arrived at this pit and Bára positively glowed as she showed us and then asked “Does anyone know where we are?” I knew exactly where we were; I’d been looking out of the window and trying to guess where the “special place” was going to be – my money had been on Kerið – but that wasn’t what she was asking.
“It’s a crater!” I said.
It is indeed a crater. Iceland has so many of them that it mines some of them for gravel which is either exported or used for construction right here at home. This one exports its gravel to Sweden and the reason we’d stopped there was that it was spectacular. It’s a red scoria crater, with streaks and swirls of green that almost make it look like it’s been tie-dyed. You can easily look past the machinery and the piles of spoil and just look at the walls on the inside of the crater in all their amazing colour. I rarely wish I had a floaty dress and an Insta-husband but this place was just made for amazing social media pictures. We were asked not to tag the location or say anything about where it is so I can’t go looking for the beautiful girls in the long dresses who might have done their photos here but I felt significantly under-dressed in my blue raincoat.
The only other thing worth mentioning is that this particular tour company used to give out samples of Icelandic flatbread to eat in the bus on the way back but since the plague, they’ve not been allowed to do that. But since it was Easter, they were allowed to hand out little individual Easter eggs. They had something biscuity in the shell which was nice but more importantly, they had a little Icelandic word of wisdom on a piece of paper tightly rolled up inside. I suspect these are quotes from Hávamál, the Sayings of the Wise One that often appear as part of the Poetic Edda. Of course, none of us speak Icelandic so Bára had to translate and that was hilarious. Non-Icelandic-speaking tourists reading out Icelandic at the top of their voice along the length of the minibus while poor Bára goes “… I have no idea what you’re trying to say. Can you pass it down so I can read it myself?” Mine said “ást er laun ástar” which means “love is the reward of love”. No, I don’t speak enough Icelandic to translate it myself but Google Translate exists. I don’t really know what it means – they’re idioms and proverbs and those don’t always translate between languages very well. Someone else had “the raven is not white even though it takes a bath” – the raven is a bad omen in Icelandic myth and this proverb basically means that whatever you do to redeem yourself, you’ll still be evil.
And so with the reading of our sayings, we sailed back into Reykjavik after… well, not such a long day as I’d been expecting, and with warmer feet than I might have expected.