Day 5 - New Years Eve

(Current Time & Place: 1/3/17, 9:00pm, two more hours until we land in Boston)

Day 5 - 12/31/16

Jon:
We woke up a bit tired but otherwise ready to go glacier touring. We had the traditional smorgasbord of jams, breads, and meats and set off for Jokulsarlon again, which was the meeting point for our glacier tour.  The early morning twilight (okay, it was actually 9am) made it difficult to take pictures, but that was okay because we had already photographed the entire glacier from the road yesterday. It took us a bit to find our tour guide, but eventually we found him, loaded up into a jeep with extremely over-sized off road tires and set off!

Our guide, an Icelandic native, was a real character. He is a tour guide, movie set director and producer, and part time jokester and philosopher. It took us a bit to get to the glacier, and he told us about Iceland, his opinions on glacier formation, global warming, glacial history, Icelandic music, and the golden rule for living life as a good person (you know, all the usuals).

Finally we arrived to the edge of the glacier.  There were a lot of groups already by the ice cave, so he took us to another cave that was completely covered by ash to have a look at ice formations.

The ice was streaked with dark layers of ash from previous volcanic eruptions. Snow just continues to pile up on top of the ash and over time is compressed into ice; it takes 10-14 meters of snow to form a meter of ice so it takes quite a bit to make a glacier.  We walked into this ash and ice cavern and while we it was pretty dark (being relatively opaque), it was still beautiful.

The ice looked tessellated, even without the sun; we had headlamps on and they did a good job of providing illumination.

Once we had our fill of the mini cavern our tour guide notified us that it was time to move on to another site. Now here is where some good news came. At the beginning of the day the main ice cavern was closed because it was filled with water.  As we could attest to, it had been raining nonstop the day before yesterday, and it takes time for the caverns to drain the water.  Caverns in glaciers are formed by water; when it rains these caverns allow the water to escape from within the glacier.  So we were lucky that enough water had drained out of the cavern for us to be able to go inside.

This was our second clear day (yesterday being the first), and the sunlight was beginning to light the whole area up as we arrived at the cave; the sight was absolutely stunning.

We saw a blue ice cavern with different shades of blue, and black ribbons throughout the blue ice as memories of distant volcanic eruptions. Needless to say, we spent quite a bit of time here capturing every facet of this wonderful place. It was also pretty fun watching them slowly open up more and more of the cavern as more water drained out.

I should mention here that our guide informed us the only way to truly experience the glacier was to taste it.

We left the cavern and took some more pictures of the area for good measure (how many times can one say they've been on a glacier?) and loaded back into the jeep to go back to our starting point.

While we were in the jeep we learned that Vatnajökull was the fourth largest glacier in the "known universe" and the largest glacier on Iceland. To put it in perspective, though, the third largest glacier is in Greenland and is over 4 km thick. Vatnajökull averages out at a mere 400 m thick, with its deepest parts being 1.1 km thick.  It's difficult to think on that scale, it's simply impressive.

We arrived back at Jokulsarlon around midday and took some more pictures of the new scene at the lake.  Since yesterday some of the icebergs changed;  some joined the party, and some were carried out to sea. We even went to the coast to get some pictures of the ice along the beach and in the ocean.

Glaciers are pretty, and looking at the sunlight through the ice is beautiful sight.

At this point we began our long drive back to the Reykjavik area- our original goal was to make it to our new place early-ish in the evening and then head into the city for New Years celebrations. So we drove out of the Vatnajökull area only stopping once or twice for pictures and trying to decide what sites that we missed on our way into the area we were going to stop at on the way back.  Our first stop was the canyon Fjadrargljufur, try to say that ten times fast (or once, for that matter).

A canyon in the winter is a very pretty, and the river wasn't frozen! In fact, our glacier tour guide said that this year so far was the warmest winter on record for Iceland while last year was the coldest, however the wind had returned. There were some areas that had been roped off to prevent people from being stupid but of course, there were footprints there. Had they gone out on those ledges with the wind we had, they'd have fallen off. Anyway, it was a pretty site and the combination of the water, stone, and snow/ice was beautiful.

