If you have plenty of time for Iceland,
and I'm talking at least seven, eight, nine days,
there is no experience quite like driving the Ring Road.
The Ring Road is Iceland's ultimate road trip.
It's an 800-mile highway that goes all the way around
the perimeter of the island of Iceland.
And if you take the Ring Road, you're going to see
pretty much the best that Iceland has to offer.
It's a total of about 25 or 30 hours of driving
when you factor in all of the little
side trips and stopovers for views.
So divide that by the number of days you have.
You can understand if it's 30 hours of driving
and you have six days, you're driving five hours a day.
So this is a real serious commitment of time.
If you have more time than that,
you can slow down a little bit
and drive a little bit less or linger in a few places.
Let me tell you a little bit about
some of the logistics of driving the Ring Road
in case you're intrigued by this.
First of all, it's a pretty easy road to drive.
Almost all of it is paved, there are a few unpaved stretches
but even a two wheel drive car can handle
the unpaved stretches if you go at a reasonable speed.
It's just a lot of miles.
You're putting on a lot of miles,
but the nice thing is the scenery changes everywhere you go.
So as you drive around the Ring Road, you'll be amazed
at the variety of Icelandic landscapes that you have.
Logistically, there's a couple of ways to go.
If you're going to go in the summer,
which is the best time to go because of the long hours
of daylight and the roads are going to be clear,
you probably are wise to reserve accommodations in advance.
Which means that about every five hours of driving
you're going to want to spend the night.
There's a limited number of accommodations in Iceland
and they fill up quickly in the summertime.
It's a little frustrating sometimes
to be tied into having to spend the night in certain places
so some people actually like to rent a camper.
And this is a popular option that lets you
be a little bit more flexible and have a
little bit more give and take as you go.
In Iceland, you can basically camp
not just about anywhere, there are a few restrictions,
but they're generally pretty lenient
about if there's a rural parking lot like this,
you're welcome to pull up and spend the night.
But check locally to make sure that
you're okay before you commit to it.
The trick with the Ring Road is because it involves
so much driving it usually ends up being
whether you're in a camper or whether you're in hotels,
a lot of one night stays and that can get a little tedious.
So you want to pace yourself and consider
partway through maybe taking a couple of nights
to linger and catch your breath.
Even if you have to do it quickly,
it's really well worth it.
I'm going to narrate the Ring Road itinerary
going clockwise around the island.
It works either way, you can do it
the other way around as well.
I like going clockwise 'cause the scenery here
at the beginning is a little less spectacular
and by going clockwise it just sort of gets better
and better as you go the rest of the way around.
Notice that the Ring Road actually passes along
the South Coast, which I've already described.
It's also pretty easy to tie the
Ring Road into the Golden Circle.
So a lot of the things that I've already described
can be sort of spliced into the Ring Road itinerary.
Alright, let's take off.
This is going to be a whirlwind trip
around Iceland in about seven days.
Heading north from Reykjavik, first you pass through
West Iceland which is a really nice landscape.
Not as dramatic as some other parts of the country,
but certainly a nice foretaste of what you're about to see.
There's a beautiful little town called Borgarnes
that has a really interesting museum
about the settlement period.
Also in West Iceland, there's a lava tube
you can tour called Vidgelmir.
I mention this one, but there's a couple of others as well.
If you're interested in volcanoes in Iceland,
there's about three place around Iceland
where you can actually go into a volcanic cave.
And it's interesting compared to a limestone cave,
which is what we usually see,
because limestone caves are formed over many eons.
Volcanic caves are formed almost overnight.
It's something where the eruption happens and as soon as
it cools, you've got completely new rock formations.
And it's also brightly colorful.
So I would say you don't have to go to
this one in West Iceland, Vidgelmir,
but consider splicing a volcanic cave tour
somewhere into your explorations of Iceland.
Also in West Iceland, for example you can stop off at
this crater called Grabrok which has a trail around the top
offering spectacular views over the countryside.
This is just bombarding you with gorgeous views to get you
a sense of what you'll see if you drive the Ring Road.
