Iceland

Land at Keflavík, collect the van

You arrive on a night of aeroplane sleep. Day 1 is deliberately the lightest of the trip — the mistake first-timers make is booking a full day on top of a red-eye.

Before driving anywhere, sit in the car park and find everything: gas hob, water tank and filler, waste tap, heater switch and its fuel source, the 12V and 230V circuits, and where the electric hook-up cable lives. Ten minutes here saves an evening later.

Þingvellir — walk down into the rift the point

Almannagjá is the eastern edge of the North American plate, and the path runs along the bottom of it. The valley floor between here and the Eurasian wall has dropped as the two pulled apart.

At the foot of it sits the Alþingi site, founded 930 AD — the oldest surviving parliament in the world, held annually in a crack between two continents. That combination does not exist anywhere else, and it is why this is the first real stop.

Geysir, Gullfoss and Kerið

Strokkur goes every 5–10 minutes; Geysir itself is dormant, which surprises people who came for it by name. Gullfoss drops in two tiers into a canyon — the upper and lower viewpoints are genuinely different photographs, so do both.

Kerið is a small red crater lake, a small fee, and ten minutes. Worth it on the way to Laugarvatn.

Laugarvatn — and the pool habit starts here

Lakeside campsite with Fontana geothermal baths on the shore. This is where the trip establishes its rhythm: the pool is the shower.

Every Icelandic town has a heated outdoor pool with hot pots, open late, at roughly a tenth of the price of the tourist lagoons. In a van that solves washing, warming up and the evening in one stop. Shower naked and thoroughly before entering — it is enforced and it is not a suggestion.

Seljalandsfoss — and the one beside it nobody finds

You walk behind Seljalandsfoss. You will get soaked — this needs waterproof trousers and a proper shell, not a jacket, and the path is slick.

Then walk 500 m north along the same path to Gljúfrabúi, which is hidden inside a cleft in the cliff. You wade a shallow stream into a chamber with the fall coming down through a hole in the roof. Most visitors never see it because it is invisible from the car park.

Skógafoss and Kvernufoss

Skógafoss is 60 m and thunderous, with stairs up the side to a top-down view and the start of the Fimmvörðuháls trail. It is also crowded by mid-morning.

Kvernufoss is the fix. Behind the Skógar museum, twenty minutes on foot, another waterfall you can walk behind — and usually almost empty.

Sólheimajökull glacier walk book ahead

A glacier tongue you can walk onto with crampons and a guide, twenty minutes off Route 1. Never walk onto a glacier unguided — the crevasses are covered and the terminus is unstable.

Book either this or Falljökull at Skaftafell tomorrow. Doing both is repetition at US$105 a head.

Dyrhólaey and Reynisfjara care needed

Dyrhólaey is a sea arch you can drive up to; the cliffs will be empty because the puffins left in mid-August.

Reynisfjara is the one stop on this trip where the rule matters more than the photograph. Sneaker waves run far higher up the beach than the previous ten suggest, and people have died here. A landslide and severe erosion in February 2026 narrowed the shoreline and largely destroyed one viewing platform, so access is now managed by safety zone.

Vík — night 3

Big campsite, and Krónan is across the road, which makes this the best restock point between Selfoss and Höfn. The black church on the hill above town is the photograph everyone takes of Vík itself.

Fjaðrárgljúfur and the Laki lava

Fjaðrárgljúfur is a 100 m serpentine canyon lined with moss, with a rim path along the top. No entrance fee; lower car park 1,000 ISK, upper car park free.

Then Route 1 crosses Eldhraun — the moss-covered lava from the 1783 Laki eruption, which killed roughly a fifth of Iceland’s population and cooled European harvests badly enough to show up in French bread prices. Do not walk on the moss; it takes decades to regrow.

Svartifoss — the biggest walk of the trip

Basalt columns fan out behind the fall like organ pipes; the same geometry inspired the ceiling of Hallgrímskirkja, which you see on the last day.

Sources disagree on the route, so take the range: 5.4 km return with ~120 m of gain on the direct path, or 7.1 km with 310 m for the full Sjónarnípa circuit with the glacier viewpoint. Decide at the visitor centre based on the weather.

