Day 2 - Leiðarendi lava cave and Blue Lagoon

Woke up at 7:05am and had breakfast, the usual.  Earlier someone had rang my mobile at 3am and woke me up. :(  So it was tough getting to sleep after that.

At 9am we were picked up by our tour guide, Liisa.  After picking up 2 more tourists, we then had to stop over to pick additional non human passengers, batteries for the head lights as these have run out.  All in all there were 6 of us, and 4 of them were British.

After about an hours drive, we arrived at our destination, a lava cave called Leiðarendi also known as "the end of the road".  It's about 25kms away from Reykjavik.  It was discovered in 1991 by a university student doing a phd on lava tubes. This one was at least 2000 years old. Apparently there are still less than 10% of lava tubes discovered in Iceland.  We put on our gear (headlamps basically) and waited for one of the British to do his business in the bush before we started as there were no toilets around.

Here's me in my gear.

The entrance of the lava tube

The height in the cave sections vary between 2m tall to no more than 80cm tall, so at some parts we literally had to crawl through. We were sweating at the end of the walk/crawl! Here's a picture of a lavacicle.

Another photo in the cave.  The person in the dark red jacket is Liisa the tour guide.  The rest are our co-cave companions.

When we came to the end of the lava tube, we sat on the hard rocky surface and had hot chocolate.  Liisa also told us to turn off our head lights and look around us.  Well needless to say we could not see anything, it was pitch black!  She told us stories of how people believe that if you get lost in a cave people here would think you got possessed by elves or trolls or something like that and if you behaved strangely you would get killed.  That's what happened to one poor farmer who apparently got lost in a cave, suffered hypothermia but as soon as he was recovering the person looking after him killed him because they thought he was becoming possessed.  Of course they didn't know he was recovering from hypothermia. :)

We went back to our hotel at 12pm and then took a short walk to Islenki Barinn where we had lunch.  It serves authentic Icelandic meals.  I had the Icelandic fish stew which came in a jar!!  Lauren had lamb curry.

After lunch we walked around the coastal area where there was a Naval ship parked.  We also took a quick stroll around the Art museum and then walked back to our hotel where we were picked up at 4:30pm for the trip to the Blue Lagoon.  The water was really nice and warm and well it just looks like something out of a dream.  Here's a picture of Lauren in the amazingly blue water that's full of minerals and other earthly geothermal goodness.

We had dinner in the cafe, I had 2 hot dogs and Lauren had 1 then the bus picked us up at 9pm and we got back around 10ish.

I've taken about 2 hours to finish this entry so now it's time to call it a day!