Lava Fields | Sift, Stir & Savour

I have the travel bug and I have it bad. Ever since I got back from vacation all I’ve been thinking about is where to travel to next. If only it were so simple, right? Things like money and work make packing my bags and taking off a bit more complicated. And I feel sort of grateful for this. Don’t get me wrong, it would be fantastic to be able to travel whenever I wanted to where ever I wanted…but I can’t help but wonder if I was able to do this, would I still value it the same? Would travelling still be such a magical thing? Or would I start to take it for granted?

Who knows, when I win the lottery I’ll let you know 🙂

Okay, back to vacation talk…sweet, sweet vacation talk! My partner and I were in Iceland for 6 marvelous days. On our first day we walked around the beautiful city of Reykjavik and drank more coffee than advisable. Our flight was overnight and we weren’t able to fall asleep on the plane so coffee and adrenaline were the only things keeping us awake. We also went whale watching on our first day. Here I am looking for the whales:

Can you see them?

Yeah, me neither. We got a lot of really great photos of…water. We did see a bunch of whales though, we just weren’t very good at capturing what we saw!

On our second day in Iceland we went horse back riding on a lava field. I had never been horse back riding before so this was really neat for me. The lava fields were beautiful and like nothing I had seen before.

How cute are the Icelandic horses?

After horse back riding we went snorkeling in Silfra, which is a rift in the diverging North American and Eurasian tectonic plate boundary. Basically the two plates are pulling apart and we snorkeled in one of the big cracks. It was awesome. And cold. Really cold. Two degrees cold. Do you know how cold two degrees is? I didn’t realize how cold it was until I put my face in it…and my lips went immediately numb.

We obviously got suited up before we went in the water. We were provided “teddy suits”, which was basically a snow suit onesie. On top of that we wore a dry suit and then neoprene head cover and gloves. All of this made us very buoyant, comically buoyant. We were advised to keep our hands out of the water because of the water temperature. I didn’t listen to this advice since my dad had lent me his underwater camera:

However, after taking one picture my fingers went numb and it was near impossible to take more- I couldn’t tell if I was pressing the button or not! Luckily I was and I got some photos. Here’s my partner floating along, face squished by mask 🙂

After the snorkeling there was the opportunity to jump off a mini cliff into a deep part of Silfra. Jumping into unknown waters has never been my thing so I passed but here’s my partner mid-air:

Because our suits were so buoyant he had to jump as straight as possible to avoid accidentally punching himself in the face when he hit the water.

The next day we went on an intense cave tour through Buri Cave. It was terrifying, beautiful and challenging all at once. I’d never been in a cave before and didn’t know much about it until we got there- which is a good thing because had I known it was a 4 out of 5 in difficulty, I may have ran the other way. The first entrance to the cave was what I expected. Rather large and easy to climb down into:

Then there was a second entrance, which was much, much smaller than the first:

Then there was a third entrance, which was impossible to take a picture of because it was so small and just looked like a crack. Probably because it was just a crack. We had to put our arms above our head and slither into the crack to get into the cave. Once we were in the cave though it had high ceilings, for the most part.

The cave was created from lava flow, so the walls and ceiling of the cave were fascinating looking. I loved how the cave walls and ceilings dried in mid-drip.

Unlike most caves created by lava flow, this cave only had one entrance/exit. At the end of the cave was a big 20 meter drop and that’s all. At one point the cave must have continued and exited to the surface, but where ever that happened has been closed off. The tour company we were with have gone down the drop and looked for more cave without avail.

Here I am at the end of the cave, getting ready for the hike back to the entrance/exit. As you can see the last 300 meters of the cave looked kind of like a subway tunnel. It was basically flat ground and a very nice rest from the rest of the rocky climb.

I will post about the rest of our days in Iceland in another post, but take a look at the photo below. It was taken at midnight. I LOVED being so far north that the sun never fully went down.