Iceland is an amazingly beautiful country filled with art, culture, spectacular and other worldly scenery and friendly, happy people, but on occasion it can be pricey. Okay, getting there on Iceland Air won’t break the bank and accommodations are in line with that of hotels in Europe . Everything else, however, costs a fortune - food, gas, alcohol and any sort of guided tour. Here’s an example. My wife and her friend, Caroline, and I stopped at a pub one night in Reykjavik for a couple of drinks - just an average pub. The ladies each had two glasses of Merlot and I had a pint glass of the local beer followed by a half pint. The bill came to a whopping US$75!

For a tour of the scenic wonders near Reykjavik we decided to drive a rental car. The motor coach tour cost 6800 ISK - about US$100 per person ($300 for three persons.) A rental car for the day cost US$85 and gas totaled US$35 for the round trip on Iceland’s famous Golden Circle Tour.

The hard part was getting started. A couple of guidebooks mentioned that car rental companies sold maps and audio CDs with driving directions and detailed information about sites along the route. Unfortunately the discount rental agency had sold out of them and that’s when the runaround started – from the tourist information office to a gift store, back to the tourist office and eventually to the Hertz office on the outskirts of town near the Pearl. The Pearl (Perlan) is a glass domed building on a hill overlooking the city. It’s unique in that the dome sits atop a cluster of enormous hot water holding tanks that are used to supply hot water to heat parts of the city. The Pearl also houses a rotating restaurant and outdoor platforms offering panoramic views of the city. The glass dome is an easy-to-spot landmark and we negotiated our way through traffic to the Hertz agency. I snagged the last available copy in English for US$20. The friendly agent at Hertz also gave me directions on how to find the beginning of the route.

I popped the CD into the car stereo and guided by the soothing voice of a female narrator we set out for the first natural attraction, the crater lake. The lake is more the size of a pond and is said to be bottomless. We hiked around the perimeter and down a path to the water’s edge. From above the lake reflected a deep turquoise, but close up the water was absolutely clear. Yep, it looked bottomless.

Next up - Laxifoss (Horse’s Mane) Falls. This little waterfall is one of the attractions not included on the big, guided tours. Most of the bus tours only hit three of the attractions on the Golden Circle . Our guide map and audio CD included10 of them. Karen, Caroline and I got out of our four-door Eurobox. I looked around and saw only a few grassy pastures, a creek and the endless and rocky moonlike landscape of Iceland . I followed Karen down a path towards a lone bench situated in a field. That’s an odd place to put a bench I thought, but when we reached the bench I could hear the sound of water rushing. The falls lay ahead and below us across a chasm, hidden from view higher up. Spectacular! I’m so accustomed to seeing waterfalls in rocky mountainous terrain or deep in the woods. The thick white band of water appeared surreal against the backdrop of flat green fields. We all sat on the bench under the warm sun and listened to the sound of the water churning.

Our audio guide next described the town of Hveragerdi , which is replete with greenhouses that provide fresh produce for Iceland . Tours of the greenhouses are available throughout the day, but without clear directions to get there we never saw them. We continued into the adjacent town of Selfoss and grabbed a quick lunch at a Subway sub shop, boring Americans that we are. A tuna fish sub is the same round the world!

Back on the lonely highway we learned about Skalholt, the ancient seat of Icelandic Bishops. The site dates back to 1056 when the first of 30 Catholic bishops came into residence. The last Catholic bishop and his two sons were beheaded on the site in 1550 during the Protestant Reformation, whereafter Lutheran bishops sat in power until the late 1800s. The current cathedral was constructed in the late 1950s through early 1960s. The stark white church is surrounded by several other equally stark buildings, which together form a conference center. The place was empty, but once inside light filtered through the stained glass windows painting the walls in a kaleidoscope of colors. It was both beautiful and eerie…and dead quiet. We dropped some coins in the donation box and ventured outside. After finding the monument for the beheaded priest we moved onto one of the most exciting stops - The Great Geysir.

Unlike the previous stops, it was hopping at The Great Geysir where several tour buses filled the parking lots. Instead of the moon, the area around the Geysir seemed more like Venus. Hot steam sprouted from vents and scalding hot pools throughout the ruddy alien landscape. Great Geysir was discovered in the 14 th century and all other Geysers in the world are named after, but it doesn’t erupt on a timetable like Old Faithful .

