The 11 Japanese tourists were hiking on the majestic Vatnajoekull glacier in southeast Iceland on Saturday when the country's most active volcano Grimsvoetn awoke at the heart of the ice, setting off earth tremors and spewing ash and smoke up to 20 kilometres (12 miles) into the air, their guide Hjalti Bjornsson recounted.

"They were quite excited. They had never seen anything like that," the 54-year-old glacier guide told AFP by telephone from Hoefn, where the group remained stranded Tuesday.

The Japanese tourists, he said, "came to Iceland looking for peace and quiet" after the devastating earthquake and tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster that hit Japan in March, "and look what they got!"

"We were about 10 kilometres from the eruption. It was not dangerous," Bjornsson insisted, adding that there was very little wind at first and the hikers were not showered in ash.

"But in the middle of the night, the wind turned ... and ash was blowing all over the hotel where we were," Bjornsson said, adding that by Sunday morning "with the sun shining, it was completely dark. We could see nothing."

The group remained captive in their hotel for several hours. Hardly able to see further than a meter (a yard) in front of them, they witnessed "small birds through the window, just dying. Covered in ash. It was awful," Bjornsson said.

Even the guide, who said he had witnessed numerous volcanic eruptions up close, could not stomach staying inside the ash cloud.

As soon as visibility improved slightly, the group made a run for Hoefn, a small village of about 2,000 inhabitants on the east side of the glacier, only to find themselves stranded with the road behind them closed due to ash and the road in front due to a snowstorm.

"We are still stuck, because usually you can drive around the island, but we got so much snow further north, maybe 20-25 centimetres, a snowstorm actually. ... We cannot go south and we cannot go east," Bjornsson lamented.

While farmers near the volcano rushed to find livestock lost in the dust, the tourist group has by comparison been living quite comfortably in a hotel.

"We escaped from the ash, so here we have blue skies," Bjornsson said, adding that the group had seen "everything" in Hoefn.

"They have an excellent swimming pool here and a sauna. ... We have been at the library, we have been at the folk museum," he says.

As to when they will be able to leave, though, he sighs: "We are still waiting, waiting, waiting."

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook