It is difficult to describe
the rugged beauty of Thingvellir National Park. Partly that's because it was hard to see the beauty through the sideways rain and the fog.
Near the north end of the Thingvallavatn lake is "Parliament plains" where the Althing legislative body of Iceland met for nearly nine hundred years, starting in 930 A.D. According to The Visitor's Key to Iceland,
"The plains and surrounding area were made a national park in 1928. The area is mostly covered with birch and willow and has many lava fissures, some filled with icy cold, crystal-clear water. There is a parsonage and church, the minister being curator of the park, and a national graveyard where the poets Einar Benekiktsson and Jonas Hallgrimsson area buried."
My sense is that "covered with birch and willow" may seem a slight exaggeration to one who has toured Wisconsin's woods; at the same time, "many lava fissures" is no exaggeration at all. Don't you have to love a country which buries its poets in a national park?
The lake was torn by wind and the mountains were hung in a thick storm of sky; we saw stark landscape and wind, a lot of wind. The road we took through the park would be narrow by Wisconsin standards, yet the asphalt was wide enough for two cars to pass, and what else do you need.
The short-cut we expected to take from Thingvellir Park to Geysir was closed. A barricade blocked our way. The sign said "Impassable" and "Closed" in Icelandic. I don't know much but I know enough not to go into the mountains when they tell you not to. April is a little early to be touring Iceland, because it is not yet the tourist season and some of the roads are still impassable.
So we took the long way to Geysir, which has hot springs like parts of Yellowstone. Our Guide calls Geysir "one of the most famous spouting hot springs of the world."
"It is believed that Geysir started spouting in the 13th century. However, at the beginning of the 20th century it stopped altogether, possibly because it was choked by visitors throwing rocks and turf into the spring in order to activate it. In 1935 it was re-awakened by lowering the water level and at its best spouted to a height of 60 meters."
There were little signs above the steaming ground; and it was a great stretch of ground that seemed to steam. The signs cautioned "Water Temperature 100 C." Which in my language means 212 degrees and boiling hot. The main geysir spouts off about every ten minutes - it went off three times while we were walking the area. There was, again, a strong smell of sulphur: this is hell as we know it, stinking hot and sulphurous. The geysirs at Geysir occur where they do because the area lies on the fault line where the North American plate and the European plate are pulling away from each other.
To be continued....
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