Now I see why they call it Iceland

Skogafoss to Höfn

With relief we woke to clear skies as we needed to be on the road by 7am for a busy day. The scenery on the drive was amazing, it was our first real look as yesterday everything was hidden by the rain.

Our first stop was the Skaftafell glacier hike, which we reached with plenty of time for the 9.30am start.  We turned up to a parked van just off the road and were herded production line style to be geared up, we then jumped back in our cars to drive in convoy to the glacier. After reaching the edge of the glacier we put on our crampons and crunched our way around, the sun was shining and it wasn’t cold, you couldn’t have asked for a better day for a walk on a glacier. The time from arriving to returning to our car was 3 ½ hours and we had been warned that there were no bathroom facilities so we’d skipped our morning coffee and were looking for lunch at the end. Unfortunately the lack of infrastructure on this side of Iceland is really noticeable. 

Rather than back tracking to the only open service station we’d seen on our long morning drive we decided to push on to our next stop Jökulsárlón or Glacial Lagoon. We had a 3.30pm zodiac trip booked there and it was only half an hour away. It was a wonderful sight with icebergs floating out out of the lagoon and past the beach into the ocean. There were hordes of cars and people, the busiest we had seen in Iceland so far. We couldn’t get into the carpark so drove to the ocean side parking and walked up the river towards the lagoon with icebergs passing by.

Here again the lack of food and infrastructure was astonishing, there were a couple of food vans, a few outdoor picnic tables and huge lines for the portable toilets. How do they manage in bad weather, what happened yesterday in the rain? Did everyone stand to queue for food and toilets while being drenched? We guess they must have as there weren’t any other options.

We were suited up and driven in a bus to the edge of the lagoon where we boarded our zodiac, for the 8km ride to the glacier's edge. As we have been to Antarctica and the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina we felt the glacier here was a smaller affair. However, what we weren’t prepared for was the variety of colours. In Antarctica the ice is pure and the whites and blues are stunning but in Iceland there is the presence of volcanic ash and lava. The striking shades of white, black, blue and grey also ran to the colour of aluminum foil in the reflection of the sun. 

We were lucky enough to witness a calving, where a huge sheet of ice broke away from the glacier and thundered into the water, and rising again to float after finding it’s equilibrium. One of the huge icebergs near us had only calved 15 minutes earlier, so we had only just missed that one.

After all of that we finally finished our day an hour further on at the town of Höfn.