Holidays from Hels
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With intotheglacier.is you could actually walk inside Langjokull, Iceland’s second largest glacier for about £140 each (kids free).
You rendez vous a couple of hours north of the Golden Circle at quite a sunny campsite (camping did strike me as total madness in this country). You get into vehicle number 1 – an all-terrain bus, and travel over black volcanic scree for miles, up through a killer whale of a landscape.
When you arrive at the cargo container “base” at the foot of the glacier, wild wind whips your hair and then tries to throw you on the ground. No one was drinking coffee at the outdoor benches provided but instead clinging to them in an attempt to stay upright. (What was it like in winter?) It was time to kit up into full-on arctic body suits. In a move which turned out to be fairly catastrophic, the boys refused the rubberised boots, assuming that their own were sufficiently waterproof.
The next step is to board a semi-aquatic monster truck, whose wheels are only partially inflated so it that it can drive/skate easily over the ice. Then the fog descended and the glacier disappeared.
We travelled for an (ice?) age over the glacier itself in a total white out before arriving at a small man-made opening where someone had tunnelled down into the ice, added a chapel and back-lit it in blue. Surreal is not the word. Ice spikes are added to shoes (which is as fiddly as it sounds).
And it came to pass that normal walking boots were no match for foot-deep glacial puddles and frozen-toed children became less interested in the glowing ice walls around them. My boots were fine though and I loved it.
