In June last year, I had to move out of the apartment I had been sharing with four friends, as the lease expired. For the first time in my life, I found myself homeless, with nowhere to call home. I was not penniless, but the tourism boom in Iceland has had a negative effect on the local housing market. Many people are now renting their properties on short-term lets through websites such as Air B"n"B or have converted them into guesthouses, instead of renting to local people. Of course, from a business point of view this makes sense, if your main motive is maximisation of profit. Short-term lets are far more lucrative than long-term lets. There are even many stories of local residents only being offered 9 month contracts from September-May and asked to leave during the summer so that they can rent the property to tourists visiting in peak season when the highest prices can be charged. I couldn't find any suitable property, and there was virtually nothing available.
The challenge with every adverse circumstance is whether we will let it destroy us, or whether we can turn it round and make it work for us. In this circumstance, I realised that it would be cheaper to travel around Iceland in my car with a few friends, staying with people we knew and in cheap hotels, rather than try to rent through Air BnB myself. I could work remotely with my laptop as long as I had wifi, so me and three friends took off on a 3 week trip around Iceland. Saving money and having an adventure at the same time!
Route 1, or the "ring road" as it is nicknamed, circles the entire island nation of Iceland, linking up many of its major towns, and providing a great tourist route which can be travelled easily in a week. As the interior of Iceland is too desolate for habitation, most of Iceland's population lives around the coast. So important is Route 1 for Iceland´s transport infrastructure, that when Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010 and the resultant floods destroyed the road at one place, people living in the South East could only go to Reykjavik by going all the way round the ring road via the east and north. A 90 minute journey of 125km suddenly became a 14 hour journey of over 1000km! Needless to say, construction workers worked quickly to restore the breach.
Anyway, now to the photos. As I have photographed the stretch of the road south from Reykjavik to Vík many times before, my photographs focus on the areas I haven't taken many shots in.
I could tell you about the Hveragerði hot springs, Seljalandsfoss, Skógarfoss which are all to be found in the first few hours on the journey south not far off the ring road. But there are other places which are worth a small detour.
Firstly there is the glacial tongue, Sólheimajökull, which is part of the large glacier Mýrdálsjökull. It's one of the few places that you can drive up to the end of a glacier with just a short walk to reach the edge. There are several different options for glacier walking tours here, but we just had only brief time to stop.
Back on the main road, we continued our journey towards Vík. The best place to view the black sand beaches is from the rocky outcrop of Dýrhólaey, which can be found as a right hand turn before Vík itself. The view from here is one of the most magnificent in Iceland, where you can see for miles along endless black sand beaches. The view from above the church in the village of Vík itself is also pretty memorable.
After Vík, the road lies along flat land, but the feeling of space and wilderness you get is incredible. The road continues through vast plains, lava fields and black sands. One of my favourite points is the approach to the huge sea cliff Lógmagnúpur, which rises dramatically out of the plain to a grand height of 767 metres.
The road then continues through endless black sands alongside the huge glacier Vatnajökull, the 2nd largest glacier in Europe and at 8,100 sq km, covers 8% of Iceland!
One of the most spectacular places to stop is at the famous Jökulsárlon glacial lagoon, where a glacial tongue from Vatnajökull melts into an icy lagoon before making its way out to sea. As I have taken so many pics here before, I didn't take any camera shots here , but I have posted a few taken back in November 2013, where I happened to be there at the right time to see a man paddleboarding casually in the lagoon!
After Jökulsárlón, we continued for another hour's journey and stopped for the night at Höfn, in the far south-eastern corner of Iceland. It's a beautiful, tranquil, understated little place which sits on a peninsula in the midst of an enclosed fjord.
This is part one of a two part blog. Later this week I will post about the vastly under-rated East Fjords as our journey continued its winding way through one of the most spectacular parts of Iceland. Please check out these and other photos taken from around the ring road here: http://www.nordicadventurer.com/ring-road/
Look out for the next instalment later this week!