The next stage of the Ring Road is through North Iceland.
And North Iceland actually to me has some of my
favorite little corners of the country.
One of the best museums in Iceland is this place, Glaumbær.
This is an open air folk museum
where you can see how traditionally
Icelanders would live in sod walled settlements,
houses of interconnected sod tunnels
connected to different rooms.
And you can actually walk through here and learn about
the way traditional Icelanders would have lived.
You can step into the bedroom where everybody in the house
would live together and learn little facts.
For example, in a room like this the women would often
have the bunks closer to the windows
because they did the fine work spinning and knitting
and the men would have the bunks farther from the windows.
They didn't need the light quite so much.
I love to find these little off the beaten path museums
where you can really learn a lot about Icelandic culture.
That's one of my favorites.
From Glaumbær, you could take a shortcut
on the main Ring Road but this is the place
where I would take a detour from the official Ring Road,
devote a couple of extra hours
to driving the Troll Peninsula.
This is a dramatic road that takes you as far north
as you're going to go in Iceland.
You're not quite at the Arctic Circle,
but from the northernmost parts of this road
you're actually able to see the Arctic Circle.
You're really that close.
The other reason I would do the Troll Peninsula drive
is that you get to see this beautiful town, Siglufjordur.
You'll notice a lot of Icelandic names end with fjordur.
That's the Norwegian word fjord,
it's just basically an inlet and usually the inlet has
a name and the town that's on the inlet has the same name.
Siglufjordur.
There's a number of reasons why I really enjoy this town.
Obviously it has a spectacular setting
and it's just a charming town to explore and spend time in.
It also has an excellent museum, The Herring Era Museum.
And you know, I never thought I would get excited
about the herring industry, but this museum
actually achieved that because it explains how in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries,
this little tiny village as far north as you can go
on Iceland had a thriving herring industry
that was so powerful that is powered the entire Icelandic
economy and actually helped lead to the independence
of Iceland because it let Iceland be economically viable.
And you can hike through these buildings
and see some of the traditional ships
and imagine how way back when a hundred years ago
there were thousands of cans of herring
and dozens of docks sticking out from Siglufjordur,
each one with several ships.
You can even go into the living quarters
of the so-called herring girls.
And these were the young women
who would come in every summer to salt and barrel up
the herring on assembly lines out front.
Again, it's really fun to be in these middle of nowhere
places and find that there's a really interesting museum.
In general, I would say Icelandic museums are excellent.
They do a really good job of teaching their history,
even in small towns like this.
As you finish up the drive around the Troll Peninsula,
you come into Iceland's second city, Akureyri.
I'm using the word city charitably.
It's a town of about 18,000 people.
Just to give you a sense of the sparsely populated nature
of Iceland, the second biggest city has 18,000 people.
It looks and feels like a mini Reykjavik.
It even has a church by that same architect
who did the famous church in Reykjavik.
There's a little bit of rivalry I think
between this city and Reykjavik.
But this is a great place just
to catch your breath, stock up.
It has a nice variety of restaurants.
And then from there, you're going to head east
to I think in some ways my favorite part of Iceland.
Unfortunately, it's a six or seven hour drive from Reykjavik
so you only do this if you're doing the Ring Road.
And that is a place called Myvatn.
Myvatn is a beautiful lake in a volcanic part of Iceland.
I don't like the lake so much, it's all of the amazing
volcanic landscapes and the variety of volcanic
and geothermal landscapes that surround the lake.
If you remember this diagram of the line
that runs through the middle of Iceland between the
North American plate and the Eurasian plate,
we're talking about this part of that line, Myvatn.
And you can imagine that this has always been
a very geothermally and volcanically active area.
At a place called Skutustadir, you can see pseudocraters.
These aren't craters, they're pseudocraters.
They were formed when giant bubbles of molten rock
rose to the surface of the lake and popped.
So they're not a traditional crater, but a popped bubble.
Literally a 10-minute drive away from
that place, you come to Dimmuborgir.
This is a name that literally means dark castles.
