Exhausted from the long day of driving the day before, I was awoken at 7 by Ryan, saying its time to go. I got ready quickly and jumped into the car. We took a quick drive around Höfn as blue hour began to commence.
We hit the road, and watched a majestic sunrise or oranges and pinks over the snow covered peaks that simply appeared in front of us as we headed back the 1 hour or so to Jökulsárlón.
Jökulsárlón is one of the most beautiful places in the world. The ice breaks off the glacier and slides down into the lake below, where the icebergs gently float out to sea through a narrow channel to be broken up by the tide, and washed along the beach on the other side of the highway. A certain calm and stillness was evident as the pieces of ice gently clunked together whilst seals swam around them, and dove and bobbed their heads in the lake.
A quick 1 minute drive over to the other side led us to see the pieces of ice, all shapes and sizes, crushed and broken along the beach. A sight that I think it is likely I will never get a chance to see again in my lifetime.
Walking along the beach, Ryan comes with this idea. "When will we every get a chance to swim with icebergs again?". My reply, "Are you kidding?". Ryan: "No, no, we can do this, where are the keys, I will run back to the car and get our towels and boardshorts". Passing the keys to Ryan and he was off, I was still unconvinced. Arriving back, we found a safer place further along the beach, and Ryan ran in with explicit instructions to make sure I included the massive iceberg to his right in the photographs. After a very short period of time, note, it was a mere 1 degrees celcius outside, and even colder in the water, Ryan ran out and I then bolted in and dove into the waves. Simply unable to breath, I lasted a similar amount of time before absolutely sprinting out of the water, Ryan bolted back for a 2nd even shorter dunk before I followed suit. Frozen and numb, we dried as fast as we could and legged it to the car where we turned on the heater. The toes were the worst. It took a long while for the warmth to return, and also for a few hours to realise my socks were full of sand.
The rest of the day was spent visiting the Golden Circle - the Geysir, Gulfoss and other attractions along the way.