The Golden Circle in a Day

An hour on from Þingvellir, over a low rise and down onto the steaming flats, you reach the field that literally named the phenomenon. Geysir is the hot-spring area that handed English the word 'geyser,' and while old Geysir itself has mostly been dozing for years, its neighbour Strokkur covers the shift, throwing a fat column of water and steam skyward every few minutes, on a cycle reliable enough that the whole ring of onlookers performs the same small involuntary flinch each time (you'll do it too, and you won't be embarrassed enough to stop). Known since the 13th century, still showing off. You catch the smell before you're properly out of the car, that faint sulfur tang that means the ground is alive. The loop to Strokkur is flat, short and utterly harmless to look at, which is precisely the trap, so keep the children a good arm's length back from the rope, because the boiling pools and the scalding run-off could not care less how strollable the path looks.

Barely ten minutes further up the road, Gullfoss makes itself heard before you see it, as the loud one. The Hvítá drops in two stages, set at an angle to each other, into a canyon deep enough to catch the roar and hand it back to you, kicking up dependable rainbows on a sunny day and a genuinely startling amount of spray on any day at all. Give it an hour and let the lower path soak you, because down there the water is close enough to feel landing on your face. It's here to be looked at in the first place only because of Sigríður Tómasdóttir, who fought a hydroelectric scheme to a standstill in the early twentieth century, which is the sole reason you're photographing a waterfall and not the back of a turbine. The upper viewpoint is the easy, dry walk; the lower one gets you wet, and in winter it gets you onto ice, so keep the small hands tight against the powerful water and the slick edges both.

Twenty minutes on, the day finally exhales. Faxi, also written Vatnsleysufoss, is the broad, low counterweight the tour buses tend to blow straight past, only about 7 metres tall but a generous 91 metres wide, fanning out over its ledge on the Tungufljót exactly like the horse's mane the name promises. A salmon ladder climbs one side, which buys a restless child a second thing to stare at, and the fish, now and then, actually deliver. It's a short flat walk from the car park with nothing worse than wet rock and a platform edge to respect, half an hour of real calm after two stops that could cook you. This is the designated picnic, and if you'd rather eat somewhere with a roof and a kitchen, Selfoss is the real town sitting on the road home. Faxi is where the Golden Circle stops testing you, and on a day like this one that counts as a feature.

The last leg is a little over half an hour, and it sets you down at Kerið, the natural full stop before returning to Reykjavík. It's a volcanic crater lake roughly 6,000 years old, its steep walls of red and black scoria dropping as much as 55 metres to an aquamarine pool at the bottom, and the geology reads straight off the rock: this one didn't blow its top so much as cave in, the floor of a cinder cone sinking as the magma chamber under it drained away. Red where the iron rusted, black where the ash was left alone. It's privately owned and charges a flat 700 ISK for everyone, parking included. Walk the rim, which is level and made for photographs; the path down to the water is a steeper optional add-on with unguarded drops, so keep young children close. Then it's back to the city.