And this is a totally different kind of volcanic landscape.
This was a part that used to be underneath the water
of the lake and liquid magma leaked up through the lake bed
and solidified as it worked its way up towards the surface.
And there are some beautiful hiking trails here
where you can walk around and feel
like you're on another planet.
Another one of my favorite attractions in this
part of Iceland is the Myvatn Nature Baths.
I mentioned earlier, you have the Blue Lagoon
which is the most famous, but there are some other premium
thermal baths that are kind of a combination
between a touristy-oriented bath and a local bath.
Myvatn is my favorite, it's about half the price
of the Blue Lagoon and a very similar concept.
It's a little bit smaller but a great place to rest up
and get your energy up before you
continue on the rest of the Ring Road.
Not far from all of these places, still in the Myvatn area,
you'll see factories and geothermal plants
hissing away in the countryside.
This is one of my favorite spots to get out
and go for a stroll, it's called Namafjall.
And you can get out here and wander through.
It's sort of like Yellowstone if you've been there.
This incredible landscape, this is called a fumarole.
This is a vent for geothermal steam
that's being built up under the surface
and it just hisses like a teakettle 24/7.
Just a pile of rocks.
It's really an amazing place just to walk through.
And it's just a two minute drive off the side of the road.
Very easy to get to, easy to stroll through.
Not too far from there, again, this is all within about a
half hour's drive of each other, is a valley called Krafla
where you can actually go to a visitor's center
at one of these geothermal power plants.
And there's lots of great hiking
opportunities in this area as well.
If you want to linger a little bit longer
in this north part of Iceland,
this is an area that's about 45 minutes away
from the lake that I just talked about,
a beautiful little town called Husavik
which is known for its whale watching.
I mentioned early in Reykjavik, whale watching is popular
and maybe isn't the best investment of your time and money.
It's pretty recent that they did
whale watching trips in Reykjavik.
Traditionally they would do them here out of Husavik
because it has better access to
more exotic species of whales.
So if you're going to be driving the Ring Road
and you really want to do a whale watching trip,
I would skip Reykjavik and do it here in Husavik.
Even if you don't do a whale watching trip,
there's a beautiful little museum in Husavik
where they have a great collection of skeletons of whales
that have washed up on beaches all over Iceland.
And then the museum sends somebody out to scavenge the bones
and clean them and assemble them.
And you can walk through and see the bones of actual whales
that have washed up around Iceland.
Now we're going to continue east on the Ring Road.
We're going to go past another dramatic waterfall.
I said I had three favorite waterfalls,
this is the third one, Dettifoss.
And there's not much to say about this
other than you can understand why this is just
an epic, dramatic, beautiful place to stop off.
It's about a half hour's drive off the main road,
but well worth the detour.
Now we're going to head down.
We've kind of circled around the top of the ring.
We're going to head back south and gradually
work our way back towards Reykjavik.
We're on the East Coast of Iceland,
an area called the Eastfjords.
Now this is where you've been on the road for a few days,
you're getting tired, I'll warn you this is sort of
the most tedious part of driving the Ring Road.
It takes five or six hours to go along these fjords.
There are no bridges to cut the corners, you enter the fjord
and about a half hour later you exit the fjord
and then you round the bend, oh and here's another fjord.
And you do this about 10 times.
And I'm not saying it's not beautiful,
I'm saying after six or seven fjords
they all do start to look the same.
(audience laughing)
But it's beautiful.
The saving grace, I think, of the Eastfjords
and a place that's really worth seeking out
and spending the night for sure is called Seydisfjordur.
This is a surprisingly cosmopolitan small town
at the far far eastern end of Iceland,
one of the most eastern towns of Iceland.
This is the place where there's an actual
car ferry from Denmark that comes across
the Atlantic Ocean and puts in here,
the only boat connection to anywhere from Iceland.
So I think that's part of why it has this cosmopolitan feel.
The other reason is there's a very popular art school here,
so students not only from all over Iceland
but from other parts of the world come to this
beautiful little town on the fjord to study art.
This is a great town to settle in for at least a night,
maybe two nights, catch a break from the Ring Road.
It has great restaurants, it's got a great
microbrew pub, a really neat place.
Otherwise, there's not a lot of
civilization along the Eastfjords.
So we're going to turn the corner and head towards home.
We've just come down from the Eastfjords
and now we're going to go through southeastern Iceland,
working our way back towards the South Coast sights.
This is glacier country, this is the home
of Iceland's largest glacier, Vatnajokull.
It literally means water glacier.
It's gigantic, it has as much water
by volume as Lake Victoria in Africa.
It's as big as the state of Delaware, okay?
This is a gigantic glacier and as you drive along
the southeastern coast of Iceland,
you're going to see different tongues as you go by.
Here's another tongue of this glacier,
here's another tongue of this glacier as you coast around.
One of my favorite sights anywhere in Iceland,
and I think this is the place that might take my breath away
more than anywhere else in this amazing place,
are the glacier lagoons here in the southeast.
There are a couple of places where tongues
of that giant glacier touch down
and giant icebergs calve off the end of the glacier
and go floating through the still waters of a lagoon.
It is absolutely majestic and breathtaking.
Now this is a good five hour drive from downtown Reykjavik
so it's not really suitable for a day trip.
But if you're doing the Ring Road, this is really worth
getting out, taking some pictures, and just enjoying the
majesty of the ice half of the fire and ice of Iceland.
That glacier lagoon is connected to the open Atlantic
by a short river and when the glaciers get small enough,
the icebergs from the glacier get small enough,
they get washed down this river
and just before they head out to the open sea
they get washed up on a beautiful black sand beach.
It has the nickname Diamond Beach
because it looks like so many diamonds
that have been tumbled in the waters of the river
on its way down and on their last stop on their way out
towards melting in the Atlantic Ocean,
they pause for a moment on this silky sand of Diamond Beach.
Just breathtaking.
So I just showed you one of the glacier lagoons,
there's a second one that's about 10 minutes away.
Stop at both of them, this second one is called Fjallsarlon.
This is the one where I would recommend
doing a glacier boat trip.
This is really worth investing some time in.
You might need to reserve a few days ahead,
but there's a great little company
where they suit you up in a really nice warm
outerwear outfit, you hike down to the glacier lake
and you hop in a RIB, a rigid inflatable boat,
and they take you out onto the glacier lagoon
really close to where the glacier tongue
comes down and touches the water.
At one point, your boat captain will reach over
into the water and he'll haul up a chunk of 500-year-old ice
and give you a chance to touch and even taste
a piece of this ice from the glacier.
And this is where you're going to see
some of these beautiful blue colors
that you'll have come to expect from glaciers.
A lot of the glaciers you'll see in Iceland
are white or even black or gray
because they pick up a lot of dirt
as they work their way towards the tongue of the glacier.
But when they first come off of the glacier,
an iceberg has this beautiful blue color.
After just a few hours, it's exposed to the air
and it starts to melt and it turns white.
But if you see a beautiful blue glacier like this,
an iceberg like this, it just came off the glacier
and you can only see this here in these glacier lagoons.
If you're interested in all of this glacier stuff,
you can actually go for a hike across the glacier.
Do not attempt this without special gear or a guide,
it's very dangerous, very slippery.
But a guide can outfit you with crampons on your boots
and they'll tie you all together
and lead you across the glacier.
You can even go for a snowmobiling trip across the glacier.
You can go spelunking through an ice cave in the glacier.
If you're interesting in any of these glacier activities,
I would devote probably a second night
to this southeastern Iceland area.
Give yourself a full day, do some research,
make some reservations ahead of time.
It's really worth doing.
So we've almost completed our Ring Road journey.
We've gotten our way from the Eastfjords
back down to southeast Iceland.
From here on out, it's a re-run.
You've already seen the South Coast, right?
We're going to drive backwards through what we just saw
a few minutes ago from the South Coast.
Beautiful waterfalls, of course.
And work our way back to home base here in Reykjavik.