Things To Do On Langjokull Glacier

There are four ways onto or into Langjökull. Choosing between them decides everything else about your day: how long it takes, what it costs, whether you need a driving licence, how old your children have to be. Each is set out below to the same four lines, so you can read them against each other. A Langjokull guided tour is how all four are sold.

Snowmobiling — one hour, two to a machine

The one most people picture, and the one with the most conditions attached. A transfer carries you from the road up to a base camp at the snowline. The kit is issued and there is a briefing. Then you ride for an hour across the ice cap, in a line behind a guide, with stops for photographs.

• What it includes: the transfer, the machine, a winter overall, helmet, gloves and a buff, the briefing and a guide in front.
• Best for: anyone who wants to have done something rather than to have seen something, and who holds a driving licence.
• What it rules out: driving without a full licence, children below the tour's minimum age, and a machine to yourself unless you pay the supplement at base camp.
• What it costs: from $204 meeting at the glacier side, from $269 with a transfer out of Reykjavik.

The ice tunnel — an hour inside the ice cap

A tunnel driven into the ice by machine, with its entrance at around 1,260 metres. You reach it in a glacier truck, put crampons over your own shoes and walk it with a guide for about an hour on level ground. It is lit from within the ice, and at some point the guides turn the lights out.

• What it includes: the truck up from the road, all the equipment, and the entrance fee to the cave itself.
• Best for: anyone without a driving licence, families with children of any age, and anybody travelling in July who assumed an ice cave was a winter thing.
• What it rules out: wheelchair users — the floor is uneven and slushy and the truck is boarded up five steps of about 40 centimetres.
• What it costs: from $203 with the transfer and the guide, or from ISK 24,900 booked direct if you can get yourself to the base camp.

Monster truck and glacier bus — sitting down on the ice

An eight-wheeled truck built for the surface takes a group out across the ice cap and stops on it. Nobody rides anything, nobody drives anything, and the stop is long enough to get out and walk about on crampons. On one operator's day there is hot chocolate and Icelandic kleinur served on the glacier, and sledding or glacier golf when the snow allows.

• What it includes: the highland bus, the glacier truck, a guide, crampons, the drinks and pastry, and Wi-Fi and a lavatory on board.
• Best for: families with small children, anyone nervous about riding, and anybody who wants to be on the ice without the arm-ache of an hour on a throttle.
• What it rules out: the adrenaline. Nothing here goes fast.
• What it costs: from $155, which is the lowest fare of any way onto this glacier.

Super jeep — reaching the ice, and what that does not include

A modified four-wheel-drive with a driver-guide of your own. It is usually sold as a private day: the Golden Circle first, then off the tarmac onto the tracks below the ice edge. Some drive out onto the ice cap itself. Some stop at its margin.

• What it includes: the vehicle, the driver-guide, hotel pickup, and on one of them the national park fees.
• Best for: a party of four to six who want the day arranged round them, and travellers heading west for Húsafell, the Hraunfossar waterfalls and the Deildartunguhver hot spring rather than south for the ride.
• What it rules out: the snowmobile and the tunnel. Not one of the four private jeep tours here includes either — two say so in their own exclusions and the other two simply never list them.
• What it costs: from $2,294 for a group of four to $2,188 for a group of four, which is the price of a whole vehicle rather than a seat.

Doing two of them in one day

Exactly one fare covers both the ride and the tunnel, and it runs three hours out of Húsafell. Gear and briefing, a ride two-up across the ice cap, a guided hour inside the tunnel, then the ride back down. At $299 it costs less than the two bought separately and takes a third of the time.

The alternative pairing is a snowmobile hour bolted onto the Golden Circle, which six of these tours do. That is a ten-hour day rather than a three-hour one, and the glacier is one stop in it rather than the whole of it.

What Langjokull does not offer

Two things people arrive expecting, and neither exists here. There is no natural ice cave on Langjökull that visitors are taken into. The tunnel is cut by machine, and that is precisely why it is open in July, when the natural caves in the south are water. There is also no walking route onto the ice cap from any road: every way up is a vehicle and every route across the surface is led.

Neither is a disappointment once you know it. The machine-cut tunnel is why a summer visitor can stand inside a glacier at all. The vehicles are why a family with a four-year-old can be on an ice cap by mid-morning.