12 Apr Iceland 2: Trapped in the ice.

I've made up my mind, I'll never again split the story in two, because then I'll be too lazy to finish it. Besides, I'm delighted to be back from Switzerland, so my excitement for Iceland has been almost diluted in my increasingly fishy memory. Now I dream of spending my African winters and Swiss summers in Lucerne, climbing some of the 82 four-thousanders in the Alps.

Still, as I had left the best places for last, I'll finish telling the story. Besides, my mother complained that the photos in the other entry had little colour and were very bleak. You want colour? well, you have colour!

Going back to the story I was going to tell you, it is an adventure of love and courage, suffering and endurance, perseverance, abnegation, challenge, risk, etc., etc. .... So, because of my bad head, I got into the Svínafellsjokull glacier (nothing more and nothing less) and you don't know the suffering and dangers I had to face to get out of it. We had to kill ourselves, come on.

But before I continue, lest the adventure fails to give you goose bumps, I'll fill in the entry by showing you an area that since I saw it, I feel like the Endurance, (Shackleton's famous ship): trapped by the ice. You don't know how hard it was for me to get away from there.

It all started one peaceful morning, at dawn and with a light easterly wind...

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In which, despite the fact that I had not gone to Iceland to fight the elements, I decided to head south of the island in search of the Northern Lights. The plan was to drive along the ring road, which is a spectacular road (for the scenery, but not for the state of the road) to Jokulsarlon Bay, see the northern lights and return.

Driving along the ring road is to open oneself to a new world of sensations provoked by the capricious succession of untamed lava fields, majestic waterfalls and hauntingly beautiful glaciers (great sentence, I'm beginning to suspect that the expired colacao has side effects...).

Another kind of sensation, if anything more painful, was given to me by the local police. I don't know why, but I suspect that the budget they don't spend on defence is invested in buying the latest generation of road radars. It would be better for them to spend the money on buying a couple of nuclear missiles, and stop with these little toys, which cost me 22,000 Icelandic pichiclines for going at 114km/h, an outrageous amount.

Down here is exactly where I got it, in front of these remains of the last eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, (as we affectionately call it around here). Some might think that if you get a fine in such a beautiful place, it doesn't matter so much and it's painless. Well, it has been empirically proven, it hurts, and it hurts a lot...

After this robbery, I stopped at a restaurant to recover from the shock. I had already tried whale meat (although I am against whale hunting) so I tried puffin meat, which is a very nice chicken but tastes like fish. Nothing new, because I'm sure that more than one of you have been given chicken that tastes like fish or vice versa in some Chinese restaurant in Madrid, for example .... (here, for little money, the publicity for their restaurant could have gone...).

Well, I'm going off on a tangent, and I wanted to bring you to Jokulsarlon Bay, the only place in Iceland where you are guaranteed to see icebergs from the shore.

You can also see some seals that come to fish, although they only show up when you let your guard down. This is as much as I could photograph.

When you leave the bay, I'm sure you think that there can't be anything more impressive than this, well, take a walk along the beach and tell me about it?

Don't tell me it doesn't look like the set of a Swarovski advert.

I only dreamed of putting this ancient ice in a big balloon glass, pouring a splash of gin, stirring it with my finger and enjoying... The occasion deserves something sybaritic, something like Sloanes Gin Dry, the best gin in the world for the oldest ice in the world. Ays, it's been so long since I've had a proper gin and tonic in Norfolk, I'd drink it for breakfast (without dipping my biscuits in it).

And here goes the adventure. Before returning to Reykjavik and against the advice of common sense, which is the least common of all senses, I decided to go into the interior of a glacier. I needed to feel the sensation of being alone in the middle of it.

So after a lot of effort, I managed to climb down an almost vertical wall of ice slabs and loose stones to the inside of the glacier tongue.

Once at the bottom, I decided to go a little deeper into the glacier. I soon had to give up because my boots were barely clinging to the ice. If only I had worn my nautical boots....

Inside, I remember the continuous sound of the ice cracking. It was so loud that at first I thought it was produced by the goats up high. Really impressive... and disturbing.

I don't remember how long I stayed enjoying the moment, I lost track of space-time (which doesn't mean I fell asleep). Then came the return. The road was very dangerous. The ground was deceiving and the brown, which looked like "it was home" and you were safe, was actually hiding a layer of ice that could break at any moment. There are areas of this glacier, the largest in Europe, where the ice layer ranges from a few millimetres to a thousand metres deep. It made me a bit dizzy to think about it.

Just before I reached the vertical wall, the snow on the ground collapsed in front of me. Thank goodness I had taken precautions, for at my feet a deep, icy crevasse opened up and I was literally hanging in it. If I had fallen into the crevasse it would have been the end, I could see myself turning into an orange polo shirt (because of the coat).

I had the phone with me to call the rescue services in case of an emergency, but of course I had to remember the name of the glacier. Svinafesjokull, now that I see it written down, it seems easier...

So I was alone in the face of danger, with my fingernails and toenails dug into the ice (so no photo, I was there to get the camera). I spent the next two hours digging my nails, knees and bicuspids into the ice until I reached the vertical wall I had descended. I had made it. I was saved! Then I took out my camera.

Once in the car, and with the heating on 4 to recover, I started my way back to Rejkiavik. The return, as you can imagine, was very boring... more waterfalls, lava fields, colour hatches, glaciers, radars, etc. etc. etc.

And this has been the story. I told you that it didn't give much of itself, I don't know what you were expecting, but as you can imagine, in person and with a beer in between, the story is much more entertaining (and exaggerated), of course.

Well, and as a friend recently wrote on his facebook page, as you can see, "In the end, everything turns out well, and if it hasn't turned out well, it's not the end yet". Or something like that... I'm confused.