I said it in the video and I’ll say it again – We are very fortunate beings. I mean, we did sail for almost a month to be in Iceland so we most definitely created that piece of ‘luck’ but to have a volcano eruption at the same time that we were in Iceland! WOW.

So we rented a car to visit the site and got straight up there, mainly on the recommendation of a local Icelandic sailor who said the lava would be most visible during the ‘night’. My first choice wouldn’t have been to hike at midnight! However with pretty much no darkness here this was a slight challenge… but we knew that the sub ‘set’ at 11.30pm and ‘rose’ at 3.30am. I say all these times in air quotes as it doesn’t actually get dark, the sun just dips below the horizon a little but the sky is still pretty bright. But we work with what we got!

After a challenging 2 hour hike to the site where the volcano eruption was, we were absolutely blown away. Seeing lava in real life is spectacular and hypnotic and we spent over an hour just watching it bubble away. However, having watched an erupting volcano on TV in the past and seeing it in real life, I can say that it looks quite similar (so don’t worry, those at home can almost feel like you’re with us!) as the lava is just as bright and is quite slow when it bubbles and spits, almost like it’s in slow motion. You just don’t feel the warmth or get the smells etc.

We finally left after feeling like we’d frozen our butts off and a few days later left Reykjavik for good to head up north and start our exploration of the rest of Iceland. Our first stop was a beautiful anchorage half a day sail north where we discovered not 1, but 4 waterfalls on shore. We made a beeline for them and anchored close so we could explore them the next day.

Iceland continues to amaze us with it’s natural beauty around every corner!