I woke up several times during the night panicked that I’d miss the alarm for my Ice Cave Tour at 8:30. Alas, I left on time and drove the hour and 15 minutes from Brenna's house in Hella to Vik, further along the South Coast. The drive from Reykjavik to Vik is one of the most popular drives for tourists and Icelanders–full of green mountains, ocean vistas, waterfalls and a black sand beach.
At Vik, I waited with a large group of mostly American tourists for the “Super Jeep” to pull up and we shuffled in. I really do not like tour groups, or being on tours, but I kept eyeing our tour guide, this Viking of a man, Hawk (his real name was super long and Icelandic so he told us to just call him Hawk). Bearded, buff, tall, shaved head with a waterfall of straight blondish brown hair going down to his neck. I guessed he was maybe mid to upper 40s, but I think I caught that he was only nearing 40. I do think the men look older here, “because of the elements”, as mom would say, but maybe he was lying about his age–he was a trickster who said things like “That’s where they filmed the American moon landing” and some other things. He made the whole group laugh several times. One tourist was going on about his wife, and how she’s not easy, and Hawk said he’d trade him three Icelandic horses for her.
I overheard he had two boys and a Spanish wife he sees every two weeks–he spends two weeks in Iceland, doing tours and making money, and then vacations/plays in Spain with his family for three weeks. He and an American man at the front of the van (who couldn't stop touching the pretty, younger foreign woman next to him) talked a lot about work hard, play hard. “It’s all about experience,” Hawk said.
We drove along the main Highway 1 for a while, passing farms and slopes of sheep. It’s herding season, which means men all around the country are gathering the sheep from the highlands, pushing them toward herding pens so they can be weighed and shipped off to the slaughterhouses. Brenna's husband Ivar says about 15-20 percent of sheep are kept each year to replenish the next batch, but that all the others are killed and so there’s a “lamb season” where Icelanders enjoy fresh lamb. Sheep herding is one of Ivar’s favorite things and the reason he has two sheep dogs. It’s so impressive and rugged to me, romantic and theatrical, that all these Icelandic men hop on horses and drive free-roaming sheep down from the high country! "I don't envy them in this weather," Hawk said, looking through the SuperJeep's windshield. It was sort of cloudy and spitting rain as we turned off Highway 1 onto the black sands where he used to ride horses growing up. He told us the wind storms in that desert can be hurricane-force gales.
As we neared the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, the sky lifted and we ended up with some sunshine and RAINBOWS. It’s like the season of rainbows here–they come and go so frequently, and you really see the ENDS of them. We strapped on helmets (no reason to wear them, Hawk explained later, it’s more just for looks) and crampons and took a leisurely walk across the sands to get closer to the glacier. Apparently all underneath the black sand was melting ice, so Hawk warned us of sinkholes. The ice cave itself was a small hole-in-the-wall where only like four people could fit in at a time. So that was a little disappointing, but I did get to pool fresh glacier water in my hand and drink it. And just touching the glaciers themselves–sooo hard-packed but beautiful with the little bubbles of trapped water.
The Mýrdalsjökull glacier is the fourth-largest in Iceland, and it sits on top of the Katla volcano (the one Bren’s baby was named after), which hasn’t blown since 1918 but is overdue, which could mean it’s been building up pressure and when it finally erupts, there will be a massive flash flood from all the melting ice, and air traffic control will just be screwed, and on and on. Hawk explained it all with this sort of sly smile and was like, "well, we can’t live in fear...Everything in Iceland is unstable: the wind, rain, volcanoes, glaciers–especially the locals."
By the end of the trip I was ready to be back. I wouldn’t recommend that tour to anyone–next time I want to do something more challenging. I almost booked a glacial river whitewater trip, but I had to have at least 3 people in my party to book it, and I didn’t. So that’s something I want to do next time!
After the tour, I felt so pensive and moody. The weather on the way home was dizzying. Wind so strong it pushed my car at times; pockets of intense rain, then just light drizzle. Then sun. Rainbows. Grey clouds. More rain. More wind. Sun. Sigh. I listened to music on my iPhone, feeling sad, about nothing really in particular, maybe just isolated from spending the past several hours with people but not feeling connected. I’d chatted with a couple who lived outside of London, but it was one of those light, small-talk chats where you walk alongside each other for a bit but then separate again, and you don’t even say bye. I sort of just wanted to come back to the house and relax with tea and cookies–also I was starving–but ended up doing some of the stops Bren recommended on the way back–like the famous Reynisfjara black sand beach.
I was maddeningly cold when I got there, but there was a woman in bare skin modeling one of those bathing suits with long, billowing fabric attached, spinning around like it was summer. And all around her, people were setting up and then grabbing their tripods from the sand, mad-dashing away from the sneaker waves, the freezing cold licks that crawl up the shore further than you think, and then suck you in. I couldn’t BELIEVE the wind; I’d never seen such a windy ocean. It really was perfect, how half the waves didn’t even break on the shore because the wind whisked them away, creating these beautiful arcs of white, delicate spray that blew toward pillars of basalt. And there it was again, the force and the yielding: the water that flows and hardens over centuries just to melt again.
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