Iceland

Short trip with direct flight from Bristol. Interesting scenery. Too little time for activities and hence focused on sightseeing. Three full days allowed us to see most of the key sites/south coast only.

Overall, an "easy" trip as we took tour packages when there. Very expensive place (and foods). A typical soup costs around £9 or £18. But foods are good as fish is very fresh. Places of interest are far apart and requires about an hour drive in between.

From top right: Blue Lagoon, "Little Geyser", Mid-Atlantic Ridge that divides Iceland into two places (American and Eurasian plates)

Cathedrale in city centre. Inside is extremely sparse and seats face both front and back. Didn't understand that. New theatre next to harbour with state of the art designs; shopping street and "Trolls". Thought the city centre looks like Azabujuban. I think the materials used are the same, probably to ensure maximum safety during earthquakes. Design wise, they are very colourful.

So many glaciers, everywhere. We went on one, with full gear, but only lasted an hour. Our first glacier was more than 10 years ago in NZ, Franz Josef glacier. Then, it was for 4 hours without good gear, and I was exhausted walking back. This one is piece of cake. Rule 1: Never fall on the glacier. A bit hard, if we were only walking around the bottom.
But when we were back on the tour van, we heard news that there were over 300 earthquakes since 6 hours ago, and a volcano was going to blow. Mixture of anxiousness and excitement. Would have been newsworthy if the glaciers were splitting in front of our eyes and lava blowing out of the volcano. But roads might be closed, we could be detoured, flights delayed or grounded...

Our favourite spot in Iceland, Jokusarlon. Giant icebergs floating in the lagoon. Blue is because the ice is so dense, no bubbles inside and absorbs all other spectrums of light but reflecting the blue. Two James Bond movies were filmed here. Recent one was Die Another Day, where the lagoon was frozen and an ice hotel was built on it.

Beautiful mountains and coasts along the way

Waterfalls eveywhere, all shapes and sizes, levels, terraces. We refilled our water bottles with water from some of them and they were "chilled" and sweet!

Wildlife - Seal, Puffin, 300 year old moss in Lava fields and "lobster" (cooked form,so tasty...)