Nearly Neutral Travel

We started and ended our two-week trip with a few days in Reykjavík, giving us 10 days to circumnavigate Iceland via its ring road. In total, we drove 2,545 km (!), starting with a visit to the lava fields surrounding the Snæfellsjökull volcano. We then soaked up the fishing history of Tröllaskagi, before climbing the Hverfjall volcano on the shore of Lake Mývatn. Our road trip continued around the remote, wild and empty landscape of the Eastfjords and the collosal Vatnajökull glacier to end up beneath the spectacular waterfalls and eerie plane wreck of the south coast. We were blown away by both the natural beauty and sheer diversity of Iceland’s landscapes, and we didn’t even venture into the country’s mountainous interior.

Carbon ✈️ 🚗

In total, our flights and hire car were responsible for 2,367 kgCO2e. As with our last trip, we’ve offset these emissions through Gold Standard. In this case, our carbon offsets went towards the development of a wind farm in western Turkey.

While we covered a huge distance in our petrol-fuelled hire car, our flights were still responsible for 80% of our carbon emissions. Once again, this demonstrates the importance of minimising the environmental impact of flights wherever possible, rather than agonising over ground transportation.

Having said that, we would have loved to complete the road trip using an electric car rather than a petrol-fuelled vehicle. This would have reduced the carbon emissions from our 2,545 km road trip to zero, given Iceland’s 100% renewable electricity mix. However, we were already spending a frustrating amount of time stationary while feeding or changing Alex, so I was apprehensive to slow us down further given the time required to recharge an electric car and also the additional planning overhead.

It’s also worth noting that there is actually a flight-free option to Iceland from mainland Europe: a ferry that departs northern Denmark and takes 2-3 nights to sail to Iceland via the Faroe Islands. Once again, we’d have loved to do this, but with the whole journey taking a minimum of four nights and many train, bus and ferry connections, we decided it was a little too ambitious for our first trip with Alex. Next time!

Cost 💰

Given Iceland’s location in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, it’s no surprise that it is an expensive place to go on holiday. On top of this, Iceland receives more than twice its population in tourists in each year. We were surprised that demand for accommodation outstrips supply even in shoulder season in some regions, keeping prices high for most of the year. We found that even basic accommodation started at ~£150 per night, which explains why camper vans are a popular mode of transport and accommodation in Iceland.

The one saving grace was that paying these eye-watering costs was incredibly straightforward – Iceland is the first country we’ve visited without ever touching cash (we paid for everything on card). Knowing this ahead of time, we didn’t withdraw any cash at the beginning of our trip, which was definitely the right decision but still felt strange at the time.

Now, while I don’t mind paying an entrance free for attractions, I will admit to having an irrational dislike for parking charges. This made the going rate of 1,000 ISK (~£5.61) to park at an attraction (even for less than an hour) a little hard to swallow, especially when the site was completely unmanned and without any facilities. Still, I’m sure these parking charges went towards responsible tourism management, so I’ve just about made my peace with them.

We found food costs were less scary than anticipated. Admittedly, this was probably helped by a combination of comparing costs to those in central London, and the fact that we cooked for ourselves most evenings so that we could keep Alex’s normal bedtime routine. But the going rate for hot dogs was around 700 ISK (~£3.95), so even with a portion size of two (!), this was still a reasonably-priced meal. A cinnamon roll at the iconic Brauð & Co was 770 ISK (~£4.35), which didn’t feel outrageous. We would have easily spent a lot more on food if we’d had sit-down meals at more traditional restaurants, though.

Cats (of Reykjavík)

We’d read that Reykjavík had plenty of stray cats, and while we spent a good amount of time cat spotting in Iceland’s capital, not a single one looked like a stray. They were all collared and perfectly groomed, and strolled around the town (and its shops) like they owned the place.

On average we spotted 1.85 cats per day, which would put Iceland slap bang in the middle of the 27 countries we visited on our round-the-world trip. The vast majority of these cats were spotted Reykjavík though, a well-known cat hotspot.

Other ⚡️🚰

On our way back to Reykjavík we took a detour through the mountains via route 435. As we approached the summit, we met a pipeline, which we then followed all the way to the capital city. It turns out that this pipeline can carry 1,000 litres of hot water per second from the Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station down the mountain, and supplies roughly half of the capital region’s hot water and heating demand. This explained why the hot water we used to shower had a slight sulphur smell!

With tourism being such big business, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that literally every Icelander that we met spoke perfect English. This came as quite the relief as the Icelandic language has a pretty steep learning curve, in case you haven’t already gathered this from the names of its towns.

