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We hiked back to the Skaftafells Glacier (Skaftafellsjökull) along a flat trail that ended at a glacial lagoon filled with icebergs at the end of the massive glacier. Between the rain and the fog we couldn’t see very much, which yielded an eerie and creepy atmosphere which was still pretty amazing!

The weather finally cleared up a bit which gave us views of the largest glacier in all of Europe - the same glacier we had (sort of) seen the day before in the fog at Skaftafellsjökull. The glacier, Vatnajökull (Vatna Glacier) extends down into a glacial lagoon, Jökulsárlón, where icebergs break off. These icebergs drift out into the ocean and are quickly pushed back onto the beach by the intense surf of the North Atlantic to a place called “Diamond Beach” for obvious reasons.

After exploring the icebergs and the “diamonds” on the beach, we went to another glacial lagoon, Fjallsárlón, off the same glacier and took a zodiac boat tour through the icebergs which was amazing. Some of the ice was small and navigable, other icebergs towered over of (look for the boats in some of the photos to give you a sense of scale).

We lucked out with clear weather, granting us much more of a view than in previous days (not to mention a chance to dry out a bit).

Driving back along the southern coast from Diamond Beach exposed us to more glacial flood plains (which were just rock and water) and lava carpets which were moss-covered lava rock that just stretched as far as the eye could see. These were broken up by the occasional waterfall, cliff face, and canyon, such as the dramatic Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon we hiked along.

We also stopped at Dyrhólaey beach which was just a few miles south of Reynisfjara Beach (and you can see the towering basalt spires in the water) and Seljalandsfoss which was (yet another) waterfall, but you could hike behind it.

Our penultimate stop was the famous Blue Lagoon hot springs - which isn’t really a hot springs at all, it’s the waste water from the geothermal energy plant next store that gets pumped up from 6,500 feet below the surface; then output in the lagoon after most heat has been extracted. It turns out that the silica within the water formed a natural sealant in the rock, and thus the Blue Lagoon was born. Still pretty cool!

Before we hit the airport, we visited the (less) active volcano one final time to note that it had gotten taller in the 4 days since we’d visited, and we could faintly see an orange lava glow in the steam.