When we booked a late-availability and heavily discounted expedition cruise from Scotland to Greenland in June 2010 it included a number of organised "tourist" side trips in the Faeroes and Iceland. Argo's review below, and with it the realisation that we may soon gain an extra "visit tick" from the potential inscription of Vatnajokull NP, have led me to re-evaluate our visit there. It turns out that 2 of the Icelandic trips did indeed go inside the current boundaries of Vatnajokull NP - first, a self-drive snowmobile ride up on the glacier and second, a boat trip on (Lake) Jökulsárlón (Here is a map of the 2017 NP extension which brought the southern part of Jökulsárlón and Highway 1 which goes past it, “inside” the NP and hence “inside” the nominated area).

I accept that we normally tend to be too “penny pinching” for our own good when travelling! This particularly applies for what might be termed “optional costs” such as commercially run tours. So, “HOW MUCH!!??” is our usual first response when discovering their cost - probably followed by us walking away, having decided that it just wouldn’t be worth it (we don’t normally “enjoy” the group aspect of organised tours anyway)! I have just checked the current price of a similar snowmobile trip to ours - this is c EUR 200/£178 per person for 3 hours including a drive up from Highway 1 and back, kitting/de-kitting time etc – so only 1 hour out on the ice. There is NO way we would "optionally" have paid that so, looking back, it was lucky that it was “hidden” from us in the overall cost because, both at the time and in retrospect, it proved a "memorable" experience!

From our ship in the port of Hofn we were driven to Jöklasel up Route F985. This is a dirt road for 4 x 4s etc which climbs through impressive scenery from near sea level on Iceland’s circle highway No 1 up to 815m on the edge of Vatnajokull at 64.255339, -15.864050 . The NP map shows the car park and the various tourist buildings to be situated on the very boundary of the park (Google puts them inside!). Mrs Solivagant and I were allocated our shared snowmobile (even these prices are only per person sharing a machine!), and, kitted up with helmets and special suits, we set out onto the ice and into the park (Photo). We followed the trails of previous snowmobiles and were accompanied by those of our shipmates who had opted for this rather than the more passive “Glacier bus trip”. I can’t claim that we ventured that far but occasionally found ourselves “alone on the glacier” as the mist rolled in and out, the base buildings “disappeared” and the group broke up as various of us swapped driver/passenger, ran into snowdrifts or fell off when turning too sharply! I note that anyone wanting to drive now has to show a car driving license. We were not asked for this and I am not sure it is very relevant anyway! Of course it was all rather “tame” really - and didn’t enable us properly to cover the natural/geolgoical values of Vatnajokull but it was still "good fun"! (though whether it was "Eur 200 per person's worth" of "good fun" is another matter!)

I cannot report the same enthusiasm for the boat trip on Jökulsárlón. This, in all honesty, was a bit “dull”. You climb onto an amphibious truck (current cost c£41 or Eur 46) which then trundles into the lake and slowly navigates between the “icebergs”. Perhaps we were too “blasé” about icebergs, having already been to the Antarctic and Spitzbergen where we travelled on, the far more "fun", zodiacs, but these "icebergs" really were hardly worth the name! The pictures in the tour company's web site above, show reasonably interesting shapes of a reasonable size - but ours were more like those shown in Argo's photo below! If this might be the only time you will ever be able to "navigate" among "lumps" of ice then your judgement might (justifiably) be different but I am not sure we gained much over just viewing the lake, its "icebergs" and the glacier behind it from the land. So, if we were ever to return to Iceland (2 visits already so “unlikely”), we would try to invest our time on some trekking within the NP rather than such a relatively expensive "joy ride".