Today’s part of the tour was 12 hours — so it was a very long day! However, I did manage to get in 9 hours of sleep last night (possibly the most I’ve had this trip). We stayed in a hotel overnight, which was very nice — even for just the fact that we had a mattress for the first time in nearly 2 weeks! The showers were also quite good, but smelt of sulphur, so I’m guessing that they might pump geothermally heated water into the showers.

We left at around 8:00 and headed to our first stop: to see some seals! We actually only saw one seal, but we still got a unique view of both a beach and large mountains in the background.

We then travelled to see a statue made out of uncemented stone by the son of a man died whilst out for a walk one day. We then wandered over to see some very interesting regular-hexagon-ated cliff edges, apparently due to regular cooling of magma. There were some which were vertical, and some horizontal. They were created in a similar process to those on the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. At the same place, there were also numerous holes in the ground, which weren’t far from the cliffs. These holes then led to caved areas that met with the sea. They were especially popular with seagulls, which unfortunately meant for us that it stank of seagull sh-droppings and stained white rocks. In some of the smaller holes, some were brave enough to climb down into the holes. Interestingly enough, the sea near these rocks was so clear that you could see straight to the bottom of the sea bed, even when the sea was about 20 meters deep.

We then headed to a black beach, made entirely of small stones. There were a few large stones that jutted out of the ground, which were great fun to climb up! Amazingly, just as we were leaving the beach, I bumped into Sarah and Andrea from Austria (who were in my patrol for the Moot, who I’d said my final goodbyes to 2 days ago!).

We then stopped at an inactive volcano, which had a pretty impressive crater at the bottom of it. There were metal stairs that lead up to the top of it, which have apparently won awards — it wasn’t said which awards, but they didn’t disrupt the look of the volcano too much, and they were pretty easy to climb up!

We then had our final stop at a mountain/inactive volcano which had an interesting make-up due to the different layers it was composed of. There are roughly 30 different layers in this mountain, with different types of lava or sediments in each layer. It made a pretty interesting-looking mountain of stuff to me!

When we got back to Reykjavik, we went out for dinner at a Pakistani restaurant and some (‘semi’, in my case) spicey dishes.

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