If you’ve got this far and still need further convincing to add Iceland to your bucket list, it turns out that Justin Bieber did a similar road trip back in 2016. While the music might not be to everyone’s taste, he actually does a pretty good job of showing off Iceland’s natural beauty, to the extent that I could totally believe that this video was part-sponsored by Iceland’s tourism board. Enjoy!

We had a lot of miles to cover yesterday and we knew we wouldn’t have time to stop everywhere that looked good en route, so our plan for today was to backtrack slightly to see more of what the south had to offer before our final push to Reykjavík tomorrow. This meant that for once, we had some semblance of a proper plan: a five-stop strategy, if you will.

🏎 Pitstop 1: The turf houses of Drangshlíð

We’d seen these old houses built into a rocky outcrop on the previous day and I was desperate to take a closer look, but it turned out there wasn’t much more to see – they weren’t structurally sound enough to go inside. Still, they looked like they would have been pretty cosy and a good place to see out Iceland’s harsh winters. In an effort to liven up this stop, we drove away with Alex’s bottle of milk perched on the windscreen. It’s hard to explain why.

🏎 Pitstop 2: The Sólheimasandur plane wreck

In 1973, a US Navy DC-3 suffered engine failure and crash-landed on the bleak expanse of volcanic ash at Sólheimasandur. Although any salvageable plane parts have long since been removed, the fuselage still remains and has become a tourist attraction. I had mixed feelings about making this stop, but we’d read that the whole crew survived the incident, which did ease some of my misgivings. To get to the crash site, we had the choice between a 7 km round trip on foot or a five-minute shuttle that would set us back 3200 ISK (approx. 18 GBP per person). I think you can guess which option we took!

Having seen this plane in several YouTube videos, I wasn’t surprised to have the opportunity to introduce Oli to the concept of @influencersinthewild. There were an awful lot of disrespectful photoshoots in progress! Despite this, seeing the fuselage resting in the arid landscape was a cool, if slightly eerie, experience.

The outbound walk was a bit monotonous, but on the way back to the car, we had a great view of the distant mountains but also a pretty extreme sidewind. It’s the most tired I’ve ever been after a short walk! Alex slept through the whole thing, cosily tucked into Oli’s coat.

🏎 Pitstop 3: Reynisfjara beach

Now firmly on the Instagram trail, we braved busy Reynisfjara beach. Although we’d already visited several black sand beaches, we were here to see the basalt columns at one end – remember Hallgrimskirkja? These are the ‘organ pipe’ formations that inspired its design. Although there were a healthy number of people on the beach, it was still easy to appreciate the beauty of the rock formations against the blue sky – we really couldn’t believe our luck with the weather. Even better, the payment machines were broken so parking was free for the day! 💰💰💰

🏎 Pitstop 4: Kvernufoss

In search of the path less travelled and with limited time before we needed to head back for Alex’s bedtime, we opted to skip popular Skógafoss and instead headed to neighbouring Kvernufoss.

This turned out to be a great decision – the waterfall may have been smaller (in both height and volume), but it was still absolutely stunning and there were very few other people there, save for a couple getting married up on a grassy ledge! We walked through a canyon formed by the river before reaching the base of the falls, and were then even able to walk behind the waterfall, which was both soggy and exhilarating. Alex once again proved difficult to impress, and observed nonchalantly from his spot inside Oli’s coat.

🎆 Brief interlude to watch the Northern Lights

The Aurora forecast was again looking promising and the skies were clear, so we spent the evening peeking out of the curtains and were so lucky to see another beautiful display. It felt a little ironic that we’d stayed in quite a few very rural and very dark places on this trip and then saw the Northern Lights when we were staying in an actual town with streetlights, but it was still magical!

🏎 Pitstop 5: Seljalandsfoss & Gljufrabui

The next morning, we couldn’t resist one last visit to some waterfalls. Like Kvernufoss (above), Seljalandsfoss is fed from meltwater from the glacial peak of Eyjafjallajökull. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, cast your mind back to 2010 and the volcanic ash chaos across European airspace – this is the very volcano that erupted! Alex was mid-nap so we had to take it in turns to walk from the car to the falls and the whole place was so crowded that I nearly didn’t bother. In the end, Oli convinced me on the basis that there were so many inappropriately-dressed people slipping around and getting soaked that I just had to go and see them, and this worked!

Once Alex was awake, we walked together to Gljufrabui, a rival waterfall less than a kilometer away. This was way more impressive, but also much scarier – with hindsight, probably not the best spot for Alex, although he didn’t seem to mind. The waterfall flows into an incredibly narrow canyon, and to get to its base involved a balancing act along a set of wobbly stepping stones through the fast-flowing (but mercifully shallow) river.

Once inside the cavern, the noise and spray from the falls in the confined space were a real assault on the senses. I didn’t capture it well at all (I was actually quite scared!) but the photos at the start of this post sell it much better.

