The start of a very long day in Iceland. I had booked a day-night tour with Extreme Iceland (the Spectacular Iceland and Northern Lights tour) that would take me to some amazing locations down the South Coast in the day, then I joined up with a Northern Lights tour which finished around 2am. I've had to split the post into two, because there were so many amazing sights and places!
I woke up at 7:30am to have breakfast and walk to my pickup location up the road. It was snowing lightly when this van with huge snow tyres pulled up and I met Magdalena, my lovely guide for the day. She put me in the passenger seat which was great because we were chatting during the drive and the view was absolutely spectacular!
The first stop was Skógafoss waterfall. This huge waterfall was amazing - there was snow and ice all around, a rainbow from the spray and sunshine and you could walk up hundreds of stairs to the very top, which of course I did.
We were at the waterfall for about 45 mins, then left to head to Sólheimajökull glacier. On the way there we spotted Eyjafjallajökull volcano, also known as E15, also known as that annoying volcano that stopped flight traffic for days all over Europe when it erupted in 2010. It also covered a lot of the ground in ash, and the land around it for miles is still recovering. Apparently people still hike up it when there is no activity - you wouldn't catch me doing that though!
We arrived at the Solheimajokull glacier, and Magdalena gave us all a lesson on the safety equipment we had to wear. This included a helmet, harness, walking pole and crampons for our shoes. The crampons were great, as it mean you could walk confidently on the snow and ice without fear of slipping over! There was a question of whether we would be able to even go on this glacier hike, as the winds were around 60km/h and so I think we ended up going on a shorter hike than they usually do, but it was just incredible. We even went into this little ice cave! There were other people on the glacier doing ice climbing... it looked so much fun, although it was definitely windy. I kept getting pelted in the face by little grains that felt like sand but were ice!
The next stop was the black sand beach of Reynisfjara, which I'll have to cover in the next post!