Leaving Myvatn we faced a long drive south and east, mostly on Þjóðvegur 1 - Route 1- THE road around Iceland. This is a decent road, although some money was saved on the bridges,
the main drawback being that the coastline is very tortuous and the road much the same. We knew we could save quite a lot of time by taking a dirt road through the mountains, and it was actually both decent quality and quite scenic if a bit bleak. Mind you I must say it was one of those times when you would prefer to be holding the steering wheel rather than being a passenger.
Most adverts for Iceland that show several landscape pictures include one of a piece of ice on a black sand beach. That's Jokulsarlon. A glacier ends and 'calves' into a large tidal lagoon which in turn feeds out to sea through a narrow channel.
The ice that gets out to sea can get washed back onto the black sand beach ............... and get duly snapped. However when we were there our focus (Steve excepted) was on the lagoon itself, not least because there was hardly any ice on the beach and as ever we had only one session of decent light.
The wildlife includes eider duck, arctic terns, gulls - we decided they were mostly Iceland gulls - the odd guillemot, a few snow buntings (just ever so slightly tatty as they actively fed young) and a few seals - but set off against the fabulous ice formations; opaque white, crystal clear, speckled black or perhaps best that blue that only glacial ice seems to have. I never thought I'd post a succession of ice pictures, but these are truly sculptural (even to the extent that one is a dead ringer for a diver).
The majority of the ice pictures were taken with my pocket camera, the rest being my last shots before the relentless wet on our last session there finally got to my 5D3 which effectively had a stroke, the brain being only vaguely connected with the mechanical bits.
Not even the Kendal Mint Cake (it's a long story) could make up for that.
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