Our road trip in Iceland officially started on this day and we were all excited! Iceland follows right hand driving and it took a couple of hours for us to get used to it, after which it was a smooth drive. There was hardly any traffic, so it was very easy to drive.

We felt like stopping at a lot of places on the road, but resisted from doing that in the interest of time. Our first destination was Þingvellir national park, which has a huge river surrounding it.

It contains the region where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates diverge, which is the main reason for a lot of volcanoes (around 100) in Iceland. The areas around the red line is the main Geo-thermal area with lot of hot springs and volcanoes.

Walking in between both the continent tectonic plates was fun. There was a very slight difference in rock structure of both the continents. Apart from that, we couldn’t find major differences.

 

There was also a small lake in between where these plate division rocks are found, in which people can go snorkeling in between the tectonic plates. That sounded like a lot of fun, but we didn’t try that.

 

I loved the sky and the cloud formations in Iceland. Somehow I felt that the clouds are so close to the land in that place, not sure if that was just an illusion or reality. I couldn’t resist myself from clicking photos of the sky throughout the drive.

We stopped in between at an ice cream joint, which is supposedly the best ice cream in the world. I was not really sure of what parameters made them decide, but they have a lot of varieties of ice cream. I didn’t take one, but got to taste them and my best ice cream vote still goes to Creamstone Ferrero Rocher, Hyderabad 🙂

We then headed on to our next destination, Strokkur, a fountain Geyser in the Geo-thermal area.

There comes the Strokkur, with a base temperature of 250 degrees Celsius and the water there raises like a fountain every 10 mins, which looked like a great wonder for us.

 

 

We spent a lot of time just waiting for the geyser and taking photos and videos with it and watching it with awe.

We took a small lunch break in between and then headed to Gulfoss. Anything that ends with ‘foss’ in Iceland is a waterfall. This was the first waterfall of our trip where we could see a rainbow too 🙂

 

It looked pretty scenic with water falling into a canyon with huge force and the water looked so fresh and pure.

From Gulfoss, we headed on to Kerið volanic crater lake.

Kerið was once a cone volcano which erupted and emptied its magma reserve. Once the magma was depleted, the weight of the cone collapsed into the empty magma chamber resulting in a crater.

We walked around the crater and spent some time there. We found some white lines in the sky, not sure if those are auroras in the making, but they looked pretty amazing.

We headed to a cabin in Hella for our night stay and the cabin looked so cute in the middle of nowhere (just two more cabins beside ours).

Wow, what a day!! Tectonic plates, Geyser, crater and waterfalls 🙂 I was never keen on Geography subject when I was a kid, but today I learnt a lot of things with great awe and interest. It felt like being in a different world altogether.

I couldn’t believe that we just covered 200kms today!

We had a good dinner and saw a lot of stars in the night sky.