Blue Lagoon & Reykjanes
Initially I thought the Blue Lagoon was this amazing natural feature of Iceland, that offered healing powers to those who needed them. On visiting it however, I discovered it’s actually a man-made feature, the result of water output of the nearby geothermal power plant and is renewed every 2 days.
According to Wiki, superheated water is vented from the ground near a lava flow and used to run turbines that generate electricity. After going through the turbines, the steam and hot water passes through a heat exchanger to provide heat for a municipal water heating system. Then the water is fed into the lagoon for recreational and medicinal users to bathe in.
Getting there though was a completely different matter. There’s a lovely bitumen road that takes maybe 45 minutes from Reykjavik, but there appeared to be a shorter route on the map so off we went down that one.
Guess what? It was a goat track that took us over two hours to navigate. My gosh it was rough. The photos below will give you an idea of how rough.
Talk about a lesson learnt but we did get to stand on the tectonic plates of Asia and America at the same time. Not everyone can say they’ve done that now can they?
