We were woken up at the delightful time of 6:00 (I didn’t realise that they still made this time of the morning) to get breakfast and packed ready to go to the opening ceremony, followed straight away by the expedition centres.

We arrived at the venue of the opening ceremony just shortly after 8:00, where we were left to go and mingle with international Scouts! With there being so many UK Scouts, the question “Which country are you from?” soon became “Which area of the UK are you from?”, but I still managed to meet people from countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Iceland, Switzerland, and Honduras (and lots more!).

The opening ceremony started precisely 8 minutes late and consisted mainly of acrobatic acts performing amazing stunts on the stage. There was a point where they went through all 96 nations at the Moot, to which each country would cheer when their name was called. Of course, there was a huge cheer from the UK with being the largest contingent to ever attend a Moot!

With being placed at Thingvellir, we had a rather short journey from Reykjavik, so we didn’t leave until 16:00 (which meant we were at a loose end for 4 hours after the ceremony finished!). To fill in the time, we met with our tribes that we’d be spending the following 4 days with, playing team-building games.

We arrived at Thingvellir with a wonderful greeting from quite a few annoying things that fly. The scenery around our campsite was amazing. We soon put up the mess tent up as a tribe, and then we all put up our individual tents. Dinner tonight was burgers — and it was delicious!

After cleaning up after dinner, we then had time to chat with others and get to know each other a bit better. I then headed to bed at around 22:30 to catch up on some much needed sleep before the following day’s 6:30 alarm!

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