Leaving the Park, back on the Ring Road heading East towards one of the most popular attractions in the park, the JOKULSARLON glacier lagoon, where large icebergs float on a turquoise lake. The lagoon is connected to the North Atlantic by a short river where icebergs wash ashore and create a striking contrast on the black sand beach; Diamond Beach, our destination. We round the 2119M meter high HVANNADALSHNUKUR, the mountain pushing up against the sea and are in sunshine again. Leaving the clouds and snow flurries behind we have the North Atlantic Ocean to the South, an escarpment to the North, with the ice cap spilling glacial tongues over it, running alongside us. So beautiful this blue dome brown cliff white ice out the moving window.
The road turns inland and up ahead of us we see a massive wall of ice pouring down from the ice cap between black cliffs, the ice all crumpled and distorted, filled with crevasses and covered with fresh snow, the ice mirroring the lava cliffs with their layers of flow. Rock and water, as elemental as it gets each flowing in their own way down to the sea Ice shapes the land, smooths it down like a sculptor and their stone . I slow down it is so beautiful, I want to be it. There is a short road leading off towards the ice fall and we can see the car park. A billboard announces glacial lagoon tours by boat. We add this spot to the See-It-On-The-Way-Back List. As the glacier recedes in the side view mirror another larger ice fall appears ahead of us looming larger the closer we get. This time when we see a wayside we pull over.
The Glacial Lagoon
Colleen, Ambiana and I are excited but not Jakobi. She chooses not to get out of the car. Traveling with Ambiana and Jakobi has changed. They used to just do whatever Colleen and I did but as they have grown older they have naturally also grown to have their own interests and desires. Which sometimes means just staying in the car and not getting out to gaze at a beautiful glacier lagoon. We often split into groups of two, here in Iceland as well as back home in Vermont, and go off and do different things. Its usually Colleen & Ambiana, Jakobi & me. I don’t like the 3:1 split so much, unless I am the 1.
The car park is at the base of a glacial moraine, sandy pebbly grassy mounds which obscure what is beyond them. We know it is the glacier and a lagoon with icebergs but are still not prepared for what we see when we crest the rise. The ice fall, massive, with sharp mountain peaks coming out of it and on either side spills into a large bluish-tourquoise bay full of ice bergs of all shapes and sizes. The shore of the lagoon below us is awash with smaller ice chunks some the size of a small car. Ambiana & Colleen are already down on the shore which is made up of smooth black and gray stones and black sand at the lagoon’s edge. Colleen squats down and puts her hand in the water while Ambiana is picking up stones and looking at them.
Colleen and I wander the shore examining the smaller of the washed up chunks. Some are so clear and transparent they look more like glass than glass. I wish Jakobi would be here with us instead of in the car. Ambiana must feel this too as a little later she disappears back over the moraine and returns with Jakobi.
Colleen says this must be Diamond Beach and I disagree but when we pull back out on the road we immediately come upon a bridge over the outlet of the lagoon with a black sand ice chunk studded beach to the South. And across the bridge on the North side of the road is a pull-off with a restroom block, maybe even a gift shop. We pull in there first as it is stunning with large bergs clustered close together and near shore but Colleen & Ambiana say just like the place we just were but more crowded and Jakobi doesn’t want to stop anywhere so we double back.
The bridge back across the outlet river is a one-lane bridge with no signal; you have to give way or go for it. Most of the one-lane bridges so far have been short and with no other traffic on the road but this one is long and there are lots cars on the road. It’s trickier when there are cars approaching the other end of the bridge to know who gets to go first. There is a car in front of me though so I just tuck in behind when they start across but they went too late and there is a car on the bridge coming the other way already more than halfway across. The car in front of me stops, I see what is happening and prepare to reverse and looking behind me see a third car tucked in behind us. All three of us have to reverse and back up off the bridge. Fun Icelandic Synchronized Driving Maneuver. We successfully make it off the bridge and our back in our lane as the oncoming car plus a few others whiz past us and now it’s our turn.
Diamond Beach-Breiðamerkursandur
Across the bridge we turn into the car park for the Diamond Beach. We are on the West side of the outlet river which is all thrashing waves and chunks of ice off all sizes flowing swiftly into the sea. Remnants of this out-flowing ice strands on the black sand beach where it glistens in the sunshine as if the beach were strewn with diamonds. To me they look like icebergs but I guess as the remnants melt and approach ice cube size so that all you see is the glistening then maybe diamonds come to mind. Probably just a marketing slogan. It has that ring. Easier to say then JOKULSARLON
There were a lot of cars in the lot and lots more people on the black sand beach walking among all the beached hunks of ice like some, I want to say surreal but it was an all-to-real sculpture garden. Nature is an Artist and proof is all around us if only we choose to see. Erosion is an art form. You see it in the shape of the land worked on by wind and water. On a timetable we can hardly comprehend the Earth is sculpted into being, is being sculpted right now by a brushstroke 10,000 years long. These ice chunks, shaped by wind and wave and rain and sun are transitory in a scale we can grasp, the earth blowing soap bubbles, but even the Eons are transitory. The melting ice reminds us that nothing lasts, only the memory of beauty remains evident again and again and again in the process of becoming that is our lives.
We joined the people in the wandering; looking, taking pictures. We did a shoot for the dancevideo starring me. Once again Jakobi had stayed in the car and once again Ambiana had retrieved her. I asked her if she had locked the car door and she told me she didn’t know how and I got irritated. My sleeping bag stolen I was taking no chances and spending to much time locking and unlocking the car doors. And micro-managing others when they went in and out of the car. Colleen blamed this constant locking and unlocking for the dead battery we had this morning.
I walked back to the car getting angry and angrier and when I got there the car was locked. That little punk, she knew I would get mad and walk all the way back there to lock it. She played me. For a moment I wanted to explode but then realized that was a choice. What’s the use of getting upset, if I wasn’t so anxious about the car being locked I would not have made the walk here. If I wasn’t so anxious about the car being locked I would be happier and so would everybody else without my constant nagging about locking the car. Jakobi hadn’t played me, she had schooled me. Like I said traveling with Ambiana & Jakobi is different.
Jakobi lingered the longest on the beach taking pictures and wandering among the ice chunks. She took a couple of nice photos. Colleen was stretching and staring out to sea and Ambiana, as ever, was stooped over picking up and looking at rocks. She showed me her collection when we met back at the car.
Eventually we all back in the car. I was the only one who wanted to stop on the other side of the bridge again to check out the glacial lagoon. I wanted a picture of me in front of the giant bergs close to shore. We pulled in and parked and this time it was only me, a 1:3 split, getting out of the car. I told them I would be quick. I made my way down to the lagoon and positioned myself in front of the berg I had my eye on and asked the closest person, an Asian girl in a blue puffy, if she would mind taking my picture.
Fellow tourists always say yes because they ask too; you take my picture and then I take yours. I have to specify horizontal framing though because I am old school SLR photo guy and you hand someone an iPhone and they instinctively hold it upright. I got my picture, wasn’t asked to reciprocate and took a brief look at the beautiful floating ice then walked briskly back to the car, got in and we resumed our way East along the Southern Coast of Iceland Ambiana, our little navigator, browsing the Lonely Planet Guide book on the section we are traveling, while I was out of the car, promised us there was some Farm-Made Icelandic Ice Cream on the way to our destination for the night, HOFN.
