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29.

Trip to Iceland, August 2008 – day 24

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Category: Iceland

29.08.08 – Skaftafell – Jökulsárlón – Reykjavik
By Garik and Lena

We woke up at 0100 AM; completely dark, weird noisy sounds came out of the trees… Something like water, rain, I don’t know. The tent moved from side to side! Somewhere further it sounded like an iceberg braking up or flood or something like this! Surrounded in total mystery and darkness we were scared of drowning and of the unknown… The movie we saw the evening before did its job. Lena tried to open the door of the tent but she closed it right away because it was so dark outside and because of the wind that break into the tent. We had hard time then, trying to sleep in these conditions. The fear and the dancing tent that looked like it will crash on us any moment, made it really hard to fall asleep! I was on the side that the wind came on the tent all the time, so somehow I kept it steady a bit; I wonder how it was if I and Lena would switch places. At some point I decided that if the tent didn’t collapsed on us till now, it will probably stay that way till morning, and tried to get some sleep. Too optimistic, it was impossible to fall a sleep! The wind only got stronger. It was blowing constantly and not like earlier, when it came and went… We kind of got used to the noise, but the tent seamed to surrender to the wind! A side of a tent at some point actually laid on me! So at 0500 we made a decision! We are packing our staff! I ran to the toilets and I was the first to wake up among all the other campers. When I ran back to the tent, I started to see other people crawling out of their tents… not much but still, I guess that even North Face tents couldn’t take that much! Some of the tents almost flew with the wind, luckily they were held by their ropes.

We started packing our staff in a middle of a storm! At least no rain, so I thought! Suddenly the Dutch guy came to help, he saw me trying to pack the tent the way I like, in an organized way, but he just folded it several times and pushed it hardly into its bag. When he just approached us and offered giving us his help, we kindly refused but he insisted… Oh well! When we finished packing I realized I lost my stretching strip with which I always tied the tent to the backpack.

All campers finished packing almost in the same time, so everybody sat under the shad and made breakfast at 0600… From now, all we had to do is wait for the bus.

The rain came and we got an opportunity to see another rainbow. Few minutes later it was like a monsoon, a storm in every aspect!

When the bus arrived, I asked the driver politely, to open the trunk. The bus driver, which seamed a bit smoked, told me with his broken English, that he’s departures at 1300 and not at 0830 as he supposed to! Weird! I tried to understand why; the driver mumbled something about weather, maybe yes, maybe no… Finally, when I stood up to get off the bus, the driver told me to stay seated and hold my bags with me. The next passengers were less polite than me; they didn’t ask the driver a thing, just opened the trunk to put their bags there and went on the bus!

We didn’t slept much tonight, as I said before, so most of the way we slept in the bus. The weather outside was still stormy, windy, fogy, cold… But just as we arrived to the lagoon in Jökulsárlón, the weather got much better, still raining but with sun somewhere behind the clouds. So we signed for a boat trip for 2400 ISK per person not mentioning that the bus here cost us 1400 ISK pp. The boat we got on was full of elderly people and during the sail we got the opportunity to taste some really old ice! Like 200 years old or even older! Must admit though, the whole boat trip is too commercialized!

After the boat trip we sat in the local café and ate seafood soup with some fish, don’t know what kind of, but it was tasty! Still wasn’t sure wether I may take another portion of soup free of charge or not. Yesterday it was ok and today when I asked the cashier, when I paid for our first portion, she said “ok”… but when I approached the table with the soup bowl to take my second portion, the cashier looked at me in a very strange way, like “What the hell do you think you’re doing?! You should pay first!”… I guess we didn’t understand each other, so I apologized, took half portion to my dish and got back to the table, had to split with Lena the half portion.

Before the bout trip and after it, we saw a seal in the lagoon, playing around, diving every couple of minutes and gets up to intake fresh air. We walked a bit around the lagoon, saw people breaking ice and trying to push it into their small plastic mineral water bottles. Took some pictures, we even saw an iceberg that flipped, making some action in the sleepy lagoon. We learned that for each iceberg, it’s only 10% of iceberg is visible; the other 90% is in the water! The white areas are because of the oxidation. Underwater the ice is more clear and crystalline. When you see blue color iceberg, it’s an optical illusion because of the way the sun light passes through it. The guide also said that when it rains, the lagoon is much more beautiful because the icebergs have more blue color. We managed to catch a rainbow here too!

From here to Reykjavik, it was a long way… We stopped at Vik, ran to the church and when we got there, we were disappointed with it. LP gave us too much hope again. We got wet a little because of the rain that started pouring on us when we were half way back to the bus. We bought hot dogs and sandwiches for the road for 2000 ISK, and now I did remembered to look at the name of the souse – Remoladi! I’m going to get one these for myself tomorrow! From Vik, we slept again, and the time we didn’t, we suffered, how long can we sit?! Some times the wind outside was so strong, we could actually see how it lifts waterfalls into the sky!

The weather in Reykjavik was similar to what we had all day long. I didn’t find my hat at BSI. Youth hostel didn’t have a place for us, we didn’t book one in advance, and so we had to stay our last night outside in the rain. We built our tent for the last time and cooked ourselves a dinner. We paid 1700 ISK for camping. The bus we took from BSI cost us 560 ISK. The bus to Reykjavik we took this morning from the lagoon cost us 16000 ISK.

When Lena ate the dinner, I ran into the hostel to buy us some chocolate cause we were out of it. I inserted 200 ISK in to the machine and it got stuck! Luckily there was a nice young Icelandic reception girl that had a key for the machine. When we finished our dinner, we decided what places we will see tomorrow. We hope tomorrow will be a better weather, so we can spend our last day in Iceland in a proper way!

P.s. We met yet another time some familiar faces in the camping zone, the German couple with young girl, the strong Dutch couple, and some German couple that we met in Askja trip.