Visit East Iceland: Adventures between glaciers

While the southern part of Iceland is a lot about volcanos. The east part, on the other hand, is a lot about glaciers and things connected to it. Like waterfalls and lakes. Make sure you visit east Iceland, it should be an important part of the trip.

Glacier adventures

When you arrive from the southwest part of an island, you will notice the change of nature. Suddenly the soil gets higher and gets covered in the snow. You will see the glaciers ahead. If you visit east Iceland, you cannot miss it. There is a several attraction around those.

The most popular is to visit ice caves. You can usually visit those from autumn until early spring when it is still cold and safe to do it. Because there are several of them, you can choose which one fits you the best or is closest to your location.

A lot of people would actually also go for a hike on a glacier. It is really important to pay for a guide there since it is easy to get stuck between the ice. But there are a lot of companies who are doing it, so there will be a way and since spring is an offseason, you don’t need to book it ahead.

Vatnajökkul hike

Vatnajökkul would be the biggest glacier in Iceland. As I mentioned before, you can find there ice caves, or hike it with a guide. Those are actual locations where the shooting of Game of Thrones took place. Even though once you are up there, you will notice that it actually doesn’t matter that much, because the whole glacier looks almost the same.

And as promised, there is a national park around the glacier. It is called Skaftafell after one of the most recognizable waterfalls there. Skaftafell is same as Langmannalaugar or Thorsmork, you can spend there hour or days, hiking on different paths.

Jökulsárlon and diamond beach

Jökulsárlon is a must when if you planning on visit east Iceland. It is a famous place of glacier lagoon, where part of glaciers meets water and melts in it. In some way, it is a pretty sad view since this is a result of climate changes but otherwise, it is a beautiful thing to see. Except for the melting ice, sometimes you can spot here seals playing around. I would also recommend walking down to the beach because that is the place where the ice ends up. It is a so-called “diamond beach” because the ice that gets stuck on the sand is glowing in the sun and looks almost like a diamond.