I spent one of my days in Iceland on a glacier hike at Breiðamerkurjökull. It’s kind of pricey (> $250 USD), but it’s super hard to get to the glacier yourself, unless you know the way, are driving a 4×4 vehicle, and have the gear to hike the glacier. The tours also only have max around 8 people so it feels a bit more private. What I was going to see was this.
The tour started at 9am, and since it was winter, the sun was only starting to rise at around 10am. Our tour guide was a fellow from France who fell in love with an Icelandic girl and moved to Iceland to be with her. Now he works as a tour guide and has aspirations to run his own tour company.
As a part of the tour, we got all the gear. Hiking boots with crampons, an icepick and a harness in case we fell and needed a rope to get back out. I didn’t have real waterproof pants, and the next best thing I had were water resistant bike pants with jeans underneath.
When we walked over large patches of ice, we’d have the crampons on, and when the terrain went back to rocks, we’d take them off. Along the way, I chatted with the tour guide and the other tourists. One guy was visiting from Dallas, Texas and does work in the film industry doing post processing work. I had no idea that kind of profession paid that much considering he was travelling around Iceland and talked about his Porsche!
After about 30 minutes of walking, we got to the first cave. The cave walls were made of ice, but were either black or blue depending on how much volcanic ash was inside the ice.
Here’s another cave.
And another.
For the last stop of the tour, we reached the coast and got an amazing view of the glacier touching the water.
Afterward, we walked back all the way to where we parked and drove back to the meeting point. We thanked the tour guide and wished him all the best in starting his tour company. Next, I drove back to Reykjavik in the snow.
That snow eventually turned into heavy heavy wind and rain. As chance would have it, that’s when I needed to fill up my car. I stopped by the gas station to fill up only to realize that my inferior American credit card wouldn’t work on those machines because my card didn’t have a pin set up. The gas station didn’t have an attendant either. Luckily I found another gas station further down the road, and I was able to fill up and continue the rest of my journey.
Photos: here