Day 3: Lots of Very Cold Water (1964 prez candidate?)

	Again on Laurie's recommendation, I decided to really go for it, driving super early in the morning from Reykjavik down to the south coast where Europe's largest glacier flows slowly into the sea. There the Glacier Adventure company will gladly furnish you with hiking boots and crampons and guide you (our guide was a Slovakian expat named Marek) on an exploration (however unstably in my case) of the strange world of glaciers.
	Especially fascinating are vertical holes where small amounts of water have swished around (according to our knowledgeable guide) and tunneled down into the glacier. The company has rigged up ropes, and you can climb down into these holes. Pretty other-worldly.
	Lots of "rivers" flow in the area underneath, or even inside, a glacier. These create "ice caves" that you can explore if they're near enough to the surface. We were really lucky that one of them had not yet flooded, which they usually do by the beginning of May. So we could go down into it.
	Because it's near the surface some sunlight penitrates through the ice above, mostly in the blue range of the spectrum, and you get just gorgeous, slightly eerie, illumination. We just sat there in enchanted wonder for quite a while.
	After the four-hour glacier exploration, it's time to see the next and final stage of the glaciation life cycle. The mass of water flows (again quite slowly) down to the sea where new icebergs are "calved." Near the small town of Jökulsárlón there is a "glacier lagoon," a huge fjord dug our over the centuries where a couple dozen small icebergs are calved every day. Our super-knowledgeable and eventually personable guide, Tamara (also not a native Icelander), was spectacular at explaining glaciation, why ice is blue, why the bergs are shaped the way they are, etc. as well as why there are so many long words in Icelandic. She also claimed that Icelandic contains dozens of words for different types of rain, and that many young people are still learning some of them.
	Here's a berg that had recently flipped over, and the sun hadn't yet "shattered" the top layer to turn it white. It really was amazingly beautiful.