Þingvellir National Park is a UNESCO world heritage site that is easily accessible from Reykjavik. It’s also known to be part of the “Golden Circle”. A very popular tourist area in Iceland. This national park was the first stop on our first full day in Iceland. We headed out early from our accommodation for our 9am Silfra snorkeling tour.
Silfra is one of the few, if not only, place in the world when you get to swim/snorkel between two tectonic plates. It’s the clearest water in the world, where you visibility is easily 100m deep. Floating/snorkelling between the American and Eurasian continentals plates definitely an experience. Be warned though, the water is absolutely freezing at 2 degrees Celsius. Even the thick dry suit provided by the tour company can’t stop you from feeling cold to the bone. By the time the snorkeling tour ends at the 30 to 40 minute mark, I couldn’t wait to get our of the cold. Getting out of your dry suit with frozen fingers was also quite the feat! The hot chocolate to warm us up at the end of our snorkel was a nice touch though.
After getting dress and back into warm clothes, we spent the next few hours exploring the park. We walked to the Althing, one of the world’s first parliaments, first establish in 930. Now the location of the oldest parliament in the world is represented by the Icelandic flag.
The walking paths were well marked and flat, which made the area easy to explore on foot. The area was also used in the filming of Game of Thrones. At the end of one of the walking paths led to a small waterfall, Öxarárfoss. This was only the beginning of our 2 week around-Iceland-waterfall-hunting-adventure. I have never seen this many impressive and powerful waterfalls in such a short space of time!
I’m excited to share more of my photos and experiences from Iceland. All my photos were processed on Adobe Lightroom. Thanks for stopping by today.
J.
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