What We Learned From Our Adventures in Iceland
- Aly & JT
- Jan 14
- 5 min read
We spend many hours researching for our trips. We search hotels, excursions, restaurants, where they are located, and what’s around. Nearly every detail to make sure we set ourselves up for a great experience. But you never know until you get there. That is exactly what happened for our stay in Iceland.
We arrived in Reykjavik early Friday for the first stop on this year’s holiday vacation. For the first time, we took advantage of Icelandair’s “stop over” option, which allows you to include up to 7 nights in their country before traveling to your next destination without extra fees added to your flight ticket. A convenient way to boost tourism by allowing travelers to visit the country as part of a longer trip. We decided 2 nights would be enough to see the frozen island.
Mistake number one. There’s no way to see the best parts of this beautiful country in two days, especially in winter. Nearly everything you want to see is close to a two-hour drive outside Reykjavik. Sights like the Katla ice caves and the small town of Vik are two and a half. With such short days during winter (the sun never fully came up during our stay), there isn’t enough daylight to drive to the sites and take them all in.
Mistake number two. Staying in Reykjavik. Traveling with an introvert, calling the capital and largest city your home base isn’t the best idea. And if you are more interested in seeing the country's natural beauty, you’re better off setting up closer to those sites. Head along the Golden Circle to one of several small towns like Selfoss or Vik. Flying into Hofn would put you even closer to Vatnajokull National Park, home of Europe’s largest glacier.
Mistake number three. To add insult to injury, we picked the wrong hotel in Reykjavik and the wrong days to be there. Although the Konsulat Hotel was nice and offered a little slice of history, its location in Centrum of the capital didn’t make for the best night’s sleep. When we searched on the map, the location seemed far enough away from the hustle and bustle. What we didn’t realize was the actual size of the blocks for the area. Unfortunately, after nearly 30 hours awake traveling with only a couple hours of nap to get us through, we had to listen to live music and a club's “boots and pants” thumping until 4:30 am. The weekends are not even the busiest days for tourists. Wednesday is. Next time, we’d plan to depart on Sunday, arrive on Monday morning, be gone before the crowds of midweek and the craziness of the weekend, and sleep like rocks in a quieter hotel.
Despite these miscues, we saw a glimpse of the awesomeness of Iceland packed into one full day. Gravel Tours took us on a nine-plus hour excursion to see a handful of the top sites along the southern route of the Golden Circle. Our guide, Christian, was terrific. A local Icelander and photographer, he knew the land, what to see, and had plenty of stories to share throughout the day. (He might have been part Viking!) The biggest drawback was not having more time at each stop.
We were picked up at 8:30 am to start the 2.5-hour drive to Skøgafoss, the first of two waterfalls for the day. Since the sun didn’t begin to peak from the horizon until 10:30 am, most of the drive was in darkness. Seeing the sun rise over the frozen terrain alone was mystical. Since we only had 25 minutes, we caught a few pictures from the base, slipping multiple times on the ice as we hustled in and out, then practically ran the 527 steps to the top for a quick selfie, some mental snapshots, and a speedy decent to be the last ones back on the bus.
Our reason for choosing this tour was our second stop. Seeing an actual ice cave of a glacier. We should mention our ride for the day, as this is where it came in handy. Not your everyday Mercedes Sprinter van, this modified version sat on a lofty lift kit and rolled around on 43” tires! We needed every bit of our monster van to veer off the paved roads and make the 45-minute detour through the hills and snow to reach the glacier. Created from the melting ice seeping through a crack, a Katla Glacier ice cave is actually a moving target. The glacier is constantly creeping along, despite actually shrinking, regularly moving an ice cave from place to place. Inside the cave were hundreds of layers of rock and volcanic ash revealing the glacier's historic path over time frozen within an icy window big enough to walk through. The mix of white, black, and ice blue was beautiful.
As we headed back towards Reykjavik, our next stop was the Reynisfjara black beach and cliffs. As soon as you step off the bus you hear massive waves crashing along the shore. Waves the biggest we’ve ever seen! Christian told us that sometimes the waves are so big they will actually launch boulders from the beach into the parking lot. Not just rocks. Boulders! The beach was a conflicting combination of the beautiful black sand, rocks, and boulders, the blue water, and the violence of the waves pounding. About 50
meters out the beach drops off which causes the waves to slam into the land creating an unusually loud crash. Add the sun hanging just over the water in the distance and the square columns of rock forming the surrounding cliffs and you’ve got a majestic scene. We didn’t get to see the remains of the crashed naval DC-3 airplane nearby. Just not enough time.
To finish the tour, we stopped at Seljalandsfoss. The second waterfall of the day, this one about 60 meters high. Seljalandsfoss River is fed by a melting glacier that flows over the waterfall and eventually into the North Atlantic Ocean. A bit more powerful than Skøgafoss, you could feel the pressure and the spray as you got close enough for pictures. In the summer you can walk behind the waterfall. The real attraction for our last stop was seeing the Aurora Borealis before loading back onto the bus for the drive home. With the sky not being the clearest due to rainy weather in Reykjavik, we considered ourselves lucky to have seen them. They weren’t the most glorious version you would see in sales brochures, but they were the real thing and placed a royal crown on an action-packed tour of the land.
Some costly mistakes were made to kick off this year’s adventure for sure. Our hotel situation hurt the most, costing us precious sleep needed for the rest of the trip. They didn’t ruin our stop though. We’d love a return visit to Iceland. What we saw was incredible and only a small fraction of what the island has to offer. Hopefully, we’ve learned from these mistakes and can do the next trip better. But we won’t know until we get back there.
Comments