It last erupted after an earthquake in June of 2000, sending a column of water 250 feet into the sky. The adjacent and smaller, geyser named Strokkur, however, erupts about every 10 to 15 minutes. Karen, Caroline and I walked through an air dense with the smell of sulfur to the upwind side of Strokkur. The water in the pool undulated up and down and then rose up into a dome of boiling liquid. The water collapsed into the hole and the geyser erupted to the cheers of onlookers. It shot up 80 feet!

A secondary blast followed a minute later shooting up about 40 feet. We hiked up a pathway to get a perspective view and waited for the next blast, which came after only 10 minutes. GG is surrounded by a low-lying rope with signs warning off tourists. The pool for GG measures over 20 feet across. Despite the warnings, numerous teenagers had stepped over the rope and walked to the very edge of the boiling hot pool. As we stood near the roped off section, the ground vibrated once, then twice and then shook as the pool let out a large gargling sound. The teenagers sprinted away from the pool in all directions as though they had seen a ghost. Karen, Caroline and I also moved well upwind just in case. We waited for about 20 minutes as GG made occasional grumbling noises and then quieted down, deciding to once again play the waiting game. Strokkur, however, shot off another succession of two eruptions. All of the sounds of whooshing steam got me thinking about cappuccino. So we popped into the café at the visitor center, picked up cappuccinos ‘to go’ and continued onto a place where the water runs freezing cold.

Gulfoss, which means Golden Falls , is one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world. The water cascades down two falls, positioned at right angles to one another and dropping a total of 105 feet into a narrow rocky gorge that is 220 feet deep and over 8,200 feet long. The waterfall is fed from the river, Hvita, which stands for White River . The glacier-fed frigid water appears milky as it flows down the plains from mountain glaciers. A cool mist rises up over the falls creating incredible rainbows. I stood at an edge overlooking the falls and felt a twinge of vertigo. One misplaced step on a slippery rock and that would be it. There would be no way to save a person should he or she tumble into the massive torrent of water that plunges into the jagged slit within the earth. We carefully followed a footpath down to lower view of the falls and felt invigorated by the mist. It’s one of the most amazing sites I have ever seen. Only a few other sightseers ambled about taking pictures and enjoying the spectacle. After standing in awe for several long minutes, we circumnavigated our way back up towards the upper overlook via a steeper path and stopped to admire the view from a rocky outcropping. When we reached the top, we found a couple of tour buses unloading. As we walked to the car we could just make out one of Iceland ’s glaciers off in the distance. The road leading to it was four-wheel drive only, not a route for our small car.

The paved road led us up and over the mountains into Pingvellir National Park. Our audio guide described stops at a pine plantation, a reform school and a small village. We, however, were mostly interested in the park and the country’s ancient parliament. Pingvellir, also known as Thingvellir, is the oldest parliament in the world, founded in 930AD. For 868 years, until 1798, parliament met on the shores of Iceland ’s largest lake. We stopped at several high points along the road to admire the view of the lake.

At one view, pipes running up a mountainside are visible on the far side of the deep body of water. The guide informed us that cool lake water is mixed with boiling geothermal water and then gravity fed down into Reykjavik to provide hot water for bathing and heating. Further on within Iceland ’s oldest National Park we took a hike down through naturally created alleyways between sheer rock walls. The site is a rift valley and part of the Great Atlantic Rift. The stone walls appear man-made, however, they are created as the North American tectonic plate separates from the European plate at a rate of three-quarters of an inch per year. The path led us to a clearing where we found a small white church, several other buildings and a graveyard marking the location of two of the nation’s most prestigious poets, Einar Benediktsson and Jonas Hallgrimsson. Paths led out in all directions and a person could easily spend days hiking throughout the park, but short on time, we looped back to the car following a wide path along the water.

n our return Reykjavik , we paused at a view overlooking the church, Iceland ’s farewell gift to us. And what did we leave there? Involuntarily, it was the CD that guided us through the Golden Circle – we just couldn’t locate the eject button. Oh well, at least we enjoyed our tour.