Skaftafell campsite — night 4

Inside Vatnajökull National Park, at the trailhead — which is as close to the usual van advantage as Iceland’s campsite rule allows you to get. Falljökull glacier tours leave from the Tröll base here: groups of ten, minimum age 12.

Fjallsárlón first — deliberately added

Six kilometres before the famous one, and almost nobody stops. Smaller lagoon, glacier wall much closer, and you will often have it to yourself.

Order matters here. Going to Fjallsárlón after Jökulsárlón makes it feel like a lesser version. Going before makes Jökulsárlón feel enormous.

Jökulsárlón the big one

Icebergs calve off Breiðamerkurjökull and drift across a lagoon that did not exist a century ago — it is meltwater, and it is still growing. The channel out to the sea runs under the road bridge; watch a berg go through it.

Amphibious and Zodiac boat trips run in September. Weather-dependent, so book same-day if the morning looks settled rather than committing in advance.

Diamond Beach — manage the expectation

Icebergs washed back ashore onto black sand, across the road from the lagoon. It is the picture everyone has seen.

It is also entirely dependent on what happened to wash up that morning. Some days it is covered in car-sized blocks lit like glass; other days it is bare sand. If it is bare, it is bare — do not spend an hour waiting for ice to arrive. The surf here is the same Atlantic that makes Reynisfjara dangerous.

Stokksnes and Vestrahorn added

A 454 m black gabbro massif rising straight off a black dune beach, with a tidal lagoon in front of it that mirrors the peaks when the wind drops. It is the best mountain photograph in Iceland and it is a ten-minute detour off Route 1.

Private land — there is a gate fee, paid at the Viking Café. Flat walking on sand and boardwalk, no climb.

Höfn — night 5

Harbour town under the ice cap, and the langoustine capital of Iceland — this is the one night worth eating out rather than cooking in the van. Pool in town for the shower.

Over the pass to Seyðisfjörður — night 6

From Egilsstaðir, Route 93 climbs over a 620 m pass and drops in switchbacks to a fjord town with a rainbow-painted street leading to a blue wooden church. It is the prettiest small town in Iceland and the ferry from Denmark still docks here.

Dettifoss — take the west road the loudest

The most powerful waterfall in Europe by volume — roughly 193 m wide and 44 m high, carrying grey glacial meltwater off Vatnajökull. You feel it through the ground before you see it.

The road choice matters in a camper. Route 862 on the west bank is paved and is the one to take. Route 864 on the east bank is gravel — legal in a 2WD but rough, slow, and the kind of surface that generates windscreen and underbody claims. The west side also has the better viewing platforms.

Ásbyrgi added

A horseshoe canyon 3.5 km long with 100 m walls and a wooded floor. Geologically it was cut by catastrophic glacial floods; Norse myth says it is a hoofprint left by Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse. Short flat walks from the car park.

Mývatn — night 7, and the first night it is actually dark

Astronomical darkness at Mývatn on 10 September runs 22:11–23:30 — 1 h 19 m. It is the first genuinely dark night of the trip, and there is no town light for tens of kilometres.

Set an alarm. Check vedur.is’s aurora page before bed: it maps cloud cover against activity, which is the combination that decides it. Clear sky beats high activity every time.

Hverir — the one that smells unlike anywhere

A geothermal field at the foot of Námafjöll: ochre and grey mud pots boiling at the surface, steam vents roaring out of the ground under pressure, and no vegetation at all because the soil is too acidic to support any.

It smells strongly of hydrogen sulphide and that is the honest experience of it. Stay on the marked paths — the crust between the pots is thin and the mud underneath is at boiling point. Day 11 is deliberately a ~60 km rest day after two 260 km-plus ones.

Dimmuborgir, Hverfjall and Grjótagjá

Dimmuborgir is a labyrinth of lava pillars formed when a lava lake drained away and left the hollow columns standing. Marked loops from 10 minutes to an hour.

Hverfjall is a 2,500-year-old tephra crater you can walk the rim of — the rim is about 3 km around, 30–45 minutes up from the car park, roughly an hour to circle, 1.5–2 hours total. It is exposed; skip it in strong wind.

Grjótagjá is a hot spring in a lava cave. Look, do not swim — it has run too hot since the Kröflu fires and it is private land.