We left Fjadrargljufur around 4pm feeling great and continued on our way back to Reykjavik.  We saw a new waterfall on the way back that seemed to be right in someone's backyard, so we took some photos of that.

Sadly some jerks then followed us and proceeded to park directly in our line of sight, so our ability to photograph the falls was cut short. As an aside, it seems that if you live near a glacier, you are basically guaranteed to own a personal waterfall. Just a heads up if any of you are looking into real estate in Iceland. Unfortunately, by the time we made it back to the other sites we were considering it was already getting dark, so we opted to see what we could from the car/road and carry on.

Around 5pm we were passing through Vik and we were starting to get hungry, but all the shops along our route were closed;  we thought this was a bit strange because things don't usually close that early. We tried to call ahead to gas stations, stores and restaurants but got no answers. It seems like the people here take their New Years Eve celebrations very seriously, and the whole country shuts down. We found one hotel in Hella (remember Hella? We stayed there with Björg on day 2) around 6:15pm that had an open 6:30 reservation for their New Years buffet, but it was extremely expensive so we hoped that we would be able to find something else as we got closer to Reykjavik.

When we arrived at the next largest town, Selfoss, we had worse luck. The place that we thought that we could go to there were booked all night and not accepting any new reservations. The restaurants or hotels that we could get a hold of in the area, or on our way into Reykjavik were closed or not seating anyone else, and we had no real leads on where to go for food. We were all getting a bit agitated at this point, and mostly had given up on the idea of dinner.  It was plan b time...  get to our new place, eat what snacks we had left and enjoy the hot tub there to calm down...  Then head over to Reykjavik. So we started north of Selfoss towards Lake Thingvellir. By some stroke of luck we found a hotel that was still serving another buffet and could fit us into their schedule. We arrived there around 7:15, shortly after making a call and after a bit of waiting were able to eat food at last. There was a nice spread of different foods, smoked herring, mackerel and cod, meats such as lamb, beef, turkey, and pork, other seafood, and of course the traditional breads and spreads that we all have come to know and love.

At around 8:45 they came around to tell us that fireworks would be starting in 5 minutes. However, about 2 minutes later we heard them start to go off so we went outside to have a look. There were a lot!  And to top it off, we walked outside to see the Aurora in all its natural wonder. Rather than just be a faint glow it was a full formed green ribbon- absolutely out of this world beautiful!  Then after several long minutes of everyone coming out of the hotel staring at the aurora, we turned back to the fireworks. Finally, we noticed that they seemed to be a bit close, as if they were right on the other side of the hotel... A quick walk to the corner of the hotel revealed that this was an astute observation, they were launching the fireworks from the parking lot, literally next to cars including our own!  Lauren was able to snap a photo of those lighting the fireworks as well, and it was none other than the fire department. This was a really nice change from the US, where we are almost always banned from lighting fireworks, and certainly the fire department wouldn't be lightning them for us.

After the fireworks we finished eating, nabbed some tasty looking desserts, and then headed out to find our accommodations for the night.  Unfortunately, the owner of this place wasn't really good at communicating with us about the location of the house, and it ended up that the house was in a gated community.  While the owner was in Spain, presumably enjoying the new year festivities, he was able to text with us and arranged for someone else to buzz us into the development. We got in and found the house, but the code that we were given didn't open the lockbox containing the house key.  Again, the owner was able to provide an alternative, but it was a bit annoying, and just a tad nerve wracking that we might not actually be able to sleep on beds. When we finally got inside, it was a very nice and cute home, despite not having any linens for the mattresses (they did have towels though).  Bryan went to sleep because he was feeling a bit sick and Lauren, Mike, and I enjoyed a nice soak in the hot tub to welcome the new year.  We weren't in the city but sitting in the hot tub and enjoying the fire works that way was a pretty good alternative.