Last Saturday morning at 8am, I got on a bus and headed for a farm that was doing it's annual réttir. This is when all the sheep that have been wandering the high lands all summer are gathered together in a huge pen so that individual farmers can collect their own (each sheep has a tag on it's ear to show who it belongs to) into smaller pens attached to the middle pen. Once the sheep have been collected into the smaller pens, they are herded onto trucks and driven to their farms. So, it's supposed to be a huge social occasion where many families gather to wrestle with the sheep to get a good look at their ear tags and shove them into the smaller pens. The big middle pen was full of kids trying to ride the sheep while all of us tourists sort walked along the tops of the walls.
The next stop was the Gullfoss waterfall, "the queen of Icelandic waterfalls". Seeing as it was sleeting heavily, I was wearing soaked jeans and I was freezing cold, I had no patience or interest in getting near the waterfall. It isn't particularly inaccessible, so I may visit it again. Look here for someone else's photos of it. If it had been sunny, I would have gotten closer, but my parents live in Niagara Falls; so you know...waterfalls don't always do it for me.
After Gullfoss, we stopped at Geysir. I was so incredibly soaked and cold that I wasn't sure my interest in seeing a Geysir would outweigh my desire to sit in misery with a hot coffee in the restaurant, but I went to see the Geysir nonetheless. This Geysir's been going strong for hundreds of years, but after countless rocks and other junk have been thrown into it, along with old age, it's not as active as it used to be. The postcards I bought were more impressive, but watching the water boil and bubble in preparation for a great big explosion of steam and hot water was neat. I'd say it now erupts to about 15 metres.
Finally, we went to Þingvellir, which is where it finally stopped raining, snowing, blowing and sleeting! The views were beautiful! Þingvellir is where Iceland's oldest parliament was founded and met regularly starting way back in 93o. I didn't see any evidence of this, but I was also freezing cold (have I mentioned the rain really comes down here? And that the wind really blows?) and was really just looking forward to coming home!
And come home I did. I enjoyed some leftover Pâté Chinois I made for an international pot-luck of sorts that we had last night in my residence and ordered some waterproof trousers and hiking boots from mec, because it's actually cheaper to pay for shipping than to buy the stuff here! Which means next time I travel the Golden Circle, I'll be a lot more comfortable!
1 comment:
It's all black and spooky!
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