Eating Ice
Last night we camped by a field of Icelandic horses. Monisha
made a friend :) She loves Icelandic horses!
There were also several mayflies floating around our van,
but Nolan insists on calling them Icelandic bigflies. (If he were writing this
sentence he would never have called them the first thing to start with.)
We woke up this morning and drove to Jokulsar - a glacial
lagoon. This was Monisha’s favorite
place we’ve seen here so far.
Totally incredible, and unlike anything either of us have ever been to. We took a Zodiac boat tour through the lagoon and as close as is safe to the giant glacier.
The glacier is actually just a finger of the largest glacier in Europe, covering 8% of Iceland. The tour was one of the first times we had any conversation, really, with people other than ourselves. Our boat group consisted of a group from Israel, ourselves, a group from Amsterdam, and our tour guide, Eric. He was born in Iceland and now lives half of his time in Sweden, half in Iceland. We chatted a bit with the Amsterdam group, but mostly talked with Eric. He was awesome. He told us that the ratio of tourists to citizens of Iceland is 6:1! Some of the icebergs on the lagoon were fantastically blue – cyan, really. According to Eric, these are the ones that have broken off very recently.
Totally incredible, and unlike anything either of us have ever been to. We took a Zodiac boat tour through the lagoon and as close as is safe to the giant glacier.
The glacier is actually just a finger of the largest glacier in Europe, covering 8% of Iceland. The tour was one of the first times we had any conversation, really, with people other than ourselves. Our boat group consisted of a group from Israel, ourselves, a group from Amsterdam, and our tour guide, Eric. He was born in Iceland and now lives half of his time in Sweden, half in Iceland. We chatted a bit with the Amsterdam group, but mostly talked with Eric. He was awesome. He told us that the ratio of tourists to citizens of Iceland is 6:1! Some of the icebergs on the lagoon were fantastically blue – cyan, really. According to Eric, these are the ones that have broken off very recently.
We even got to taste an iceberg ;)
Another foss made its way into our adventures! Svartifoss was
today’s hiking destination. A 1.8km uphill hike (pretty steep actually!) brought
us through the most foliage we’ve seen this whole trip, up to a beautiful foss
in a basalt cove like…thing. Basically, it was beautiful. We sang a little on
the way down, mainly takes on a round taught to us by Monisha’s aunt and
cousin, Bay and Chloe.
Here we are in Vik, stopping by a little info center to attempt
to get our post in today! Hopefully internet works...we're actually using Nolan's wifi hotspot because the info center internet costs money. It's slow going.
It sounds magical! I've seen that lagoon in pictures - great to hear that it is as blue and beautiful as it looks in the pictures. Thanks for being so dedicated in posting - we really look forward to the post of the day!
ReplyDeleteNana and I drove through Palo Alto yesterday on our way to the SF airport. If you had been there, we would have taken you to lunch!! Instead, we read your blog together at the airport and marveled over the sights you've seen. No question that the Esthers are unanimous in their enthusiasm for your blog. And I think you are going to be happy to have a detailed account of your travels too! Much as you think each memory is going to be indelible, they start to blur on a long trip.
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad to hear you enjoy reading our blog! It's fun for us to stay in touch with and update our people back at home. Every time I get to wifi I look forward to checking in on whether there are any new comments :)
DeleteAnd as incredible as everything is, we're already well aware that our moments are far from indelible. It's already hard to remember what we did two days ago without looking through pictures or back at our last blog post.