Planes,
trains and automobiles - only without the trains...
Page
1: Introduction
Page 2: Tours, Car hire, Internal flights
Page 3: Whale watching, skiing and the North
Coast
Page 4: Volcanoes, craters, hot springs and lava
fields
Page 5: Skidoos and glacial lagoons
Page 6: Icecaps and hiking
Page 7: Reykjavic
It turns out that Iceland is fully geared up to this kind of tourism, and independent travellers need not feel they're selling out by going on such tours - after all, outside the summer weeks, you may find it hard to get around the country by any other means. In short, you can do almost anything from Reykjavik by jumping on an organised tour. You'll be sat on a bus or plane, whisked to multiple destinations for photo opportunities, then returned to the safety of the capital in time for tea. Note, there are no trains.
Whether you're into glacier tours, snow-mobiling, whale watching, hot springs or the afore-mentioned Gulfoss and Geyser, there's a day tour from Reykjavik to satisfy your every desire. As an example, a tour combining glacier snow-mobiling and an iceberg lagoon cruise costs about £160 each, including internal flight, buses and activities. If you're in a rush, or want to minimise your costs, you could feasibly go to Reykjavik for just two or three days and go on a different tour every day. Sure, you'll be a bit shell-shocked, but you'll have seen some amazing sights!
At this point I should mention a debt of thanks we have to the wonderfully helpful Larus Sigurdur Larusson, from Vestfjardaleid Travel for his invaluable tips and finding us places to stay at a time when Iceland was very busy.
This time round we fancied exploring Iceland at a more leisurely pace, so opted to spend seven days at three main locations: Reykjavik in the South West corner, Akureyri on the North coast, and Höfn / Skaftafell park in the South East. We wanted to also go whale watching and skidoo-ing! A car would be essential for certain portions...
Iceland's main highway is a 900 mile ring road which pretty much circles the coast all the way round, albeit chopping off the North East corner by cutting across the interior. The road may only have a single lane, but it's in great condition having only been completed in 1974, and certainly whenever we used it, there was very little traffic to worry about. While a 4-wheel drive is essential in the interior, you can easily get around the major roads with a basic 2-wheel drive vehicle - at least when there's not too much snow around!
Hiring a car isn't cheap: you're looking at about 12,000K (£90) per day for the cheapest 2 wheel drive with unlimited mileage. A drive around the entire ring road would itself make a great trip, but we decided to fly internally to our main destinations.
Air Iceland operates a number of internal flights, costing about 7000K (£50) per person each way, and compared to the UK internal flight experience, they're an absolute dream! Take Reykjavik domestic airport for instance: it's about a five minute taxi ride from the centre of town, and check-in is no more than 30 mins before flying, with most locals leisurely strolling in about 10 minutes before! Then you literally walk out of the tiny terminal building and onto an equally tiny plane, and you're off! You could leave your hotel and literally be in the air about half an hour later, which is an amazing experience for anyone who's schlepped their way out to "London" Luton or Stanstead just to be delayed hours for a cheap internal flight.
Most of Iceland's internal flights also seem to take between 40 and 60 minutes, and the experience at the destination is equally quick and painless: the plane lands, you step out and into the terminal, wait about two minutes for your luggage, then make the five or so minute trip into town.
To put things into perspective, we had one flight which landed in Reykjavik at 8:10pm. We managed to get our luggage, clear the airport, catch a cab to our hotel, check in and make it into a bar by 8:30pm. In contrast, we landed at Heathrow at 8:10pm and didn't make it home to South London until 11pm. Sure, London is considerably bigger than Reykjavik, but it's refreshing to be able to use flights so efficiently.
The bad news is at the time of writing in August 2001, was that Air Iceland was not making money on many of the routes and was considering dropping them. This would be an enormous shame, for locals and tourists alike who want to quickly get from A to B, or for when conditions make road travel difficult or indeed impossible.
