The blaring sound of the alarm clock woke me up this morning at 7:45 reminding me of today’s ice cave tour. Although I was excited I had stayed up late the night before working on my blog and didn’t want to get out of my warm bed. The Hilton where we are staying dose not have wireless internet so to do my blog last night I had to walk down the street to a different hotel. Eventually I pulled my self out of bad and down the elevator to the lobby.
The breakfast at the hotel restaurant was great and after we all loaded into to huge land rovers and drove off. If you had to know some thing about the trucks we where taking it would be that the wheels where huge like monster tucks and the vehicle was so high off the ground we had to use a step. Other then us there where three others in our truck including our guide Stephan who was really friendly.
Our first stop was at spot in Iceland known because it is right in the middle of the tectonic plates. We could literally see where the rock had been pulled apart over time making a big canyon in the middle. After that we stopped to break for lunch and to seen a fairly big glacier that was made from bright blue ice. In between stops we drove on rough mountain roads and some times off road and the hole drive was through two or three feet of snow! We where really luck because they hadn’t gotten any snow until the week we arrived so it was all fresh and deep.
Our drivers where really good and had tricks for getting out of every snow drift. When we got to really deep snow the guide would let out air from the tires to increase the tire area. It was amazing some times we would be so stuck and the guide would let out a couple of pounds of pressure and away we would go.
Our next stop was a massive cave that used to be a lava tube. It was crazy because the cave was on a field of lava rock but when I walked across the field I couldn’t see it until I was right next to it even though it was 5 meters wide. The translation of the of the caves name to English means “big mouth”. The cave was really cold and full of icicles but what I thought was the coolest was when water would drip from the roof onto the rocks below and freeze in the shape of a crystal ball.
The next stop was a mind boggling water fall where the water came our of the rocks and not from a stream. This happened because the area was full of lava rock and the rain water and melted snow would sink into the rock and flow through under ground tunnels until it came out the falls.
By the time we made it to our last stop “geyser” a hot spring it was starting to get dark. The hot spring is the biggest in Europe and some say the world it produces 200 liters of boiling water a second and it’s heat is used to power entire towns.
Once our 10 hour tour was over we got back to the hotel and packed our bags for London. I finally got to bed at 1:00 not to fun because I have to get up at 4:30 tomorrow morning to work on my travel website CanadaFlights.ca and then head out to the airport for my flight to London!