This marked the end of our time exploring the south of Iceland, and next we concluded our road trip by heading back to the capital to eat many baked goods and search for the cats of Reykjavík.

From our guesthouse in Skálafell we made two stops close to the Vatnajökull glacier, at the glacial lagoon of Jökulsárlón and the black sand Diamond Beach, before spending the afternoon hiking the river canyon at Fjaðrárgljúfur. This day already felt like we’d hit our stride travelling with Alex, before we peeked out of our window that evening and finally found the sky glowing green…

I wasn’t delighted when our Alex-alarm woke us at 6am, but we had a big day ahead of us and a beautiful sunrise outside the door of our wood cabin. Our guest house had also put on a lovely breakfast buffet, featuring more cold smoked lamb (my favourite 🤤) and even some pickled herring (Sara’s favourite 😬).

We spent the best part of this day circumnavigating the Vatnajökull glacier, which covers a rather unimaginable 7,700 km², equating to roughly 10% of Iceland’s land mass. Zoom out on the map above and you’ll easily spot the huge patch of white! The glacier extends down many of the valleys towards the ring road, re-appearing around the next corner almost as soon as it had disappeared around the last.

Jökulsárlón

Jökulsárlón is a beautiful lagoon that sits at the foot of the Vatnajökull glacier. While the main glacier has been steadily retreating, the lagoon has been increasing in size, with chunks of the glacier occasionally breaking off and floating around the lagoon for years before eventually finding their way out to sea.

We spent quite a while watching a herd of seals swim gracefully around the lagoon. Apparently the seals give birth to pups on the shore of the lagoon, although we were a month or two early to spot any.

As seems to be the case with many places we visit, this lagoon was the filming location for a Bond movie, specifically the opening sequence of A View to a Kill. In this scene, Roger Moore dodges bullets while skiing away from some baddies, before using part of a snowmobile as an improvised snowboard to music by the Beach Boys. As cringey as the moment appears now, it’s been suggested that this scene actually helped boost snowboarding into the mainstream.

Diamond Beach

Just the other side of the ring road from the lagoon lies Eystri-Fellsfjara, more popularly known as Diamond Beach. This black sand beach has recently become instagram-famous for the perfectly clear, car-sized icebergs that wash up on the beach.

Unfortunately our timing wasn’t the best, and instead of car-sized icebergs we were instead greeted by a huddle of photographers trying to make a small collection of ice cubes look as big as possible. We had a good chuckle at the scene, before joining the fray to get our own snap.

The beach itself was still beautiful, surrounded by the ice-capped mountains.

Still, we didn’t spend long here before continuing towards our destination for the afternoon. That is, once we’d given Alex one of his most scenic outfit changes so far.

Fjaðrárgljúfur

As if Jökulsárlón wasn’t intimidating enough to pronounce, we upped the stakes considerably with a stop at Fjaðrárgljúfur (see pronunciation guide for the curious).

To call this river canyon “dramatic” feels like an understatement. The canyon itself has been painstakingly formed by the flow of glacial rivers over thousands of years, leaving behind a 100m deep gorge. We were getting battered by the wind as we hiked up along the top of the canyon walls, so I’d zipped Alex right up inside my coat and tried to protect his face with his fluffiest trapper hat. He got a lot of smiles and laughs from the folks coming the other way!

At the top of the canyon we were rewarded with views across a waterfall, over which the river cascades before heading into the canyon.

It was a truly epic walk for relatively little effort (bar the wind!) and by far our favourite stop of the day. We headed on to our accommodation for the night expecting to turn in early, but the arctic skies had other plans…

Aurora Borealis

Finally, we were in luck, and managed to catch the Northern Lights without having to wake up in the middle of the night. Our first glimpse was through the window, when Sara had a bit more luck with her long-exposure technique than the previous night and we saw a definite green tinge in the sky.

By the time we’d got outside, the sky had exploded into a proper show.

For some reason I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the Aurora. In an age of colour-enhanced photos, I was expecting a static scene of barely visible light. However, we were both blown away by not just the colours and shapes cast across the sky, but also rate at which they changed. No sooner had we pointed out an emerging swirl to each other, a new ribbon of green would unroll across the sky and there’d be an even more intense display behind us.

We took so many photos that evening that Sara’s phone ran out of battery, but even that didn’t send her inside. The midnight air had become bitterly cold by the point, but a cup of tea was just enough to keep our fingers from going numb. It was a genuinely magical experience.

Iceland’s south coast is so packed with big-hitting highlights that this post marks only our halfway point along this dramatic section. The next day we’d turn the corner at Iceland’s most southerly tip, and head along the south-west coast back towards Reykjavík once again.