11th March

-2C to -6C

Last day in Iceland.

Woke up a little later this morning. We are going to take it a little easier today and visit the Blue Lagoon to relax. The bus collects us at 10.30 this morning. The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa set in the desolate lava wilderness. It was created when superheated seawater flowing out of the Svartsengi geothermal power station collected in the surrounding lava. The lagoon is bordered by rough masses of black lava boulders which lie piled high around the perimeter, hemming in the milky blue waters. The water is at 37C and very comfortable. There is fine white silt on the bottom of the lagoon which you can put on your face and arms like a mud pack and is said to have health benefits. It can be bought at the in house shop. It was pretty awesome swimming around in the heated lagoon especially when a bit of snow came down. We could have stayed the whole day just soaking up the water but we had a bus to catch to get us back into town. On the bus to the lagoon we sat next to a young Canadian lad by the name of Greg who is backpacking for 6 months. Also met a nice English couple who have visited Australia twice, once for 9 months. I reckon they've seen more of Australia than me! We got back to the hotel around 3.30pm this afternoon and after collecting a few things we went downtown to the post office to send some stuff back home. We stopped at a confectionary shop where l picked up some Easter Eggs for the kids and some Icelandic chocolate for Craig. I bought some leather gloves for 1200ISK ($6.50). Petrol costs 230.6ISK ($1.25) a litre. We know some Icelandic words.....Kaffi, Te, Bakari, Banki, Apotek (chemist), Posthus, Fisk, Glas....ahhh, we're just one of the locals now. Tonight we are going on another Norther Lights tour, that is unless it gets cancelled. It's 7.30pm and still cloudy so there's every chance that it will. It is nowhere near as windy and cold as yesterday and except for a tiny bit at the Blue Lagoon it hasn't snowed all day. It doesn't get dark here until about 8.30pm which really suprised me. I thought being Winter it would get dark really early. Gets light around 7.30am.

We have to be up at 4am tomorrow morning as our flight leaves Reykjavik at 8.30am. It takes about 10 minutes by taxi to get to the bus depot then around 40 minutes to get to the airport. Boy, are we going to be tired as l guess we won't get back here until around 1am after the Northen Lights tour.

Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing! The light chasers have finally conquered. It's so hard to describe what we saw but it was beautiful and it also had red and a bit of yellow as well as the green in it too. You don't get to see that very often at all. I reckon the display went on for at least an hour which is unusual too. Even when we left it was still going although it was fading. One of the guides said he'd rate it as a 9 out of 10 and it was the best display all year. How lucky were we! A lot of people had a look at the lights and then went back into the bus because it was soooo cold but l stayed out until it was time to leave. Our last night here and we spent it looking at natures wonders!

Met a young English couple who were on the same lights tour as us on Wednesday night and also the same tour as yesterday and they are going to email us photos of Wednesdays lights that they got from a guy on the tour. This guy was also on the tour tonight and he said he's gonna email them the photos and if he does then they will email them to us.