Longest day in Iceland yet. I kept
hitting the snooze and finally dragged myself out of bed and made it
to the lobby to wait for the bus at 7:00 sharp. The bus didn't come
until 7:13 and once we finished picking everyone else up we headed to
Skaftafell, located in Southeast Iceland and one of the places I was
trying to book a hotel months ago but everything in the area was
unavailable. It's the base city for Vatnajökull National Park so I
was glad that they actually run a day trip that far from Reykjavik.
That means the only area I wasn't able to get to on this trip was
this one national park in North Iceland, but with everything I've
done so far already I would say this was a good trip. This was a 4+
hour ride with the bus speeding on open highways with no traffic.
There was another woman traveling solo named Greta (from Germany)
that also went on the same trip and is also staying at the same hotel
as me. She complained that this was the worst hotel room she had
been in for a very long time. The bus ride was fairly smooth. It
was nice that it was strictly a bus ride (on a pretty comfortable
bus), and didn't have narration or any photo stops or anything else
touristy.
Once we got to the base for all the
glacier hiking they provided a lunch of a tiny sandwich and the
Icelandic staple fish soup. I'm starting to really like the soup
here; it's pretty filling. Then we headed to the Glacier Guides base
and they measured our hiking boots for crampons - metal spikes tied
to the soles of your shoes to dig into the ice and provide the proper
traction. Then it was another bus ride (in a school bus) to the base
of Virkisjökull Glacier. It was a short hike until we actually got
to the beginning of the glacier and had to put on our crampons and
use our pickaxes. I was a little surprised at the casualness of it,
because when I hiked Fox Glacier in New Zealand the guide fitted all
our crampons on personally to make sure they were on correctly, but
here the guide was basically like, “Here, this is how you put it
on,” and didn't check our boots afterwards. Oh well, we had no
major incidents, except for this one tourist who I will just call
Camera Guy lost his pickaxe. I think he put it down to take a
picture and then it just slid off the glacier due to the downward
slope. Our guide had told us if we wanted to put it down to either
dig our pickaxes into the ice or step on it between the crampons and
that if it started to slide down not to follow it; it would be a lot
easier for him to retrieve the pickaxe than to retrieve one of us.
Anyways, Camera Guy was pretty forward
with his picture requests. When you travel solo, of course it's
always hard to get your picture taken in front of something. You can
take the picture yourself and wind up with a giant lollipop head, or
you can get one of the other tourists to take it for you. Often
enough when I take the picture myself someone will walk by and offer
to take it for me. Otherwise my preferred method is to sort of
wander around until usually a pair of travelers, either a couple or a
pair of friends who want their picture taken together asks me, and
then after I take their picture I ask them to reciprocate. Well
Camera Guy asked just about everyone in the group, even the guide
(tactfully you should leave the guide alone to you know, GUIDE)
constantly and he was pointing out exactly what he wanted in the
picture, how big he wanted to be in the picture, etc. Then he would
fix his hair every time before we took the shot. I guess it's good
he's comfortable with his vanity? When he had lost his pickaxe and
was walking around far away looking for it, Greta mentioned to our
guide, “There's always one.”
The glacier was pretty cool. Hiking on
ice is always a unique experience and a little treacherous; you
really want to make sure your feet are wider apart when you walk or
otherwise you might hook your crampons on your pant leg and rip your
pants or fall, etc. We had a good view of Vatnajökull Glacier, the
main glacier on top and the 2nd biggest in Europe.
There's always cool formations too (pun intended) where the water
runs down the glacier and you just see things you wouldn't see
anywhere else in the world. What we were walking on was actually
very dirty though, covered in ash and dirt from the latest volcano
eruption from the Grímsvötn
volcano in Vatnajökull last month. Apparently some of their
manmade bridges on our glacier got taken out too because of the
eruption, so they had to alter some of the hiking paths.
We spent 1-2 hours hiking on the
glacier and then headed to Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon on
Breiðamerkursandur. Yes those names are just as hard to pronounce
as they look. This area was pretty neat because this is where the
glacier runs into the sea, and the seawater melts the ice, so you
have this big lagoon filled with different types of icebergs floating
around. We got in an amphibious boat and took a 45-minute ride
around the lagoon. Our guide was blonde Anna, and she took this big
chunk of 1,000-year-old crystal-clear ice and used a pickaxe to break
it up into pieces so we could all try some. Definitely refreshing!
The lagoon is is also where they filmed the end of the James Bond
movie Die Another Day
(which I never saw so I have to take her word for it) where they are
driving around on the ice. They filmed during the winter but the
producers didn't realize that the water never freezes over, so they
had to close the bridge between the sea and the lagoon and wait 2
weeks for parts of the lagoon to freeze so they could drive the Aston
Martins on it.
After
our boat ride we got free waffles with cream. I wasn't sure why this
was highlighted in the trip brochure, but I think Icelandic waffles
are a big thing for dessert or to have with coffee, and yes it was
really good. It was stuffed with jam inside and then you dip it in
the cream. Yum. Then we drove back to base camp and back to our
original bus for the ride back home – another 4 hours! It was a
nice ride though; when everyone's quiet and just enjoying the scenery
or sleeping it's very calming. We stopped in this tiny area midway
and I had a fish burger for dinner, and yes, this fish was delicious
and not ridiculously overpriced. We also passed by Eyjafjallajökull
on the drive,
which erupted last year and caused all those travel headaches in
Europe (flights to and from North America were unaffected because the
wind blew everything east). The bus driver also pointed out the
large volcano next to it saying they were waiting for it to erupt
sometime.
We didn't get back to town until 23:00
and I was so exhausted when I got back to the hotel that I just took
a hot shower and brewed myself a cup of decaf (and started blogging)!
Tomorrow is horseback-riding in the morning, and that will be less
than half a day. I'm starting to feel sore muscles from yesterday's
snorkeling so I hope my legs will be okay tomorrow.
