This was a big driving day. Since Rich got a terrible night’s sleep Tuesday night in the campground, I did all the driving and Kai sat up front with me while Rich slept in back. We covered several hundred kilometres in the rain. Our goal was to get to the Diamond Beach and to our Jökulsárlón Glacier tour for 6pm.
Kai and I listened to music and talked while I was driving. The scenery is so other worldly. Sometimes there’s just an enormous rock, like half a kilometre wide, just sort of there like this:
Other times, you just pass these gorgeous waterfalls that you aren’t allowed to go near…
Or you just come up to a glacier, like this…
This turned out to be Hvannadalshnúkur
But eventually we got to where we were going, and it honestly came out of nowhere. We were driving with hills on either side. Not picturesque hills either – they just looked like moon rock, when all of a sudden the hills tapered down very suddenly and there were bright turquoise icebergs right there in front of us. It was amazing. We found parking, and realized we were at what is the Diamond Beach on one side of the road, and the Iceberg lagoon on the other side of the road. I wish it had been sunny out, but we were so lucky that the rain stopped and the sky brightened up just in time for our tour. It was such an amazing experience!
So basically what happens here is the icebergs break off the glacier, either from the top or more often from under the water line. The glacier cliff edge that we were able to get about 500 metres from on the boat tour, is about 40 metres high. It doesn’t look it, and it didn’t even look like we were that far away from it, but we realized that with this kind of scale we are incapable of judging distance. So the ice wall is 40 metres high (which is why you have to stay away because if a piece falls off and your boat is close, you could be in real trouble), but it extends 300 metres down under the water line! More often than not, the pieces break off from under the water and bob up.
The “pieces” are MASSIVE and look blue because they absorb all the colours of the spectrum except blue. When they come into contact with the air that doesn’t happen, so they appear clear or white. When a giant ‘berg tips over and the ice from underneath comes up, it again looks blue. Then the ‘bergs get carried out to sea, but the comparatively warm ocean waves break them up and they get tossed back on to the beach and look like diamonds shimmering in the sun.
This is on the Diamond Beach
The Diamond Beach is really hit and miss. It depends how many pieces of ice are washed up on any given day. And we saw a seal buddy. 🙂
Around 6pm we heading to the tour meet spot and they got us geared up, because it’s cold out there! We got in a massive all-terrain bus, and they drove us over to the water where we would be divided into two groups and put into zodiacs. Our boat had us and 7 others. As we boated towards the glacier we went very close to various icebergs of different sizes. The guide clearly loved what he does. He gets to go out there every day and every day it is different. He said he was out there the day before when a really big one (either broke off or bobbed up – I can’t remember), and only 3 hours earlier it had flipped over.
Then, on our way out, we saw a seal on a chunk of ice, just hanging out, and we took time out to get as close as possible without freaking the little guy out!
