Travel to Iceland?

I know there’s an old thread, but it’s best left buried. As i see it there are three ways to do this:

  1. Do a 24-7 guided tour around the island. Pros are you get better tour guides, see a ton, and don’t have to mess with anything. Cons are that you’re stuck with what you get for better or worse. Also more expensive.

  2. Stay in Reykjavik, take some local tours. Pros are more of a relaxed adventure, a bit more “touristy”. Cons are a bit more “toursity”, stuck with what’s in Reykjavik, tours are probably of much lower quality (bored bus drivers).

  3. Do 100% your own thing, drive wherever and do whatever. Pros are glorious freedom. Cons are derpster freedom of being in a foreign country with no idea what to do aside from tour books. Fewer personal interactions. Probably the most and least stressful, could be amazing or depressing.

  4. Punch all the ponies. Fuck those little fuckers. Pros, stupid ponies. Cons, killjoys.

  5. Dig for fairies. Pros, fairies! Cons, probably no fairies.

  6. Leap into a lightning-spewing volcano wielding a big hammer. Pros, pure metal! Cons, probably not going to go to Valhalla.

Did 3) last summer. Car rentals are sort of expensive, but you want 4WD. Hotel prices are insane, but there are a lot of good B&Bs and guest houses. Book early, they fill up fast. Especially outside Reykjavik. We used booking.com and hotels.com.

There are tourists everywhere, so you will probably not lack people to interact with.

Planned the trip with the help of the Lonely Planet book and another one… Top 10 in Iceland I think it was called. Spent two days in Reykjavik, felt like that is enough time to see the essentials and then some. Then we drove the Golden Circle route and looked at most of the sights on it, then westwards to Reynisdrangir (or however it is spelled) and back.

I had an excellent experience, but most of it is watching nature :)

Wait did you say Reynisdrangir? That sounds like Reyna’s draugir. Which sounds like some sort of indo-european cognate of Queen, and Draugir, which is of course everyone’s favorite undead in Skyrim. So you’re saying you shouted at the Queen of the Draugir? Sounds pretty metal to me! ;)

I’m looking at the “Top 10 Iceland” book by Eyewitness Travel right now, along with Frommer’s Easyguide to Iceland, which is anything but easy. LOTS of people i’ve known have taken Viking River Cruises of various stripes and enjoyed them greatly; personally i’m not yet a cruise ship type, but i suppose i could be convinced otherwise.

Travelling to Iceland was a series of highlights, and Reynisdrangar was one of them:

On the drive over it we also went up to Gjáin, which was the absolute biggest wonder. The pictures on this page really do not do it justice: https://guidetoiceland.is/connect-with-locals/regina/gjain-in-thjorsardalur

So booking through Kayak.com was a mistake, not sure if it was IcelandAir’s fault or JustFly.com’s fault; essentially Kayak.com is a aggregator and the winning low price was through JustFly, though that wasn’t actually clear at time of purchase. Anyway i had to call JustFly something like once a week because of “important changes” to my flight, such as cancelling legs, changing times, ect., finally just cancelling the flight entirely. Had to rebook through Delta for about $800 more and lost the travel insurance already paid. Have better seats at least. Tried to work out using WOW Air but couldn’t make the connecting flights from Austin in time.

That sucks, I’ve had my bad experiences with aggregators.

On the other hand, when you get here make sure to keep an eye out:

So I’m looking to take my first vacation abroad this fall… Is Iceland a pretty good choice for a solo traveler? It’s been about 20 years since I’ve taken a proper vacation (at least that involved more than a two hour drive) and I figure it’s time to fix that.

Traveling abroad alone an be amazing or depressing if you’ve never done it before, it depends heavily on your temperament and creating a trip that fits you. I don’t know about Iceland specifically but i have traveled once by myself, and my criteria for designing a trip would would be: 1) urban or outdoors 2) english vs non-english speaking 3) expectation of socialization vs not.

So, for example, if you wanted both urban and outdoors, english speaking, with socialization, a guided tour group might be up your alley. Iceland seems like you’re doing it for outdoor experiences, so the chances for socialization are much less. I mean anything can always happen anywhere, you can always make friends, but wandering the countryside doesn’t lend itself to immediate contact, you know. But the big thing is be honest with yourself about your own personality and fit the trip to that. If, otoh, you just have to go see a specific thing (city, monument, place, region, ect) then you’d happy to deal with the obstacles in getting there, whatever those are.

Yeah!!! Yesterday I made an extremely spontaneous decision to head over to Iceland for 12 days this Sunday! Managed to rent a very expensive campervan (think it was the last one in town…) and starting to google what I should look out for.

Enidigm, how was your trip?

Well done, what are you interested in? Nightlife? Nature? Even though I’m native I’ve found every time I give tourist advice someone else shows up in the thread with a massive info dump from their Iceland research. So I think I’ll wait for someone to do that :)
A camper van for 12 days is probably the best way to do it.

Feel free to message me if you need a natives perspective on things.

See if you can go to the Hrunamannahreppur hot spring. It’s private but you put some money in a box and walk 3 min to it, over a hill. You probably can find directions if you Google.

Edit: One thing to keep in mind about Iceland is that places that look like a town on Google maps often are literally just somebody’s farm and there are no public services there. Rural Iceland is extremely sparsely populated. However, the “big” tourist attractions (waterfalls, etc) are PACKED with large tour busses full of (most frequently) Asian tourists. Try to stay away from those places and visit the smaller spots. That’s where you’ll truly find the beauty and charm. Anything within a 2 hour drive of the airport will be overrun with tourists.

Oh, man, I had forgotten about this thread! We had a great time in Iceland, but i winged it so i’ll tell you of our/my experience.

So, the overall view is that I used maps.me (the app) to drive around since the GPS in your phone can tell you where you are even without data - but honestly i had data almost the entire trip in the south end. For whatever reason maps.me also has a lot of locations marked you might otherwise not find - trailheads, caves, stuff like that.

I never used cash even once. Even out in the middle of nowhere the locals used cellular credit card terminals. But we never got to the east or north parts of the country, so it might be good to get some cash if you’re heading that way, jic.

We did a lot of guided activities through TripAdvisor, which at that time seemed more popular with vendors than AirBnB. But in subsequent trip to other countries AirBnB is by far the leader in activities, so it might have changed by then. We never took a bus tour, just drove around ourselves, but the activities we tried were nice to meet people and break up the groove of things.

When we landed around 8am i didn’t even have a car rented and i couldn’t even figure out How to Phone, and all the in-airport rentals were hundreds of dollars so she pulled up a place called Sixt a few hundred meters away from the terminal and we got a nice and peppy Isuzu hatchback that served us well. We ended up staying in an AirBnB in Hafnarfjörður - it’s about a 20 min easy drive from downtown, and since i was coming for the outdoor stuff found it more attractive than hanging out downtown. But next time i probably would switch.

We ended up doing a Food Tour of Reykjavík around 1 or 2 pm the day we landed after getting settled in the AirBnB. Just fyi, it was great, but come hungry because the amount of food was … incompatible with proper digestion. Rye bread ice cream and lobster bisque and street hot dogs and Skyr and alcohol maybe isn’t the most patient combination, if you catch my drift. But everyone was fun and it was a great way to start the trip, imo.

In Reykavik, the city settlement museum was perfectly sized and deep enough to be interested but not a place to spend the day in. The National Museum was a more traditional experience and was, perhaps, a bit boring by comparison ( I think it was more the atmosphere than the content) although i was very depressed to see things from my childhood in a pile of junk at the back of the museum in the “the way things were” exhibit. The Settlement Museum gift shop was very small but had several handcrafted things that seemed way too expensive at the time but wish i had picked up - the National Museum seemed more towards books and generic souvenirs.

Our tour guide pointed out that most clothing stores imported their clothes, but the Handknitting Association of Iceland still had (as far as you can tell) local handknitted stuff, Skólavörðustígur 19, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland.