Mývatn Nature Baths added

The northern answer to the Blue Lagoon: same milky alkaline water, a fraction of the price, a fraction of the queue, and a view over the lake and the lava field instead of a car park.

Go at dusk. You are in warm water when the sky goes dark, which sets you up for the second aurora night without having to get cold first.

Húsavík — whales book ahead

Skálfandi bay is the most reliable whale water in Iceland. September species are humpback and minke; blue whales are early-season only, and the puffins have gone — operators stop selling combined whale-and-puffin trips from 15 August.

Take the morning sailing: the bay is calmest early, and it leaves the afternoon for Goðafoss and Akureyri.

GeoSea afterwards — clifftop geothermal seawater baths looking out over the same bay you have just been on.

Goðafoss

Right on Route 1, thirty seconds from the car park, and still one of the best waterfalls on the island — a 12 m horseshoe in the Skjálfandafljót.

The name means “waterfall of the gods”: when Iceland converted to Christianity around the year 1000, the lawspeaker Þorgeir is said to have thrown his pagan idols in.

Akureyri — night 9, and laundry

The north’s real town: proper restaurants, a botanical garden that grows things it should not at this latitude, and the traffic lights with red hearts instead of circles.

Hamrar campsite is the best facilities on the route — forested, hot showers, clean toilets, laundry, wi-fi, cooking shelter, around US$18 an adult. Do the laundry here. It is day 9 and there is not a better chance before the flight home.

The longest drive of the trip — break it on purpose

~390 km, about five hours of driving. This is the day the trip could go wrong: it is long, it is mostly transit, and it comes after eight days of early starts.

Leave early, and stop three times whether or not you feel like it. Hvítserkur, a 15 m basalt sea stack that looks like an animal drinking; the Hvammstangi seal colony on the way past; then Hraunfossar, where a waterfall seeps out of the face of a lava field along nearly a kilometre of cliff, with Deildartunguhver — Europe’s highest-flow hot spring — a few minutes further on.

Kirkjufell, and Snæfellsnes properly best value

Snæfellsnes is called “Iceland in miniature” and it earns it — glacier, volcano, lava field, black beach, bird cliffs and fishing villages inside 90 km.

Kirkjufell with Kirkjufellsfoss in front of it is the most photographed mountain in the country; it is a two-minute walk from a car park across the road from the campsite. Go at first light, before the Reykjavík day-tour buses arrive around 11:00.

Djúpalónssandur and Snæfellsjökull

A black pebble beach with the rusted remains of the trawler Epine GY7, wrecked in 1948, still lying scattered across it — left deliberately as a memorial, so do not move anything. Four lifting stones sit at the top of the path; fishermen were graded by which one they could get onto a ledge, and the lightest is 23 kg.

Above it, Snæfellsjökull — the glacier-capped volcano Jules Verne used as the way in to the centre of the earth.

Arnarstapi to Hellnar, and the black church

A 2.5 km coastal path between two villages along columnar basalt cliffs, sea arches and a fulmar colony — flat, easy, and the best short walk on the trip. Walk it one way and back, or leave the van at one end.

Then Búðakirkja, a small black timber church standing alone on a lava field, which is the other photograph everyone takes on this peninsula.

Reykjavík, Laugardalur — night 11

Year-round campsite next to the city’s biggest pool, a short hop from the van depot in the morning. Sleeping here rather than out on the peninsula is deliberate — it removes a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the departure day.

By 15 September Reykjavík has 4.5 hours of astronomical dark. City light spoils it, but if the vedur.is map is green, drive fifteen minutes out to Grótta on the Seltjarnarnes point.

Reykjavík, Sky Lagoon, and the drive to KEF

Hallgrímskirkja’s tower for the coloured-roof view — and note the facade, which is basalt columns, the same geometry you walked up to at Svartifoss on day 7. Then Harpa and the old harbour.

Sky Lagoon if the flight is late enough: better designed than the Blue Lagoon, an infinity edge onto the Atlantic, and it is on the road to Keflavík rather than a detour.

Refuel before the depot, not at it. Rental fuel charges are punitive, and the station at the airport knows exactly who its customers are.