Today we began our tour of the island with a group of 35 on a 50 passenger bus. We headed west and north from Reykjavik and were in the rural areas in less than 30 minutes after leaving the mandatory stop at the souvenir shop; this type of forced shopping is my least favorite part of traveling with a tour group.
Touring the island is focused on viewing the beautiful scenery all around you, which changes dramatically every few kilometers along the road, and stopping for a closer look, with expert explanation, at local natural wonders. The towns along the way provide a little diversion from the scenery viewing, and are often driven through with little more comment than the name of the town and population statistic. These towns provide services to the farmers and ranchers in the remote areas, and are not intended as tourist havens.
Our first stop was an overlook of the fiord and town of Borgarfjodur. We stopped briefly in Borgarfjodur for coffee, snacks, and to use the facilities. In addition to some dried fruit and soda, we would have purchased something for lunch had we known in advance what awaited us at our ‘official’ lunch stop about an hour and a half down the road.
Hraunfossar waterfall was our next stop where the glacial runoff stream flows through the lava formation and is joined by ground water flow that emerges from the stream bank.
Our lunch stop was the nearby tiny village of Reykholt which is the home of one of Iceland’s legendary figures Snorri Sturluson. Snorri was the head of Iceland’s largest and most powerful family before the King of Norway convinced three other powerful Icelandic families to kill Snorri and thus pave the way for Norway to make Iceland a colony. They are currently excavating some ruins believed to be either Snorri’s house our ancient houses built on the same site.
Our lunch stop was the tiny hotel located in Reykholt. The menu was fixed: mushroom soup and bread for 700 Kroner (about $10) per person. While the soup and bread were good, and filling, this lunch stop is another point against Vantage Tours.
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There were no other choices for lunch in this area, so Vantage knew we would need to eat at this hotel and would be served the fixed menu. I believe that they should have included this meal in the package price, rather than having everyone pay for this fixed price meal. Also, we should have been told in advance of this lunch plan, as when we stopped about 1.5 hours earlier in Borgarnes, we could have either had lunch at that stop, or bought something for lunch from the grocery store or fast food place. It seems obvious to me that Vantage gets a kickback from this small hotel, or other considerations, and thus makes the group pay the paltry sum for the meal. All-in-all this seemed to be poor treatment of Vantage’s clients.
Our fist stop after lunch was Deildartunguhver hot springs, which is advertised as the largest hot springs in Iceland, and indeed all of Europe. While the bubbling hot water was mildly interesting, I feel sure people traveling through Yellowstone Park would not stop to view this site even if it was right along the side of the road.
Easily the highlight of the day was our last stop at Eiriksstadir, a recreation of the home of Erik the Red and birth place of Leifur Eriksson, the now accepted first European to discover North America. We were given an interesting insight into Viking life by a young lady, dressed in period garb, who explained details of the interior of the reconstructed house, and how the farming family lived and used the dwelling.
Our final stop of the day was the Hotel Edda in Laugar where we would spend the next two nights. Although this hotel was in the middle of nowhere, with no other surrounding businesses, it was a fairly new facility with large clean rooms. One oddity of the hotel is it is attached to a school building that closed several years ago. None of the rooms in the school are used by the hotel, but the swimming pool and locker facilities are available to the guests, and the old cafeteria is used as the restaurant. The hotel provided our dinners for the two evenings, and the customary breakfasts. Each evening dinner on the tour is an pre-selected advance choice, from a list we completed the first evening, of meat or fish; our meat choices here were lamb the first night and chicken the next. I opted for lamb the first night and then fish, and both meals were quite good.
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