We took this welcome opportunity to sleep in, which we hadn't gotten to do for almost a week. Got up and around about 10:00 a.m., at which point Robbie said " did y'all hear all that music last night?" To which I responded, "Umm, yeah, and the fire juggling masked caped men on the balcony?" He was so bummed! He and Alexa had closed the blackout shades and gone to sleep and never even gotten to see them. He really thought I was joking until I showed him the photo evidence.We walked around Reykjavik town a bit and had some lunch (sandwiches at the hotel) and were picked up around noon by the Iceland Excursions bus. They go around town picking up everyone who has signed up for a tour, and then drop them off at the main office where you pay and get your voucher and wait for your actual bus/van/whatever.
The activity of the day (selected by Robbie and Alexa) was "Iceland from Below." Climbing in lava tube caves! Our guide was a Canadian guy named John who has lived in Iceland since the 1960's. The group consisted of the 4 of us, a woman from New York exploring Iceland on her own while her family visited family in Italy, and a young German woman who had apparently been shadowing John for several days. Tour guide in training? I don't really know.
We piled into a van and headed out of town (which happens very quickly). We stopped at the Eldborg crater somewhere northeast of Reykjavik (haven't been able to pinpoint it on a map) to give us a chance to "get used to walking on uneven surfaces."
Unfortunately it started raining and I, planning on being in a CAVE, had not brought rain gear. So the hike was a bit more hurried than I may have liked. We walked up to the rim, walked about 1/4 of the way around, and then back down. Pretty darned neat. If wet.
The rocks in the lava field surrounding the crater were all covered in this thick green moss. It's really difficult to describe what it felt like to walk on it, other than to say that it was like walking on a giant sea sponge. I took a video of it later on in the trip to try and illustrate just how squooshy and thick it was. As a result you really had to be careful and try to stick to the path if there was one, because there was really no guarantee that there was actually a rock or anything solid underneath that moss. Not that difficult to fall into a hole and break your ankle.
While we were hiking up to the top of the crater John was preparing our gear for the caving trip. We looked pretty snazzy.
So what we were hiking into is called a lava tube. I have a hard time understanding the mechanics of it all, but basically they occur when the surface of the lava cools before the lava underneath, so the lava continues to flow underneath the hardened crust. The flow kinda spreads out as it goes, so the tubes get flatter and flatter until they just kind of peter out. Geologically I'm sure it's fascinating, but it kind of went in one ear and out the other.
Decked out in our orange jumpsuits, gloves and head lamps (John had mentioned as an aside that we were free to bring an extra one just to be safe but nobody paid him any mind) we headed into the cave. He drew us a little diagram of what to expect as we went in, which we all looked at in the van and promptly left there.
The floor of the cave was pretty much all big slabs of rock. There were several piles of rock that looked pretty obviously like they had fallen from the ceiling at some point, which wasn't all that reassuring. I was extremely grateful for the hardhat because I kept whacking my head on the ceiling. I don't know how Robbie managed. Even though it didn't hurt it got really annoying after a while.
The best word to describe the cave would be: Dark.
Amusingly there was a really really old skeleton of a sheep waay back in the back of the cave. Difficult to tell whether he wandered in and got lost, or if he was just standing chomping on some moss when the floor fell out from under him and he fell in....
So, after we got to the end of the cave, we marveled a bit at the little stalagmites on the ground (It was only now after looking up lava tubes on the internet that I realize that those are actual lava stalagmites, not mineral accumulations after the fact. One web site called them "Lavacicles" which I thought was cute. They happen simply from lava dripping down from the ceiling as it's cooling.) Then we turned around and went back vaguely the same way we came in, meeting John back at the entrance. Then we were to choose whether we wanted to see the other part of the cave, which makes a loop around and comes out at a slightly different place. I asked if there was a big payoff, like a gorgeous multicolored cavern or sparkles or something, and he said no, it was just more of the same, the reason to do it would be to just say you did it. So I passed, opting instead to wander around outside the cave and do some birdwatching. The others wanted to go. So off they went, and John stayed at the cave exit to meet them as they came out.
It was so quiet and peaceful....a couple of birds seemed very interested in our presence there, probably because they had nests nearby Here is a Curlew who hung around keeping an eye on us:
I told John what our general itinerary was for the week, and where Mike and I planned to head after R&A left. He gave me a couple of tips of places to check out and emphasized things we shouldn't miss.
He had said that it should take them about 20 minutes to start coming out. At about 30 minutes he walked a bit into the cave to listen to see if he heard voices. He yelled out and didn't hear anything, so we figured it was maybe taking a little longer since they had Alexa. After another 10 minutes he went back into the cave exit and said he heard voices so they should be coming out soon. After another 5 minutes with no sign of them he yelled out again and heard something back. He continued to yell and they slowly started coming out one at a time.
Apparently they had somehow gotten sort of turned around or stuck, ending up at a dead end then backtracking but then sort of losing track of where they had some from and where they were going. And then their headlamps started dimming out one by one. They were yelling, apparently, but the noise wasn't carrying through the cave like you might think it would. Of course afterwards both Robbie and Mike said "well, some of them were panicking but I knew everything would be okay" but I'm not sure if I believe them. The guide said that 1 hour was his cutoff when he would have gone in and go them, and they beat that by about 5 minutes. None of them really realized that everyone else's lights were going out as well. I know objectively it's obvious that getting lost in a cave that's completely navigable within 20 minutes, with a trained guide outside waiting for you isn't really that big of a deal, but I can imagine sitting in the dark with no idea which way is left and which is right that I would have probably gotten a little freaked out as well. Very glad I didn't go.
Alexa had a bit of a meltdown but as far as 10 year olds go she did a good job given the circumstances. But she was definitely not all smiles on the way out.
After trudging back to the car...
We went to a horse stable to drop off the girl who had been shadowing John. She was off on an 8 day horseback tour of Iceland!
We got to chill out and pet the horses for a little bit, then we stopped and took some pictures at a corny "Viking Village" restaurant that was covered with viking symbols and carvings and stuff.
(Incidentally I found this cool slideshow while looking for the name of this sculpture. It's Here on flicker and it's a compliation of a bunch of people's unique photographs just of this one statue. I thought it was really neat. And obviously most are better than mine. BUT.....is mine more impressive if I tell you I took it from a van moving at about 40 mph?? :))
We just missed the last whalewatching trip of the day, so we wandered around town a bit more. We walked down to the lake in the center of town and watched all the locals with their bags of stale bread that they picked up at the bakery on the way over, feeding the ducks. We also walked around a bit, scoping out the souvenir shops and plotting our future purchases.
We had a lot of fun playing "spot the superlative" while shopping. All told, we saw "Icelands Largest Souvenir Shop," "Shop of the Year," "The Cutest Store in Town," "The Largest Selection of Giftware in Iceland," and "The Oldest Store in the Heart of Reykjavik," and we never strayed out of a few block radius!.
We went to the grocery store called "10-11" which as far as I could tell was open from 8 to midnight or 24 hours a day. Either way, the name is odd.
Dinner was spaghetti with butter for Alexa, tomato sauce for the grownups, and some pepperoni for protein :) Next day was an early start so we headed to bed. No fire juggling tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment