Day 7 - More Adventures In Water, But Intentionally This Time

Today, we had a pre-planned tour booked, so were up early to meet our guide, Valdi, from Arctic Adventures for the "Black and Blue" tour (which is not nearly as brutal as it sounds). Black and Blue is an all-day adventure tour combining two of the company's popular half-day tours, the "black" being a climb through a lava tube (cave) in one of the volcanic fields, and the "blue" being a snorkel swim through the Silfra Fissure in Thingvellir glacial river. Silfra is a crack in the earth, another part of the mid-Atlantic rift, which has filled with glacial meltwater filtered through kilometers of the porous lava rock that comprises the floor of the rift. The whole valley is a UNESCO heritage site as it also includes Thingveller itself, the original site of the Icelandic parliament dating from 970 and the first settlements. Valdi had told us we WERE to have 3 other trekkers with us but none of them showed up, so we had his services as a guide all to ourselves, and he was good enough to take us to a stop overlooking the valley first, where he pointed out the Law Rock from which the laws were spoken and judgements delivered, and the church, quite old now itself, which stands on the site of an older church and likely older ones before it that go back to the original Althingi or parliament that began there. More reason to read the Sagas now to better understand this.

We had a bio-break at the visitor centre there and then drove down into the valley for our Into the Blue component, wrestling ourselves into "teddy bear suits", the insulated inner suit, then dry suits over those, and loading up with our flippers, masks, and gloves for a short walk to the ladder into the fissure. Dry suits were quite effective, but quite an experience themselves. It's like wearing a giant rubber bag with boots on it, and when it's sealed, you pull the neckline open and hunker down to squish the air out, and then when you stand up it's rather like being in a ziplock with all the air squished out. You have to have a buddy to do this or you'd never get the rest of the gear on. From there we got in line behind another group including some divers to waddle down the ladder into a rift 10 m deep or so of what is in fact INCREDIBLY clear, cold water. It was surreal and gorgeous. We were amazed Valdi hopped in with no hood, gloves or mask, just his wool hat! He was there to bob along ahead of us and show the way, and was very good at preparing us for what to expect (cold hands, for example, and a completely unmanageably buoyancy even with the air squished out). Once in the water, we really just drifted with a light current. After about 20 minutes, we hit a hard left we'd been warned about where you do have to swim against the current a little, or risk getting swept out into the larger, deeper, and not nearly so pristine lake Thingvellervatn. Valdi took the outside to catch anyone who drifted, and it was fine, really ,having been warned, but I had a bit of a struggle as by that time my boots had floated off my feet so other than some imprecise ruddering capability, my fins were pretty pointless. I dog paddled against it, and eventually we popped into a lagoon and had our last 10-15 minutes to explore that. I was, for a change, the only photographer, so will update this post later with whatever I got on the Nikon WP camera. I couldn't see entirely well when shooting, both because I'd popped the seal slightly on my goggles so had a bit of water in them, but the suit buoyancy combined with the float on the camera kept me from looking at the view screen while shooting some of the time. After about 40 minutes total ( I think ) we followed Valdi to a shallow rocky spot to hop out, he helped us get the fins off and get my boot back ON, and we tromped back to the van - really only having travelled a few hundred metres if that, but it was amazing. A very beautiful, surreal experience. I asserted when I got out that I could be talked into learning to SCUBA dive if I had places like that to go.

We changed back out of our drysuits and Teddy bear suits in the relatively mild air, and were happy to find we had truly stayed mostly dry, no leaks or breaks. Valdi had sandwiches, cookies and juice for lunch in the car, and on our winding drive to our afternoon site we stopped for a restroom break and hot drinks as well.

.... more in a bit, as evening is upon us and we're off to a Northern Lights hunting tour tonight!...