Iceland: Stunning, Spectacular, Amazing, Breathtaking, Beautiful, and Expensive. A trip to Iceland should be on everyone’s bucket list. Aside from the astounding beauty, it’s relatively easy to get to there with daily flights or connections from most US, European, and Asian cities with very reasonable and even extreme discount airfares. That’s the good news. What that means, however, is that Iceland has been discovered; by the Americans . . . and the Canadians . . . and the Brits . . . and the French.. . . and the Germans . . . and the Japanese . . . . and the Chinese . . . and everyone else.
Our trip in April 2017 arrived in Reykjavik from the Faroe Islands and spent two days exploring around the city before heading off on a ten-day anti-clockwise drive around the island. Iceland is roughly the size of the US State of Virginia and Route 1, Ring Road makes a giant loop around it. We booked our entire trip through Nordic Visitors. Our Nordic Visitors Travel Consultant, Helga, prepared a customized itinerary for us that started with hiring a 4×4 SUV with studded tires. It also included all of our hotel and excursion bookings along the way. When we arrived, the rental car company had a tote bag waiting for us with an Iceland mobile phone, road maps, an atlas, and a spiral bound book with our ten-day daily itineraries. Each day’s itinerary included suggestions for stops along our drive with vouchers for our pre-booked hotels. The 100 page book was also a complete travel guide of Iceland that included its own maps with tour suggestions and Icelandic travel tips. Our total price for this service which included the car hire, twelve nights lodging with breakfasts, and the itinerary was 677,000ISK ($6,400USD). Well worth it!
Driving in Iceland is straightforward. All of the road signs are in English even if the locations are Icelandic with too many consonants and special characters like æ, ø, đ, ý, ö, Æ, and ó randomly sprinkled about. If, just as a hypothetical example, you don’t have an Icelandic keyboard on your mobile phone GPS, you will never find the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur where you are supposed to stay the night. You might even, still a purely hypothetical example, drive right through Kirkjubæjarklaustur and drive another 40km (24mi) in a late winter Icelandic snow storm before you realize it. Traffic conventions are similar to the rest of the world. Green means Go, Red means Stop, don’t be an asshole. You do, however, need to really pay attention to road conditions if you are going to drive the Ring Road off season, and April is still off season. Every day you should check the Island Road Conditions at www.road.is because when they say conditions can change quickly they mean it. When you hire your car, you have the opportunity to purchase, “Sand and Ash Insurance” for a mere 4,000ISK ($38US) per day. Yes, your math is correct: $456US for “Sand and Ash Insurance” on a twelve-day car hire to protect you from loss if your hire car gets sand-blasted to bare metal from the wind and blowing, “Sand and Ash” . . . or a from volcano eruption. Just do it. This will be your first of many startling experiences on the cost of traveling in Iceland. Also, per the hypothetical example above, pay the extortion for a GPS with an Icelandic keyboard.
Our itinerary looked something like this:
Day 1, March 31: receive the car on arrival at Keflavík – spend the night in Reykjavík
Day 2, April 1: Diving with Dive Iceland at Silfra – spend the night in Reykjavík
Day 3, April 2: spend the night in Golden Circle area
Day 4, April 3: spend the night in Kirkjubæjarklaustur area
Day 5, April 4: spend the night in Höfn area
Day 6, April 5: spend the night in Egilsstaðir area
Day 7, April 6: spend the night in Lake Mývatn area
Day 8, April 7: a second night in Lake Mývatn area
Day 9, April 8: spend the night in Skagafjörður area
Day 10, April 9: spend the night in Snæfellsnes Peninsula
Day 11, April 10: spend the night in Borgarnes area
Day 12, April 11: spend the night in reykjavik
Day 13, April 12: departure
We did not spend an additional couple of days touring the Western Fjords because so many roads and activities were still operating on a Winter schedule and were closed. The summer season in Iceland pretty well runs from May through August. April and September are sort of shoulder season. October through March you will find many roads and activities closed. Even in April, there were some minor modifications to our itinerary to accommodate a storm in the Eastern Fjords. This itinerary resulted in 2,865km (1,780mi) or somewhere around 250km (150mi) or 4 hours driving per day. Our drive included a drive down the Route 93 grade to the village of Seyðisfjörður, the same route that Ben Stiller’s character skateboarded down in the movie, “The Secret Life of Walter Middy.”
Highlight tours and sights of our twelve-day tour:
Dining in Iceland is a pleasant experience that you won’t forget. We found ourselves saying “Wow!” at every single meal. Sometimes we Wow’ed at the wonderful flavors and textures of the delicious Arctic Char which is a salmonid fish that thrives in the many fresh water lakes and rivers. Other times, we Wow’ed at the expensive prices. We averaged, as in the median price we paid for dinners, 35,000ISK ($320USD) for meals with modest bottles of wine. The best single meal we had was actually our last night in Reykjavik at the restaurant, Apotek. The worst thing that we ate was Kæstur Háharl (fermented shark) at the Shark Museum on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, but his may actually just be a cruel joke to play on tourists.
We have listed the hotels where we stayed along with their web links and our summary impressions in the Where to Stay section in the Iceland destination on our web page, www.opendoortravelers.com. Nordic Visitors did a good job of screening and booking hotels for us along our route and mapping out a doable Ring Road route. During our trip around the island, we were rarely out of 3G or 4G cellular connectivity and all of our hotels had reliable WiFi internet. In addition, we did not run across a single shopkeeper or hotel desk clerk who did not speak excellent English.
