Welcome to Iceland Guest - Your Online Travel Guide.

Iceland Guest is an information website for your travel to Iceland. On this site you can get all the tourist information you need for your vacation in Iceland. We hope that you will find this online travel guide useful in planning your holidays in Iceland.

About Iceland
Iceland is a refreshingly unconventional travel destination. The Icelandic nature is unspoilt, exotic and mystical with its spouting geysers, active volcanoes, tumbling waterfalls, towering mountains, vast lava plains and magical lakes. Iceland’s fjords, glaciers and highland plains present visitors with some of the most beautiful and enchanting places they will ever see, as well as a rare feeling of utter tranquillity.

For travelers on a quest for action, Iceland’s pristine nature offers great potential for outdoor activities such as snowmobiling, horse riding, cave exploring, hiking, swimming, skiing, river rafting, kayaking and mountain safaris on modified four-wheel drives, to name but a few. Iceland supports a surprisingly diverse Nordic flora and fauna and is an ideal place for ornithology enthusiasts, while also offering some of the world’s best whale watching destinations.

About Reykjavik
Reykjavík sometimes feels like a cosmopolitan capital and a tiny seaside village - all wrapped up in one. But Reykjavík has the best of both worlds; the qualities of a modern, forward-looking society complemented by a close connection to Iceland‚s beautiful and unspoilt nature.

Reykjavík’s legendary nightlife is bolstered by plentiful cultural and social happenings in addition to an abundance of first-class restaurants. The size of Reykjavik city centre is also limited enough to allow for easy navigation by foot. Reykjavík has been described as a young and daring city that is characterized by strong contrasts. Conveniently small, clean and safe, it is more or less free from the major problems that haunt many other capitals. Big city events are frequent, the winter lights festival finished recently with thousands of participants and more tourist at this time of the year than we are used to.

in Focus

8.5.2007

Boreholes to Solve Global Warming?

Boreholes to solve global warming Emission of carbon-dioxide is one of the main causes of global warming, so getting a hold of it would be a major step in fighting its development. If Iceland's president, mr. Olafur Ragnar Grimsson gets his way, great advances in counteracting the warming process may be developed in Iceland, reports the Time magazine.

A team of leading scientists is going to attempt injecting carbon-dioxide charged down boreholes drilled into the basalt layers beneath the ground, near Hellisheidi heath, halfway between Iceland's capital Reykjavik and the South-Icelandic town of Hveragerdi. Deep in the ground, they are hoping that the gas will react with the porous basalt and form a stable mineral that would remain stable for millions of years. If they succeed, a
viable way of rendering Iceland, and potentially other nations as well, carbon neutral may have been found.

The location for this experiment was chosen after scientists from Columbia University met with Mr. Grímsson, who himself has seen great advances being made in Iceland when it comes to discontinuing polluting energy resources for more cleaner ones. As a young boy, his job was to bring coal to his grandmother's house. At the time Reykjavík had a soot-black sky was hanging above. Coal has been completely replaced by hot water pumped up from the ground in nearby geothermal areas to heat the houses. "If Iceland could achieve such a radical change in one generation, enormous changes can succeed all over the world," comments the president.

Iceland has also been the location for the testing of hydrogen powered vehicles, and Mr. Grímsson jokingly comments on his firsthand testing. "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I was the first person to exceed the speed limit in a hydrogen-powered car," he says. "I wanted to test its capability. Why not?"

Read about Time's Global Warming's Big Thinkers.

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