Stunning Svartifoss backed by dark basalt columns and a fantastic Zodiac tour on Glacier Lagoon, filled with icebergs floating down to the sea.
Parking at Skaftafell we walked to Svartifoss, a good hike, mostly uphill. It's a beautiful waterfall, tumbling over a cliff of dark basalt columns.
Afterwards we had coffee and chocolate cake at the Skaftafell Visitors Centre cafe which we rather regretted, the cake was heavy and quite hard!
Vatnajökull is Europe's largest glacier covering an area of about 8,000 square km, about 8% of Iceland! The ice cap reaches 1,400 - 1,600m above sea level and, in the right conditions, can be seen from 350 miles away. Beneath the ice is the Grímsvötn volcano, one of Iceland's most active; its last eruption was in May 2011.
We took a Super Jeep tour to see the glacier but it was rather a disappointing experience. The glacier is, indeed, impressively massive, and we had a beautiful day; the surface of the glacier was dazzling.
Though a fine landscape in itself, it is quite featureless, a huge expanse of ice overlaid with snow. No crevasses to speak of, and no ice caves in this part of the glacier. There are ice caves but they are only accessible in the winter months.
It was possible to drive snowmobiles but there just didn't seem to be a great deal to see when you got onto the main part of the glacier, apart from the craggy outcrops and mountains at the sides. As experiences go it was not a patch on the Perito Moreno in Argentina or Fox Glacier in New Zealand.
We were driven from roughly sea level to around 1000m where the glacier beneath our feet was about 90m thick.
Spectacular glacier views on the way back to the hotel.
While exploring the south of Iceland we stayed at the Fosshotel Glacier Lagoon. The Fosshotels all look fairly bleak, this was our second of the trip and typically stark but the room was comfortable and the food very good. We did find, however, that all the fosshotels served a variation on a theme: always a lamb dish, a beef dish and a fish - cod or Arctic Char. At this hotel the baked honey-glazed Dala Brie, the roasted beet with rocket, the beef cheek and lamb sirloin were all excellent.
Close to the hotel is a lovely waterfall, Grofarlaekjarfoss. It is approached through fields of lupins, in full flower at this time of year. Lupins were introduced to Iceland from Alaska in the 1940s in an attempt to stabilise the land. Now they have spread far and wide, we saw them everywhere we travelled.
We had pre-booked a Zodiac boat trip on Glacier Lagoon and it was a great experience. It was another beautiful day and we stopped in a gravelled area at the side of the road on the way there to take photographs of the glaciers.
None of us on the Zodiac (there were about 8 passengers) had expected to be sitting on the sides of the inflatable! And it was a very bumpy ride as the captain/guide went very fast. Very exhilarating but not much fun for the chap sitting next to me who confided in me later that he'd recently had a neck operation!
At the entrance to the lagoon there were a lot of tourists on land, but once out on the water there were just our two Zodiacs.
We travelled the whole 9km length of the lagoon to the face of the glacier, passing small icebergs along the way and a few basking seals.
The glacier, Jökulsárlón, like many, is retreating.
Diamond Beach is at the mouth of the Jokulsa river, where blocks of ice floating from the lagoon head out to sea or get stranded on the black sand beach.
It was early morning when we arrived at Diamond Beach and there was a mist, quite atmospheric.
