Iceland Golden Circle tour

The first thing to understand about the Golden Circle is that it is not an attraction. It is a loop of ordinary Icelandic road, about two hundred and thirty kilometres long, with three extraordinary things arranged along it and a name invented by the tourist board. There is no gate, no ticket and no opening time. You can drive it at two in the morning in June and the only thing stopping you is that you will want to sleep.

That matters because it changes what a tour is for. You are not buying access. You are buying a driver, a commentary and, in winter, somebody else deciding whether the wind is too strong to be on the road. In this country that last one is not a small thing.

Most tours go anticlockwise, which puts Þingvellir first. You come over a low rise and the whole rift valley opens out below: a lake, a plain, and a wall of rock running away to the north. The wall is the edge of the North American plate. On the far side of the plain, several kilometres away, is the edge of the Eurasian one. You walk down into the gap along a path called Almannagjá, between cliffs, and the gap widens by a couple of centimetres a year.

The Icelanders held their parliament here from the year 930, in the open, at the bottom of the rift. It ran on that spot for eight hundred and sixty years. Nobody built anything: they came, they argued at the Lögberg, and they went home. Standing in it, that arrangement makes more sense than it does written down.

Then Geysir, and a small disappointment that turns into a better story. The Great Geysir — the one that gave every geyser on earth its name, documented in Icelandic records since 1294 — is asleep. It last erupted in 2003. In its day it went up seventy metres.

What actually performs is Strokkur, a hundred metres away, and it performs relentlessly: every six to ten minutes, fifteen to twenty metres, occasionally forty. The moment worth waiting for is not the column of water. It is the second before, when the pool bulges upward into a smooth blue dome the size of a car, and everybody standing around the rope inhales at once.

Gullfoss is the one that silences people. The Hvítá — the White River, full of glacial rock flour and coming off Langjökull — runs across a flat plain, drops eleven metres, turns ninety degrees, and drops another twenty-one straight into a crevice about twenty metres wide and two and a half kilometres long. In summer it does that at roughly a hundred and forty-one cubic metres a second. From the upper path you are looking down into a canyon whose bottom you cannot see for spray.

It nearly became a hydroelectric station. In the first half of the twentieth century foreign investors leased it, and Sigríður Tómasdóttir — daughter of the co-owner, who walked to Reykjavík barefoot to argue about it — is credited with stopping them. There is a stone with her face on it above the falls. Gullfoss has been permanently protected since 1979.

And then the fourth stop, which is where tours stop being interchangeable. Kerið, a two-hundred-and-seventy-metre red crater with green water in the bottom. Friðheimar, where they grow tomatoes under lights in a lava field and serve you soup among the vines. Brúarfoss, which is the bluest water in the country. Or a hot pool at the end — and after eight hours in Icelandic wind, that is the one nobody regrets.