Iceland is hyped as a remote wilderness experience and there are certainly remote and wild adventures to be had but truth-be-told; many of these adventures are within a few hours of civilization. Most of the excursions available out of Reykjavik are Adventure-by-the-Hour spoon-fed tourism. It’s not unfair to say that Iceland is becoming a worldwide tourist destination similar to the US Hawaiian Islands. Various sources report Iceland’s annual tourism as 1.1 million visitors annually which is nearly four times the resident population of a little over 300,000 people. We were pleased to make the tourism number 1,100,002 in 2017 and to cross Iceland’s Ring Road off of our Bucket List. We hope to go back some day for a mini-trip in the summer season to explore the Western Fjords, actually “Do” the Silfra Dive, and maybe even take in some Icelandic Golf amongst the sheep and horses.
Phil & Diane
[Disclosure: we were compensated with a complementary lava cave tour by Nordic Visitor for booking a large comprehensive package but received no other compensation from the businesses mentioned in this blog.]
While each day on the trail and each tea house was unique and special, the days also blur together looking back at them. Particular highlights on the trail include crossing the famous Hillary Bridge; hiking in the shadow of the iconic Ama Dablam mountain; views of Mount Everest; a blessing at the Tengboche Monastery complete with Khatas (ceremonial white scarves) and Kalavas (traditional red string tied around the neck or wrist); and of course camping at EBC with “High Definition” views of Mount Everest, Mount Nuptse, Mount Lhotse, and the dozens of unnamed 6,000 and 7,000 meter peaks in the Solukhumbu Valley. By far the best highlight for me personally, was celebrating my birthday by ice climbing in the Khumbu Icefall and getting BIRTHDAY CAKE baked in a Dutch Oven at 17,500 ft at EBC.
The food was all good with generous portions but eventually became a little monotonous. Breakfast was generally some combination of fried eggs, scrambled eggs, omelet eggs, hard boiled eggs, toast, pancakes, and porridge. Dinner was generally some combination of Dal Bhat RaRa Soup, and Momos. Sometimes you could get spaghetti and meatballs and sometimes you could get chicken but conventional wisdom said to stay away from meat dishes after day three, above Namche Bazaar. Bringing some of your own food, particularly protein packages of chicken and comfort snacks you enjoy also goes a long way to enjoying the trip.
Generally, the Tea Houses are un-heated, small rooms with two twin beds. Tea House construction is commonly cinderblock external construction with single-pane windows and plywood walls. Our Tea Houses all had hinged doors with some form of lock (maybe a skeleton key, maybe a pad lock). We also had a mix of en-suite bathrooms and common toilets. Some Tea Houses offered hot showers for 1,000NPR – Nepalese Rupee – (~$7.50USD) and some didn’t. Nearly all offered some form of internet connectivity with varying degrees of success for a fee of around 800NPR ($6.00USD) for 24 hours, and all offered some form of clean water for 150NPR to 300NPR ($1.00USD to $2.00USD) per liter. Many trekkers simply use iodine purification tabs and trust the water from a common tap. While the ease and cost of buying water for a couple of weeks is convenient, Trekkers should be prepared with some form of water purification as a backup. In addition, our guides provided us with boiling water to fill our Nalgene bottles each night. These provided nice bed warmers as well as some clean water for the next days trek.
Temperatures on the trail during our trek were very pleasant. Daytime hiking temps tended to be in the high 40’s F (9 C). While the Tea Houses are all unheated, the bunks generally come with some sort of duvet or comforter to put over your sleeping bag for extra warmth. With nighttime outside temps in the high 20’s F (-3C) the inside temps tended to run in the low 40’s F (+5C). On our trip, we had one day of steady rain which made the trail slick and made the day generally uncomfortable. There is a certain amount of suffering and hardship that comes with any worthwhile mountaineering endeavor. Long days, steep climbs, aching muscles, and cold wet conditions kind of come with the territory.
Of course, climbing over a small rise and pulling into EBC on the ninth day of the Trek was the pinnacle of the trip. After many years as a mountaineer, following in the footsteps of Hillary, Norgay, Unsoeld, the Whittakers, Messner, Fischer, Hall, Purja and so many others, this trip for me was bit of a pilgrimage. The opportunity to spend two nights at EBC and go ice climbing in the Khumbu Icefall was an epic experience of a lifetime and the Trekkers, Climbers, Western Guides, and Sherpa Guides we spent a couple of weeks with made the trip that much more memorable.
Fast forward a few days after a helicopter ride from the village of Pheriche back to Kathmandu with Wayne suffering from dysentery and me suffering from mild AMS. The first thing we did was take a hot shower, eat a cheeseburger, and drink a cold beer. The next thing we did was to meet Karma and Sanam Sherpa from The Small World. The Small World is a non-profit operating in Nepal with a mission to educate young women and break the cycle of poverty, abuse, and trafficking that affect so many Nepalese woman. They also have a US based 501(c)3 charitable organization called The Small World USA. Our local Columbia Center Rotary Club of Kennewick is working with The Small World and the Rotary Club of Kathmandu on joint projects to support The Small World mission.
Phil Ohl
[DIsclaimer: No goods or services were provided in exchange for inclusion in this article]
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