June 3 - Another long day in the car with many stops. First is to Jökulsárlón Glacier, where I thought I had booked a tour to visit an ice cave in the glacier. We arrive early so walk along Diamond Beach, where chunks of ice from the glacier flow down a river and beach themselves on the shore after being battered about by waves.
Head up to the meeting point by the glacier lagoon, where the tour companies are clustered, along with a souvenir shop. There is another couple waiting for the tour, so when the meeting time passes, I’m fairly convinced that the operator has some logistical issue that we haven’t been informed of.
A call to the agency confirms that it is me who has errored. The date I chose was Sept 3, not June 3, which should have been obvious but that the tour we want is offered only starting Sept 1. The calendar on the website confused me by pulling up September and showing Sept 3 as the first available time slot.
We all determine alternative action. Mike and Debbie get a free walking tour from a park ranger and we go on an amphibious craft for 40 minutes tooling around the glaciers in the lagoon. I think this is my first time on such a craft.
A few facts about this water feature:
Breiðamerkurjökull, the glacier that feeds it, is about 8 km from the ocean (used to touch the ocean before 1934 but had melted back since). The lagoon is a mix of salt and fresh water, hence very low salinity. Seals like it because large predators in the ocean are unable to get across the shallow sand bars into the lagoon to hunt them. It is Iceland’s deepest lake at 248 meters. The ice floating in it is thousands of years old, flowing down Breiðamerkurjökull ever so slowly from Vatnajökull, Europe’s largest glacier and source for all the glacial fingers moving toward the southern coast.
We walk along the edge of the lagoon for more photo op
The down can be extracted without killing the eider, otherwise it seems unlikely they would sell it anymore. Eider farmers make safe areas for the ducks to make their nests and drop a lot of down in the process. When the eider ducklings leave the nest, the farmers take the nests and extract the down from them.
We next drive through Vik to Reynisfjara Black Sand Beach. These black sand beaches are a feature of the southern coast, where Vatnajökull Glacier is discharging vast amounts of ground-up volcanic rock in several large deltas.
From here it is a long slog to our next destination, again an old farmhouse in the countryside. It is down a series of long gravel roads, in an area called Vestur-Landeyjar. It is a huge house, with all the bedrooms on the second floor and everything else on the ground floor.
There are some board games, including scrabble with Icelandic letters.
