For the UK contingent, there was an option to do different tours of Iceland after the Moot had finished. I chose to go on a two-day tour called ‘Inside Iceland’. On the tour, I was with other UK Scouts.

We left the school where we were staying at around 8:30 to go on our tour. We had a coach to ourselves, complete with a tour guide that told us about lots of interesting things as we passed them.

After about 2 hours of driving from Reykjavik, we arrived at a site with geothermally heated water at over 200°C! They piped off the water to be used usefully.

We then stopped at a waterfall, where some of it appeared to come from under the surface!

We then headed to the main part of the tour: an ice cave! We were at a glacier called ‘long glacier’, which was — apparently — very long.

It took about 30 minutes for us in a modified missile-carrier to take us to the top of the glacier (where the entrance to the cave was). The cave had been very recently excavated in the past 4 years, with us reaching about 25 meters deep into the surface within the cave. Apparently — at that depth — the layers of snow, ice, and volcanic ash (from all the volcanoes in Iceland) would have only been around 30 years old.

Inside the cave it was pretty slippery,  so we were given crampons to go over our shoes. There were many different rooms created along the sides of the main tunnel, including 2 chapels where weddings have taken place! Additionally, we were told that roughly 2 weeks before our arrival, there was a music festival that took place inside of the cave in the glacier!

The journey back from the glacier took a little longer than it should’ve because of an incident involving a caravan and a car in front of us… It wasn’t a problem, though — more time for napping!

We arrived at our hotel for the next 3 nights, then a few of us headed out for food together. We had some delicious pizza, which was made even more delicious by how cheap it was.