It was incredibly windy during our visit, especially up on the viewing platform above the waterfall. Hoods were being whipped off if you turned the wrong way and just holding my phone up to try to record some video of Gullfoss (removed for now) from a good vantage point required two hands and me leaning hard against the railing for support.

Gullfoss is a waterfall along the Hvítá river in Iceland formed from a series of turns and drops into a canyon. While it had been intended at some point in the past to tap the waterfall for energy production it is now a protected, natural monument and open to visitors throughout the year. A wooden staircase allows everyone to descend and walk along the river then back up some the waterfall’s drops. Although it didn’t rain while we were in the canyon alongside Gullfoss the fierce wind often whipped the spray from the crashing water into us leaving us almost as wet anyway. Still, I managed to take some photos of the waterfall when I could.

A pseudo-HDR processed photo of Gullfoss emphasising the darkness of the day.

And I even managed a little bit more (removed) video of Gullfoss from a slightly less windswept position in the canyon. The short video shows the viewing platform on the cliff edge right at the end.

Iceland is incredibly bleak and our trip to Geysir was under heavy, grey skies but that doesn’t stop the landscape looking awe-inspiringly beautiful. When you add a hillside with steam rising against a cold temperature and wind and a fountain geyser called Strokkur erupting every few minutes you end up with some fabulous sights and wonderful memories.

You only needed to wander off for a couple of minutes to explore a few springs or check out the wide vistas visible from Geysir before you could turn around again and wait for Strokkur to send another jet of hot water tens of metres into the Icelandic sky.

Despite the size and obvious danger that boiling hot spring water possesses it was possible to get very close to the Strokkur geyser. This gave us a good opportunity to see how the surface of the water would periodically recede bubble up into a dome just before everything erupted with a wonderful whoosh. I was also able to position myself so that what little sunlight there was backlit the geyser; this gave me a chance to capture some of the blues in the water with one of my photographs.

Away from the spectacle of the geysers at Geysir that landscape of Iceland offered up some immense views of empty, nearly colourless land and distant mountain ranges that, like elsewhere in the country, made you feel both big and incredibly small at the same time.

The commentary on the bus ride to this destination was particularly good, explaining not only the history of the place (it was the location of Iceland’s first parliament to limit the power of the country’s chieftains) but also the fascinating geology. We stopped several times so that we could look down on gaps along the road where the Earth’s crust was splitting apart or where large variations in the surface level were located.

The bus eventually took us to Almannagjá, where the land simply seemed to suddenly step up tens of metres in the middle of nowhere. There was a path that could be walked to a tourism information point at the top of the canyon and we were offered the option of walking it to meet the bus there or staying on the bus. As you might guess, we walked. Many people stayed on the bus and the perfectly understandable reason for that along with the lack of photos from the bus was because of the torrential rain that was coming down at the time. It was without a doubt the most rain I’ve ever been drenched by in my life and the photographs of the walk up the canyon in Þingvellir below do not do the conditions any justice at all; the water was running off my coat like a waterfall and it was all I could do to keep my camera just dry enough with a cloth every now and then to shoot any pictures at all (the LCD took days to get the moisture out).