Today, after breakfast, we headed out to Jokulsarlon and Diamond Beach. It was about a 40 minute drive. Jokulsarlon is a lake filled with glacier meltwater from a receding glacier.
It has huge chunks of floating icebergs and the water color is an amazing blue green hue, depending on the conditions.
We did another star jump!
Look at the perfect reflections!
After spending about an hour here, we headed out for the glacier hike. We somehow missed stopping at Diamond Beach, which has black sand and sparkling icebergs!
After grabbing a quick lunch along the way, we reached the meeting point for the glacier hike on Vatnajokull Glacier- the largest icecap in Europe. We had signed up for a 5 hour hike (starting at 1 pm). This means we get to spend at least 3 hours on the glacier.
Our guide was a guy from New Zealand!
After everyone got fitted with crampons, we were loaded into the jeep and driven to a place close to the glacier. There was a lot of meltwater due to the glacier receding and we had to walk about 20 minutes to get to the starting point. Here, the glacier looks quite brown from all the mud and soil mixed into the ice and doesn't look as pretty as one would expect.
At the beginning of the tour, we were taken to a ice cave and the guide talked a little bit about how it gets formed and the different ice layers etc
After that, we started the glacier hike. The guide was always there to help get over the steeper parts.
I fell a couple of times due to getting entangled on my own crampons !
As we climbed higher, the glacier had more blue hues in the ice.
They had made some ice ladders for the steep climbs.
The also had some ropes laid to help with climbing.
We did our star jump, but I was a bit too scared to jump more than a few millimeters on a glacier!
It was not that cold being on the glacier.
The guide helped us cross some crevasses. We could not see the bottom of those crevasses!
We could not see the top of the glacier. It seemed to go on and on!
At some parts, the ice was a deep blue and very pretty!
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I was able to drink the water - it was clear and clean and refreshing!
After spending some time relaxing and enjoying the view, the whole group headed back down. We never did reach the top of the glacier. There are multi day tours where one can do more walking across the glacier.
We really enjoyed this experience and highly recommend it. One can do the shorter one for 3 hours, if 5 hours is too long. The kids wanted to do a full day tour- they so much enjoyed the hike on the glacier.
Once we got back, we drove to the next guesthouse and settled in for the night!
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