Saturday, 09.08.2008 - Sunday, 10.08.2008
With Arved Fuchs and Falk Mahnke having travelled to Iceland on Friday already the major part of the group met at Frankfurt Airport on Sunday to follow them to Iceland.
Vincent Naude from Namibia who had just taken part at Junior National Young Leaders Conference (CYLC) in the US was the first to reach the metropolis at the river Main on Saturday followed by Gustavo Páez from Columbia and by tired but nevertheless happy Karin Olivas (picture below) from Nicaragua.
They were met by project leader Arne Steenbock and teacher Ulrich Jordan guiding and advising this year's youth camp.
Early on Sunday the two were to meet Yaseen Bismilla from South Africa arriving at the airport at 5.00 a.m., followed by Wolfgang Url (Austria), Chrysovalantis Anastasiou (Cyprus), Dmitriy Averyanow (Russia), Andi Kriisa (Estonia) and Natan Gordon (Israel) later in the morning.
The I.C.E.-group continued to grow during the morning with the eventual arrival of our German participants from Landsberg, Dresden and Hamburg. With Dirk Notz, the accompanying scientist of the Max-Planck-Institute and Kristin Richter from Seattle who assisted the Svalbard youth camp last year, the group almost reached full strength.
Joining us again are Siren Rühs, representative and participant of last year's youth camp on Svalbard and journalist and media expert Roland Westphal. New to the team is Tillmann Schulze who will work with us as camp fotographer. With the entire group on board the plane headed for Iceland left Frankfurt airport at 2 p.m.

Already arrived at Reykjavik this Sunday morning had Jennifer Ullulaq from Gjoa Haven on a direct flight from Canada. She was met by former crew member Sigga Sverrisdóttir and taken from Reykjavik to Húsavík together with Arndis Kolbeins, a student from iceland.
Just having arrived at Húsavík the group sent back their first report:

It's close to midnight and we have finally arrived. It was a long day, really long indeed for some of our transatlantic participants, who had already clocked 30 hours flying-time when arriving at Frankfurt-Airport. Around twelve additional hours had to be added.
However, no need to complain: all of us arrived at the Frankfurt airport meeting point, there were no problems at security checkpoints, the pilot delivered a smooth landing at an almost cloudless Keflavik and our bus driver topped everything with his sensational message: not a dop of rain at Húsavík for the last three weeks. We take it as a good prediction.
With no losses at the luggage-front we hit ring-road No. 1. The excited conversations in English, Spanish and German turned into lower keys as the amount of kilometers increased.
When dawn turned to darkness we finally arrived at our guesthouse "Vísir", our home for the next eleven days.
A welcome meal had been prepared for us and those not too tired yet enjoyed the food. Tired and exhausted but looking forward to the ensuing days we went to bed.