A trip to the south: Day 2

After a huge breakfast in our hostel, we started to drive further east. We made a short stop in the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur to see a natural pavement made of basalt. It was partly covered in snow and ice, but great to see anyway.

Next up, we drove to Skaftafell national park to hike to Svartifoss, a waterfall nestled amongst basalt columns (a lot of basalt in the south, as you may have gathered by now). However, there was a sign at the visitor's centre saying that the path was very icy so I asked the man at the desk if it would be OK and he quite simply told me not to go. I'll never know if the path really was that icy or if he took one look at me and decided I was too much of a liability, but I was quite glad he gave us a definite answer. I know we would have been stubborn otherwise and would have spent several hours risking breaking our necks on the ice just to prove we could do it. Instead, he suggested we take an easier route to the edge of the glacier, Skaftafellsjökull. The walk was easy but windy, and as we got close the wind was blowing sand into our eyes. The guys carried on but me and Marja decided it wasn't worth it. However, we still managed to get reasonably close and it was very beautiful.

Our final stop was Jökulsárlón, the glacier lake. It's one of the best things to see in Iceland and, although I've seen it before, it's still really beautiful to see. The ice is always moving so it looked different to the last time I saw it, and the best part was the huge number of seals swimming round!

After this, it was a very long, windy drive home. The trip was so much fun, but I'm no hurry to do that drive again. However, as we drove back past Vík we saw this sunset and it was the perfect conclusion to our trip.