Saturday 2nd August

We slept well at Hotel Bourganes and got up quite late for breakfast. Breakfast was reasonable and we treated ourselves to hot toasted sandwiches with ham, cheese and tomato which was a great way to start the day accompanied by a cup of strong coffee, which was good. It was raining outside, so we decided to head straight on to our next destination: Thingvellir National Park.

On the way we stopped at the hot spring Deildartunguhver. This is a most incredible wonder of nature: hot water bubbling out of the ground at 100 degrees! Steam everywhere, and pools bursting with hot water. There is a geothermal plant there to take advantage of it, as well as some greenhouses(!) where tomatoes are grown, taking advantage of the abundant supply of free natural heat. 200 litres of piping water is claimed to emerge from the ground every second, making it the most powerful hot spring in Europe.

Moving on from the hot spring we took the mountain road towards Thingvellir National Park, site of the old Althing (parliament), originally established at this location by Viking settlers in the year 930. We parked up, and then made our own way around the park. We walked through a beautiful grassy valley where a former river or glacier has forged a path through volcanic rock, a verdant walkway of grass and flowers in between craggy black rocky cliffs over a hundred feet high on either side (see picture, left).

It is all easily walkable, one way or another (see picture, right), including taking the long route all the way up to the top, across a thin river which culminates in yet another waterfall, around and back down to the level of the lake next to the Althing and the tiny church (which unfortunately we were unable to sneak into as there was a service going on). This was a good three hour walk, the view from the very top being a particular highlight (see picture below).

As we descended back to the car park we noticed a hotel alongside us and wondered what it might be like. We peered inside, decided we liked the look of it and wandered in to obtain a brochure. This was our "Plan B", set in store in case we didn't like the look of the next accommodation stop which, ominously, was also referred to as a "Summerhotel" in our list.

Next stop was Geysir, where we saw the amazing Strokkur geyser (see picture, right) which spouts hot water into the air in a huge plume every five minutes or so. I managed to take some good pictures of this. Strokkur, next to Geysir, which is now dormant (merely a pool of hot water dribbling occasionally) shares the area with two other pools of hot water which look as though they go straight down into the very heart of the earth. The smell is predominantly sulphurous and there is a great deal of hot steam which drifts about the area. Gullfoss waterfall was next; a splendid, pounding, wide-river waterfall which was probably the most awesome of all the waterfalls we saw, as it had two tiers and seemed to dwarf the others for sheer volume. It was raining quite heavily by this time, however, so after about ten minutes we decided to make tracks for our accommodation of the evening.

We reached "Summerhotel" Edda in the early evening. What we thought was Summerhotel Edda was in fact another hotel up the road which was also called Edda (Iceland is full of Hotel Eddas, we later discovered): we were pleasantly surprised by the look of this establishment until we discovered that the actual hotel intended for us was the other Hotel Edda 200 yards down the road! We drove off and, sure enough, it was a very basic, disappointing place along the lines of the Hotel Aning. We were particularly upset at this and felt a bit cheated by the tour operator, because there had been a perfectly good alternative just up the road ­ so why send us to the cheap and nasty? In Saudarkrokur, we had accepted the poor quality of Hotel Aning as there was really nothing else in the area, but in this location (Laugarvatn), when there was a perfectly pleasant Edda Hotel (part of the same chain) just up the road, why did they put us up in the poor relation? I expect it's all about saving money, but in the process they made us feel slighted and poorly treated. Given the expense of the trip, we calculated that there was at least £80-90 per night to spend on accommodation for the both of us, and not even the better Hotel Edda would have cost that much (and they had room).

The room at Summerhotel Edda was not very clean (the toilet seat had marks and stains on it) and the floor was another lino special. The whole place had the same institutional feel about it so we decided to give up on it and headed back to the Hotel Valholl, at Thingvellir, feeling mighty displeased with the tour operator for such calculating meanness and feeling let down that when they had the opportunity to give us a better hotel, they did not do so, instead thinking perhaps they'd save a few pennies by moving us downmarket, hoping we wouldn't notice.

We rang Hotel Valholl on the mobile phone and made a reservation. When we arrived, we were not displeased with the accommodation but they had accepted our booking for a twin room, then promptly showed us to a "double" room with the standard comically tiny hotel double bed in it (our own bed is over seven foot wide and we sometimes feel cramped in that!). After some kerfuffle they gave us a ground floor twin room, but with not much of a view and it was dark and slightly dingy. The shower curtain was also smelly, and by this time we were thinking that maybe we should have stuck at the grotty Summerhotel Edda, although it was too late to do anything about it and we were getting increasingly tired and hungry.

We brushed up and had a quick shower in preparation for a relaxing meal at the hotel. The bar there is very posh, attended by a stiff man in a bow tie and barman outfit. The prices were also pretty stiff at £7 for half a litre of draught beer! We sat on a comfy sofa and looked at the menu. I sipped my beer, slowly.

I ordered fish soup, followed by a dish of oven baked trout. The fish soup was a revelation ­ bursting with flavour, great texture, and well seasoned, almost as good as the Laekjarbrekka restaurant's soup in Reykjavik. The oven baked trout was similarly well done, carefully cooked with a solid flavour and succulent texture and accompanied by crisp, well prepared vegetables. There was, however, one big problem with this meal. It was the first meal at which we felt we could justify a bottle of wine (the prices for wine in Iceland are completely ridiculous and hitherto we had decided to avoid it on the grounds of not wasting money). As we felt we deserved a bottle of wine to go with the food, and it looked like a good establishment, we selected a bottle of Bin 10 Dry Red Singing Creek wine, imported by Enotria Wine Cellars Ltd, of London NW10 6NF (according to the label, bottled by W1226 at M44 6BD; serial no. 9 313336 5436797). It was about halfway through our first glass of this stuff that we started making funny faces at each other. It was a thin, weedy fluid with the consistency of Ribena and a taste which wasn't quite there, while what was there was not particularly pleasant. It just tasted wrong. Only when Samantha suggested that maybe they had watered it down did I realise ­ the wine had not been opened at the table! The more I tasted it the more unpleasant it became, and the more it looked, smelt, and tasted like watered down wine. It did not sit in the glass the way wine does ­ rather, it kind of clung to the edge more like water does. It was a very poor, thin kind of colour and consistency, unlike every other Australian dry red I have tasted. Wine normally has a thicker skin than this. But the thin, caustic, weedy taste was the worst thing about it. The more we tried it the more we came to the conclusion that there was something deeply wrong with this wine. Of course, with mediocre bottles of wine fetching upwards of £25 because of the completely ludicrous level of taxation levied by the Icelandic government on wine, Icelandic people may not drink sufficient quantities of the stuff to be capable of detecting anything amiss. Dinner was overpriced, running to a total of £95 for us both including the highly suspicious wine.

This was a real shame because the food was very good, the ambience of the place was pleasant and the location, right in the heart of the Thingvellir National Park, was tranquil and beautiful.

I passed a troubled night, unable to sleep because of the feeling of annoyance over the wine, and the room was too hot.

Click for next day

© Richard Harrison

All photographs are © Richard Harrison 1997