I awoke early to a truck rumbling across our tiny room. "What the heck?" I thought. Then I rubbed my eyes and realized it was only Terry snoring. I couldn't see the clock, so I glanced outside. Naturally, it looked like the middle of the day, since the sun supposedly rises at 3AM this time of the year and sets around midnight.
I decided to forget about how early or late it might be and go back to sleep. When I woke up again, my stomach told me it was time for breakfast. Our "hotel" (really more like a group of cabins with volcanic rock on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other) served a great breakfast. I made a hill out of lox, ringing it with cream cheese and black bread. I ate every last bite and pronounced myself a happy camper.
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| A long walk ahead. |
We went for a rather long bus ride to the edge of the Skaftafell National Park. This is a picture of Terry and me before we began the mile-plus hike to a waterfall. I suppose the idea of going straight up a mountain is why my face is so pained.
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| The climb was worth it. |
But we got up close and personal with serious glacier run-off.
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| Broccoli? You be the judge. |
We sat at the edge of the waterfall, taking in our surroundings. Terry noticed that an adjacent canyon wall resembled broccoli. I think he's right.
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| Sunlight turns the ice a deep blue. |
After hiking back down the mountain, we headed to the Jokulsarion Glacier Lagoon, where we boarded on land a boat with wheels that had been decommissioned from the US Army after the Vietnam War. This particular lagoon's claim to fame, aside from large blue chunks of the glacier sitting in the middle of pure, pure water, is that it was the setting for DIE ANOTHER DAY. The producers "rented" the lagoon for a month, topped it off with several feet of water, froze the water, and then filmed a scene in which James Bond drives his Astin Martin across the ice. Something that would have been impossible under normal circumstances--meaning James and his car would have sunk to the bottom with a thud.
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Antique ice never tasted so good.
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Our tour guide was hilarious. He claimed the lagoon always looked different to him. Every morning when he went out on a boat, he wondered, "Who changed my f--ing office."
He broke off pieces of thousand-year-old ice for each of us tourists to suck on. It tasted fresh and clean--much more satisfying than chomping on those square cubes at the bottom of a water glass in a restaurant.
