Day 7 - 8.8. Day with/on glacier

The next day was again extremely busy. We woke up at 7 a.m., quick breakfast in hotel (quite poor btw, don’t recommend for the price of 1600 ISK). We were quickly back on Road 1 and after few kilometers we made our turn to Joklasel Hut, laying at 840m on the hill next to giant Skálafellsjökull glacier (part of Vatnajokull).

Joklasel hut

We wanted to take snow mobile drive to glacier. According our guide price should be 8 000 ISK, when we arrived reality was 17 000 ISK for one hour. I was in minority, so had to go. We got helmets, clothes and jumped on ski scooters. Snowmobile appeared to be very unstable, this led to inevitable disaster. Shortly after Jirka handed over driving to me we made „flip“in other words I turned snowmobile in quite high speed. There are several theories why this happened of course different from me and from Jirka side, but let’s say that true is somewhere in the middle and most probable reason was high speed, no proper attention and mainly no balancing. The best thing about this whole story is that Jirka made a record of whole crash (maybe also reason why we crashed J).

Snowmobiles

High speed

Glacier

Anyway nothing happened Snowmobile was shortly backed on belts and Jirka continued to the top of the glacier. From here we had a beautiful view everywhere and also to the highest mountain of Iceland - Hvannadalshnukur.

Hvannadalshnukur at the background

After adrenaline flip we took a soup as usual  in the hut and local special Vatnajokul beer made of glacier water – served only around the glacier.

Glacier beer

From the hut we drove back 16 kilometers to Road 1 to another big tourist attraction glacier lagoon  Jokulsarlon. As every other group boarded on amphibian (from US Army) we learned that this place was used for shooting movies like Lara Croft, Die another day or Batmanbegins.  Lagoon gets bigger as salt water from sea melts glacier that means there might be no lagoon at all in 10-20 years. It’s worth coming here as long as the lagoon exists. Btw the guide on vessel was from Austria, from Vienna, working here during summer.

Our vessels

and we hit the water

Lagoon

Lagoon

View from the sea to the lagoon

Glacier lagoon and its exit to sea

From the lagoon we took ride to National Park Skaftafell and we had a first chance to see that weather was changing because so far we were so unbelievably lucky you couldn’t imagine. All days were so far like from postcard. But it changed now. We saw windy storm coming from east and we knew that were  heavy rains in west. But we luckily escaped to Skaftafell quickly enough (for the moment). In Skaftafel everything changed suddenly you think  it must be a different island. Everything is green, even trees and bush are here, real big green oasis. As announced in guide, a busy place, not only tourists but also local people love this place as it’s not so far away from Reykjavik. Our whole team took short track around the park to see Svartifoss, then our ways split and Jirka decided to take solo 15 kilometers trek up to the hill.

National Skaftafell park with Svartifoss in the middle

Svartifoss

Svartifoss

Martin and Ivo continued back to the car. 3 hours later Jirka appeared totally destroyed but happy that he survived. Another storm was close again we decided to continue more to the west to avoid meeting with it. We picked up a camp site in Kirkjubaejarklaustur, and again we could only recommend this place, green, nice, clean, enough toilets and showers and even quite cheap. Ivo again decided to save us from his snoring and after small car rebuilt he fell asleep in the car.

Mine and Jirkas appartment

Ivos super appartment on wheels

Driving 320km, road 1, road F985, road 1