Ice Ice Baby

Jökulsárlón is a glacial lake in the south east of Iceland.  It’s about 4-5 hours from Reykjavik so to get there you need a car or a tour.  Luckily for me, Nasr (backpacker from Hugi’s remember) met a couple of crazy Americans in a bar.  They happened to have a car and were happy enough to take Nasr and I along for the drive.

 

It was a great day; a fairly long drive, but good company so it was fun.  Adrian and Sarah were great value and True Americans.  Everytime they did something funny or dumb or said something to do with home they were like ‘AMERCIA!’ (world police style).  Apparently this must be done whenever you do something funny or dumb or brave or strong or right.   I think the worst thing about the whole day was we ran out of time – or maybe Sarah’s driving.  We’ll have to toss a coin on that one.  But we definitely didn’t get to spend enough time in the places we went to and there were places we wanted to go that we didn’t get to at all.

 

We stopped to look at the glaciers.  From a distance it's a bit creepy how they come down the mountain looking like a great wave.  Like someone has pressed pause on a tsunami.  What if someone unpaused that thing? 

 

This guy could be in trouble if there's too much hot weather 

 

 The glacial lagoon was awesome.  Beautiful still looking water and ice everywhere shining in the sun.  What I wasn’t expecting the birdlife and the seals! They were everywhere, just hanging out in the water, being seals.  Then across the road is the glacier beach.  Black sand beaches with random chunks of ice covering the entire beach.  Ice of all shapes and sizes, murky white ice and shiny clear glisten in the sun ice.  Another photographer’s paradise.  So pretty and if I had the time I’m sure I could have just wandered around for hours taking pictures of chunks of ice.  Ok so maybe I’m just easily amused.

 

 

 

You can also do boat tours of the lake – but not at this time of year.  So I think that’s about reason 23 as to why Kelly should come back to Iceland in the Summer.  

 

So coming home we were pretty late.  It got to after 9 and we were still an hour or so from Reykjavik when Nasr looks out the window and starts yelling ‘Holy shit, stop the car!’  Poor Adrian must have nearly had a heart attack, but he pulls over and we all get out and there are the Northern Lights.  Big and amazing and fantastic and just like the pictures!  The wind was wild and icy cold and in normal circumstances you wouldn’t stay out in it for more than five minutes, but there we were for half an hour watching them stretch across the sky from one end to the other.  They moved and danced, fading and reappearing, doing that thing where they look like powder falling.  We tried to take the impossible photos.  Balancing our cameras on the roof of the car when the wind was so strong it was not just moving our cameras, but the whole car!

But we got back in the car cold and happy.