Travel Shorts – Iceland

I just returned from a ten day tour of Iceland. I know a lot of people asked why I wanted to go there. The answer was simple.

Volcanoes. Glaciers. Faults. Geysers. Hot springs. Waterfalls.

Not to mention the happy Icelandic horses.

And there’s so much more. For the two days before my tour started, I was free to do what I wanted. A quick Google search found that there were numerous interconnected companies in Reykjavik that offered day tours that ranged from easy (whale watching) to difficult (day long hikes up to the rim of a volcano). There was scuba diving in glacial lakes where the water is so clear, you can see for dozens of meters. There were ATV rides, horseback rides on Icelandic horses, river rafting, snowmobile rides, and the Blue Lagoon. You could even go inside a volcano.

The one day tour that caught my eye was the chance to walk through a lava tube. The tube is just a cave that has been created by lava. One can walk on top of the huge lava fields of Iceland and never know there is usually an interconnected series of voids below them.

In the case of this lava tube, a section caved in so that you could enter it from one side of the collapse and exit from the other.

The tube was about a kilometre long and like every other site in Iceland, there was nothing done to it to make it “tourist friendly.” No ropes, no ladders, no boardwalks, no lights. Not even a sign saying “watch your head.”

Yeah, it didn’t take long to see why they gave us helmets.

We had to climb down through the boulders left behind by the collapse in order to get inside, so one had to be reasonably mobile to do it. Later in the tube, we came to sections that we had to squeeze through and in one case, the ceiling was only about eighteen inches above the floor, so we had to roll to get through.

It’s not a day tour for anyone with mobility issues.

Our small group was fine and we walked through the first section with no problems. We only had our helmet lights to illuminate the ground in front of us. As we turned one corner, we noticed some lights in the distance and our guide had us turn off our headlamps and sit quietly in the pitch black while the three other lights moved towards us.

He wanted to jump out at them.

So, we sat there, listening only to the drips of water and the distant voices. Our guide slowly made his way a little closer to the approaching trio and then we heard a “BOO!”

Followed quickly by a screech and then some colourful four letter words.

As it turned out, the trio was another guide who was escorting a mother and daughter back to the entrance. The mother was elderly, walked with a cane and was much too frail to be doing this tour. She wanted out of the cave.

We were just lucky we didn’t add Icelandic Ambulance Tour to our itinerary.