Last updated: 29 July 2023
To put it simply, travelling to Iceland was one of the best experiences we’ve ever had!
I look back at our 10 days travelling the southern part of the ring road as one of the most exciting adventures of my life. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced and would go back again in a heartbeat!
I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to write about our Icelandic road trip to ensure that I provide enough detail about all the amazing places we visited so that you might find it interesting and helpful should you decide to visit. If I try and squeeze 10 days of travel into one post it’ll be a very long post and you may suffer from RSI from scrolling down the page.
So in the interest of health and safety I’ve decided that a 5 part Icelandic Road trip series is the best way to cover the journey that Roma and I took in November last year and hopefully give you some ideas and suggestions on what to include in your itinerary should you decide to head to Iceland.
Since the upcoming 5 parts will cover what Roma and I experienced in Iceland, I thought I would take some time now to address the question of why you should travel to Iceland. Why you should commit to the idea of heading north and go experience a country that very few people have travelled to…yet.
Um…why are you going to Iceland?!
This was probably the single most common question I was asked when I told people that we were heading to the Republic of Iceland. It was asked with a genuine interest because Iceland isn’t exactly the first country you think of when you say that you’re off to explore more of Europe.
It was a great question though because before booking the trip I knew next to nothing about Iceland, and in fact, it was Roma who convinced me to go. I may even have uttered the words um…why Iceland?
What did I know about Iceland before travelling there? Well, the extent of my knowledge was pretty much based on a commonly quoted line from The Mighty Ducks 2…
I kid you not, I must have had about 5 people quote that line when I said I was travelling to Iceland! That either means that all my friends are movie fans or the Mighty Ducks 2 was actually a bigger movie than I thought. Either way, it’s fair to say that my knowledge of Iceland was pretty slim.
What was it that changed my mind and inspired me to go? Photos. Images of what appeared to be an alien planet which had some jaw-dropping natural landscapes. Here are just a few photos that we took during our visits, I’m hopeful that they will inspire you to learn more about this amazing country.
As I mentioned earlier, a visit to Iceland is as close to visiting another planet as you can get! Don’t believe me? There’s a reason why the opening sequence of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus was filmed there
Silence. Just perfect silence.
When was the last time that you felt alone, I mean really alone. No noise, no people, just silence?
We experienced that multiple times just driving along the ring road. There will be a moment when you realise that you haven’t seen another car in at least an hour or perhaps even longer. We decided to pull over and get out of the car and just stand there and just enjoy the moment. We stood there, on the the side of the road, surrounded by a glorious view, in perfect silence. It was a moment of serenity.
The Ring Road in Iceland (aka Route 1) is a national highway which connects the majority of towns and cities and also provides the perfect tourism route. The most popular starting point is the capital of Reykjavik and then you choose either to head North or South and then keep driving. The length of time to drive the entirety of the Ring Road depends on what you want to see and how long you have to see it but I hear from other travellers that 10 days is a good amount of time.
NOW is the Perfect Time To Go
The Republic of Iceland has a population of 300,000 people and two-thirds live in Reykjavik which means that the moment you drive out of the capital city you are entering a sparsely populated world where natural beauty is everywhere all around you.
There has been a consistent surge in tourism following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis which crippled the Icelandic banking system and led to the jailing of 26 bankers for a combined sentence of 74 years in 2015 (one of the only countries to do this – America, take note!)
The massive growth in Iceland tourism is due to the fact that the country is more affordable for more tourists to visit. There were well over 1 million visitors last year, not bad for a country with a population of 300,000! And this number will only increase!
The majority of tourists visit during the summer months when the weather is warmer and the days are longer, up to 18 hours of daylight so you can definitely travel a lot longer than the winter months. However, there is a steady increase in winter tourism due to growing interest in glacier walking, hiking, and skiing. The tourism industry is hard at work building new accommodation to house the ever-increasing tourism demand and it looks set to hit 2 million visitors annually by 2020!
NOW is the best time to visit.
Next week on our Icelandic Roadtrip series: The Ring Road