Downtown Iceland is both modern but not at all big; though this is my groove and felt quite at home. The church had a Martin Luther Playmobile set in its extremely tiny gift shop / ticket counter that I almost got. It’s mainly worth it for the view in the steeple. The church is relatively unfurnished otherwise.

We never went to any bars or nightlife, fyi. We jet lagged crashed that night, and then the next day started outdoor stuff. BTW, Puffin boat tour = boring, but Whale boat tour = fun. Just be careful doing food tour + whale tour, if you catch my drift.

We took the “golden circle” loop in one long day to see Þingvellir National Park, the geysers “The Geyser” and Gullfoss waterfall. Gullfoss was the most impressive, the geysers the least - at least if you’ve seen geysers elsewhere before. The nearby tourist trap looked like it had 100x more investment than the geysers themselves, which is a weird feature of Iceland right now, a lot of private investment spending a lot of money.

I would 100% recommend Golden Circle first and not last, since it’s a great way to start but will seem less impressive once you’ve seen the glaciers. There’s lots of helpful signs and materials and really no reason to get a guide. Supposedly if you have time there’s a diving activity in the lake in Þingvellir which sounded fun.

I think the next day we did the museums and the whale tours in Reykavik.

The next day east along the ring road toward Sölheimajökull to do some ice climbing. That was a blast, if maybe a bit short. Some girls in another party stripped down to their birthday suits for some Instagram photos across the crevice. Along that road there are several major waterfalls which we bumped into randomly, so give yourself time going that way to catch them.

The next day we drove all the way to Vatnajökull National Park which is where the OMG glaciers really are. If you´re in a camper they have a really nice campground outside of the basalt column waterfalls at Skaftafell. When we were there they were empty. We then did the Jarkolsarlon lagoon glacier boat thing and did some snowmobiling on the glacier itself - stupid expensive but a ton of fun. On the way back to Reyk we hit upon a random “Puffin” sign before the long metal bridge across the glacial washout, and a cute Icelandic girl who supposedly grew up on the nearby farm drove everyone out to a intermittent island where there were a ton of puffins.

There’s a ton to do in Iceland so i’m sure you can flesh out 12 days pretty quickly! We never rode horses (but, you know, Texas, so less interested in that) and weren’t even able to make the Blue Lagoon. We also never made it past the lagoon nor went around the north or west.

Wow, ok, that was long! Hope that whets your appetite!

And eat some marzipan/licorice candy for me.

Awesome! Thanks for your input! Just installed maps.me and will check it out.

I just looked up the entry fee for the blue lagoon and was rather shocked how much (95$) they want me to pay for a dip in some warm water ;)
Reckon I’ll give that a skip…

I’m primarily interested in landscapes & waterfalls, so even considering not driving into Reykjavik at all. (Are whale tours worthwile?)

I saw loads of puffins in Scotland, so thats not too high on the must see list.

Thanks for the tip to travel to the golden circle first. Was still unsure if I should travel clock or counterclockwise around the island. Guess I’ll head east first!

Hadn’t really given organized activities much thought, but will see what airbnb / tripadvisor suggest.

The only one we that we liked was the lagoon tours - those were pretty cool. Skip the ice caves in the summer, they’re super dirty.

I also highly recommend this hike - we couldn’t do the whole thing due to time & equipment limitations but even doing part-way was awesome

I just posted some impressions in the foto thread! The trip was very cool and though I had a great time, I’m not sure I’d do the trip that way again. If I should go back someday it’d have to be with a 4x4 to actually get around more and see some of the more dramatic landscapes!

ice (25)

Wow, great photos :)

I so hope that was spam for Iceland the supermarket chain.

I like to imagine there’s a person somewhere in Somalia or something who took the time to make that post and is now disappointed because it got flagged so quickly.

But really it was probably just an algorithm that made the same post on 20,000 other message boards at the same time and generated a couple hundred clicks.

Yay, internet.