After having been awake almost the entire night the day before carrying bags and boxes, what could be more relaxing than getting up 07.50 in the morning and go on a crazy ATV fourwheel drive with roaring engines in 60 km/h in the terrain and -11°C? That wakes you up for sure! Vacation doesn't include being lazy and taking it easy! (Ok, 07.50 AM may not sound that early, but I was tired - believe me).


Evil Knievel here I come! Fear my pink gloves! (I had to change gloves with Sanna).

Bus-trouble part one: We were picked up on the hotel by a small coach and everything went really smoothly. There was a big collection of people at the bus station and we sat down waiting for our ride. More people came and left for various tours. Time passed. All the other tourists left one by one and after a while I and Sanna were alone in the entire place. We became a bit suspicious but we waited patiently and politely. When another 20 minutes had passed we noticed that the activity in the office was rising. The staff talked frenetically in Icelandic. Phones were ringing. More people from the staff came into the office. They looked at us. More phone calls. Suddenly one of the staff people leaped forward "let's get into the bus, now!" Apparently we should have been on the same bus as all of the others and now we were speeding through Rekjavik to catch up with it. We were amazed at how the driver managed to stay on the road in the slippery snowy streets as the bus were swayig back and forth, flying over the speed bumps. We reached our goal in minimal time to find an entire bus full of people waiting for us and a very harsh looking guide standing on the street with her hands at her sides. We got on the bus, moved a few people around and started talking loudly in Swedish about embarassing situations not the least when you think nobody else understands your language but eventually you find out that they do. After a while we realised that when we stopped talking it was dead silent in the bus and everyone had heard exactly what we said. Probably quite a few of them knew Swedish...

Then we jumped straight into the Blue Lagoon. If there is one thing you should do on Iceland, this is the place to go. Professional photographers have a way of making the most ugly, stinking, tiny hotel room filled to the brim with frogs and coachroaches look like the halls of Versailles (how do they do that?) but this was one of those rare spots that's actually cooler in real life than the brochure. The water was warm and milky blue. We were outdoors in below zero with clear skies above our heads and snowy peaks in the background covered in a fairy tale mist ermerging from the warm lagoon. In the distance we could dinstinguish people people bathing in the mist. It was almost unreal. I regretted I do not own a water-proof camera (my D70 had a bath once in the Fyris-river in Uppsala, but unfortunately it proved not to be water-proof). Anyway, we felt our lives were fullfilled and it didn't matter what we did in the rest of the trip.

I have a confession to make. But don't worry, I've already had my punishment. At the lagoon they had some sort of face mask mud. They also had plastic bags. We quickly realised that non-transparent water is very convenient for smuggeling mud in plastic bags out of a bathing area. It seemed like such a good idea I had to give it a go. I was on top of the world, I felt like a true criminal mastermind! However, I realized I wasn't such a genius after all when somebody later that evening with excessive use of violence smeared it all over my face...


There was some left that we managed to smuggle out of the country, it looked like plastic explosives so we didn't put it in the carry on luggage. It would have been kind of cool to hijack an airplane with a mud face mask though! "Fly me to the Bahamas our I will put slime in your face!"

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