Day 3 Vik to Hofn

Icelandic campsites don’t seem to be quite as early moving as other campsites we’ve been to. With the midnight sun, it’s extremely disorientating trying to guess the time of day so the only way I can even come close to working out the time is simply by actually looking at my watch.
There seems to be lots more late arrivals in the evening than we are used to and as I said above less action early in the morning .. suits us!

We woke around 8 and had appeared to be the only people up and moving. After brekkie of granola/ cereal with the Icelandic Skyr(pronounced skeer) - we have this at home sometimes but figured I should actually look it up since I’m in the country that makes it - apparently it's been an important part of Icelandic food culture for over 1,000 years and is popping up all over our supermarkets now. It is an Icelandic-style strained yogurt that's even thicker and more densely concentrated than Greek yogurt. Icelanders will tell you that true, Icelandic skyr is not actually yogurt at all but instead, it's categorized as a cheese. Traditionally, skyr involves heating skim milk and then adding old skyr cultures. Curds will form and then the whey is drained for many hours until there's a thick, sour skyr. Anyway lesson over.. yum brekkie !

We needed a few supplies so headed to the grocery store across the road . Still the prices are raising my eyebrows to a whole new level - £20 for a block of cheese! But we always knew this country was expensive so just have to get over it … why is it so expensive ?

Obviously being an isolated island miles away in quite harsh conditions
They have to import a lot of stuff. Then everything is taxed. There is lack of proper competition ( apparently only two owners of supermarket hence no one blinking twice at a £20 block of bog standard cheese) in several sectors , a small market … ie fewer people live here so costs have to be covered hence more expensive and finally with the tourism trade booming I’m guessing shop and restaurant owners are trying to make as much money as possible?

Not everything is expensive in Iceland, however, the most notable exception is energy, including electricity, water and geothermal power, which is relatively cheap. That is an advantage for Iceland during the current global energy crisis.
Also the state maintains a strong infrastructure, e.g. a wide-ranging welfare system and an extensive road network as we have begun to see on this trip . So when fewer people shoulder those costs, it means higher taxes per person.

Sorry seriously off tangent.. will revert back to recount of our day!

From Vik we headed to Skaftafell.
Vatnajökull is the largest glacier in Europe, covering 10% of Iceland's landmass.  Vatnajökull National Park covers even more as it includes both the glacier and land surrounding it.  It was recently nominated to be included as a UNESCO World Heritage site.  The national park is made up of several areas, including Skaftafell. The weather hasn’t been great so we opted for shorter walk - one to the base of the glacier which was an impressive sight .

We headed to one of the country’s
Most photographed sights - Jokulsarlon Glacial lagoon. Sadly the weather was not on our side so each photo looks pretty dreary. We’ve all got decent wet weather gear but today it was actually cold so this was a bit of a challenge. There are three main ways of seeing the glacier close up in the summer.

1. Kayaking - looked amazing in the guidebooks but in the reality of today looked even more cold and you also had to be 14 so a no go for Eashan so quickly wiped off our option.
2. The Amphibian tour - basically like the Duck boat at home- a heavy duty truck that goes on roads and then wades into the water and becomes a boat.
3. The zodiac… a sort of high speed rib that looked fun and got you closer to the icebergs but sadly was actually booked out!

So it was option 2 for us.

Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon is a lake that is connected to the ocean by a short river between two black sand banks.  

It is hard to imagine that Jokulsarlon Lagoon has only recently celebrated its 100th birthday. Around 1920, Breiðamerkurjökull, an outlet of the Vatnajökull Glacier, started to melt and created this lagoon.
Obviously there’s a lot of discussion about climate change and what this glacier will look like in a few years . All very frightening stuff!

I have been lucky enough to see glaciers before but I’ve never seen such large icebergs breaking off the glacier drifting out to the ocean and I was amazed at how quickly they moved .  

The water was teeming with fish like herring, trout, salmon, krill, and capelin, which make a tasty snack for the seals and seabirds that we spotted including the Icelandic gull and eider and arctic tern.

Breidarmerkursandur, more commonly known as Diamond Beach is next to the lake and as you can imagine with the difficult Icelandic names , it’s a name made up by tourists who compared large gleaming and melting ice flanks sitting on black sand to diamonds. It was fun to see.

After a walk around we headed to our amphibious vehicle where we got to get up pretty close to the icebergs and learnt some more facts thanks to our guide. Well actually we can’t get that close as what we can see above the water represents usually only 10% of the size so a whopping 90% of ice is usually under the water. The whiter the berg the older is it basically too..As mentioned above the lake itself is pretty young having only been around since the 1920s. The Glacier Lagoon was created by melted glacier water following a warming of global temperatures. The Icebergs floating inside the water may well be comprised of 1000-year-old glacier ice that has broken away from Breiðarmerkurjökull glacier tongue and guess what? We got to hold some thanks to one of our guides gallantly darting off in his speed boat and retrieving some for us tourists . Our boat guide even had a special tool to chisel some small shards off for us to taste! That was pretty special trying something that was 1000 years old!

Obviously we all know how alarming climate change is . This is causing the ice to melt faster than the fresh snow can compensate for in the winter months. The lagoon is growing constantly, and the glacier tongue’s retreat is clearly visible with each year that passes In fact, this enormous lake was 4 times smaller as recently as the 1970s. How has it got to this ?

The Jökulsárlón lagoon has been a location for many internationally acclaimed films, including A View to a Kill, Die Another Day, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Batman Begins

We headed towards onto Hofn where we stayed the night. It’s a quiet town . We stayed nearer the sea so invested in some bug spray as by now we were getting bitten quite regularly. We were treated to a lovely sunset around 11pm!Read more