Welcome to day 8! We have less than a week to go 🙁
It seems that the eastern side of Iceland is always gloomy so we decided to get as far south/west as we could.
The first stop of the day is Lækjavik, a small nature preserve with a black sand beach and rock formations in the southeastern part of Iceland. There weren’t too many people here so we decided that this would be our breakfast spot.
With the weather still crappy, we made a pitstop in Höfn, an Icelandic fishing town in the southeastern part of the country. We went to the local Nettó and bought some snacks and food items, and then filled up our tank of gas. Our camp stove’s butane canister was also running out so we picked up another one of those as well.
After driving an hour west of Höfn, we arrived at a 2 for 1 site: Jökulsárlón & Black Diamond Beach. Jökulsárlón is a glacial lagoon, bordering Vatnajökull National Park. The Glacier Lagoon flows through a short waterway into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving chunks of ice on a black sand beach. This was the sight of our first glacier in Iceland as most of the glaciers are in the south!
The glacial lagoon was beautiful, but be warned, there were a ton of people there. Busloads of tourists visit this place. I think this was probably the busiest place we’ve been to so far on our entire trip. We did see a bunch of seals swimming against the crazy force of the glacial river from the Atlantic ocean into the lagoon. It was super cool to see some of them make it.
From there, we did a quick 20 minute walk to Diamond beach across the river as well and it was beautiful there.
In total, we spent around 2 hours between the glacier and the beach and then continued on.
We decided to camp at Skaftafell Camping in Vatnajokull National Park. I think the cost was around 1400ikr but the best part of this campsite were the super nice showers and FREE laundromat. The views of the mountains were also spectacular as well. This was our favorite campsite so far.
The timing worked out perfectly too since we had packed about a week’s worth of clothes each and were just running out so we were able to get a refresh for the rest of our trip.
Forecast for tomorrow looks to be more glaciers! See you there!