It's adventure day 3, the groups are getting smaller and the weather is getting better. 15 degrees of warmth, no wind and clear blue skies - not only was it warm enough to take your coat off but you could take your fleece off too! Today I joined 12 other people and a guide for a full day tour (12 hours) of southern Iceland. This gave us 3 waterfalls, a famous volcano, a black volcanic beach and a walk on a glacier.
We drove about 1.5 hours from Reykjavik and the first part of the day was all about getting wet. At the first stop our guide took us through a cleft in the rock and we found ourselves in a cave with a hole in the roof and a waterfall flowing though that hole. This was Gljufrabui.
After taking photos and generally getting wet we came out of the cave and walked 5 minutes along a path to another waterfall called Seljalandsfoss. This one had the thrill of being able to walk behind it - provided you were prepared to get wet of course. I do hope you are all taking note of the sheer effort I'm going to, to bring you good pictures!
Waterfall number 3 was Skogarfoss, again providing close encounters and a drenching and also because of the sun, great rainbows.
The lunch stop was a picnic on a black volcanic beach - picnic on the beach, in Iceland? There is no beach culture here because the sea is never warm enough to swim in and the weather rarely suitable for sitting on one.
The afternoon was spent hiking on a glacier. But first we need a picture of the volcano - Eyjafjallajokull.
That's because it will explain why the glacier I'm hiking on, is not white like you see in pictures of the Swiss alps. Remember Eyjafjallajokull grounded all the fights because of the thick cloud of ash it produced. This is formed when the hot magma hit the cold icecap. Whilst a load of the ash travelled towards mainland Europe, a large amount of it fell on Iceland too so the glacier I hiked on was a mixture of ice and ash hence the colours.
The glacial lake in this picture with the icebergs did not exist 20 years ago as this area was covered in ice - it is a result of the shrinking of the glacier.
The guides are only allowed to take 12 people on the ice each and as I was the thirteenth in our group, I had to join a group with another guide and meet a few more new folk - once again the guide was excellent. We had harnesses, crampons, helmets and ice axes and basically climbed on the ice for an hour or so. All good, rather dirty at times given the ash, fun.
I'm not going to try and make out that any of the stuff that I have done in Iceland has come cheap. It hasn't. The tours I have done have cost hundreds of pounds, but my advice to anyone coming to this beautiful country is to look at what's available and if there are things you want to do, then do it. This is one of the best countries in the world for doing this sort of stuff and there is so much I haven't done. Reports I have heard from people who have been out whale watching for instance have been very good.
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