Itinerary · for one

Iceland · the Ring Road

A clockwise loop of Route 1 in midsummer · the island when it never gets dark · solo · twelve nights. Reykjavík for one night to collect the rental and walk to Hallgrímskirkja. Two nights on the Snæfellsnes peninsula for Kirkjufell, Búðakirkja, and the lava-field road. Two nights at Vík for Seljalandsfoss, Skógafoss, and the black sand of Reynisfjara. Two nights at Höfn for langoustine soup beside Jökulsárlón’s drifting icebergs and a glacier hike on Vatnajökull. Two nights in the Eastfjords at Seyðisfjörður for the rainbow street and the Tvísöngur sound sculpture. Two nights at Mývatn for the geothermal field at Hverir, the lava castles of Dimmuborgir, and rúgbrauð baked underground in a hot spring. One last night at Akureyri, the northern capital, before the loop closes and the flight south begins.

1 traveler 7 bases 12 nights 13 min read

v2 · May 11, 2026

Jun 18 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at Keflavík. Then the long light.

Out of Hong Kong on a Thursday, Reykjavík by Friday afternoon. The sun won't set for nearly two weeks. Twenty-two hours of daylight, two of silver dusk, no real night between them. Twelve nights ahead on a clockwise loop around the island — up to Snæfellsnes first for Kirkjufell and the black church on the lava, south along the waterfalls, east past Jökulsárlón's drifting icebergs, into the Eastfjords for the rainbow street at Seyðisfjörður, north to Mývatn's sulphur and steam, and out through Akureyri with the lupines still in bloom.

Begin the journey ↓

Jun 18 → Jun 30 · 12 nights · 7 bases · 900 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Jun 18 Day 1

Reykjavík · the loop begins

A small city under a sun that refuses to set. One night to collect the car, walk the hill to the church, and stand on the harbour at midnight in daylight.

1 night

Land Keflavík (KEF) · 50 min by Flybus to BSÍ terminal

Rental 4×4 collected at KEF · seven days, one-way to Akureyri

Things to do

Hallgrímskirkja · the basalt-column church · lift to the tower for the rainbow street
The old harbour at near-midnight · Mt. Esja across the bay, still lit
Sun Voyager sculpture · steel longship on the Sæbraut waterfront
Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur · the lamb-hot-dog stand the locals queue at
Skyr with berries at a Sandholt bakery · a kleinur twisted doughnut for the road

One night only · stage the bags, sleep, and start the loop early — the south coast is a long first day

Bookings

hotel Reykjavík 101 · 1 night near Hallgrímskirkja pending

rental 4×4 rental · 7 days · KEF pickup, AEY drop pending

One-way fee applies; book early for midsummer

Chapter 01 · the story

The sun does not set in Reykjavík in June. It tips toward the horizon at 23:30, hesitates over Mt. Esja, and then climbs again. The whole city stays out until 2am because the body refuses to call it night.

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Hallgrímskirkja sits on the highest point in the city like a basalt rocket nobody finished launching — Guðjón Samúelsson designed it in 1937 to copy the columnar joints at Svartifoss, and the lift to the 73-metre tower costs 1,400 króna and opens onto a view of a capital that holds two-thirds of Iceland’s 380,000 people. From up there the rainbow street painted up Skólavörðustígur looks like a child laid down a ruler and a paintbox at the same time.

Down at the old harbour at 11pm the light is the colour of dilute honey and the puffin boats are still loading the last tour of the day. Harpa’s glass honeycomb on the waterfront catches the low sun in 714 separate panels — Olafur Eliasson designed it during the 2008 banking collapse and the country built it anyway, half as defiance, half as apology. The Sun Voyager points west toward Greenland. A cruise ship sits along the quay with its lights on for nothing.

The Blue Lagoon is forty minutes back toward the airport and costs the better part of 100 euros to enter. It is also entirely manufactured — the water is runoff from the Svartsengi geothermal plant next door, the silica turned the lagoon white by accident in 1976 — and Icelanders mostly do not go. They use the neighbourhood sundlaug at Vesturbær or Laugardalur instead, 1,300 króna and open from 6:30am, where the heitir pottar hot pots are the closest thing the country has to a town square. The 11pm light is free. The municipal pool is the better idea.

Chapter 02 · Jun 19–20 Days 2–3

Snæfellsnes peninsula

Iceland in miniature — a glacier-capped volcano, black churches on green lava, basalt sea-cliffs, and a fishing harbour that turns gold over Breiðafjörður at midnight.

2 nights

Drive Reykjavík → Stykkishólmur · ~175 km · ~2 hr via the Hvalfjarðargöng tunnel

Loop the peninsula clockwise on Route 54 · the whole circuit is a long day with stops

Things to do

Kirkjufell and Kirkjufellsfoss · the arrowhead mountain and its small waterfall
Búðakirkja · the black timber church on the lava field at Búðir
Djúpalónssandur · black-pebble beach with the rusted trawler ribs still on the sand
Arnarstapi to Hellnar · basalt sea-cliff walk past Gatklettur arch, fulmars wheeling
Bjarnarhöfn shark museum · the fermented hákarl cured in the same farm sheds for centuries
Stykkishólmur harbour at midnight · the wooden houses gold over Breiðafjörður
Hákarl with a shot of Brennivín · plokkfiskur and harðfiskur with butter for the road

Snæfellsnes is the Ring Road in miniature · two nights lets the weather miss you once and still see the peninsula

Bookings

hotel Stykkishólmur guesthouse · 2 nights near the harbour pending

rental Continue 4×4 from day 1 pending

Route 54 is paved the whole loop; no F-road required

Chapter 02 · the story

Snæfellsnes is the country folded into ninety kilometres — glacier at the tip, lava-field in the middle, basalt sea-cliffs along the south, a fishing harbour on the north. People call it Iceland in miniature and for once the tourism office is right.

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The peninsula runs west from Borgarnes for a hundred kilometres and ends in a glacier-capped stratovolcano that Jules Verne dropped his expedition into in 1864. Snæfellsjökull last erupted around 200 AD, the icecap sits at 1,446 metres, and on clear days you can see it from Reykjavík across Faxaflói bay — which is the literary trick Verne was working with, the idea that Journey to the Center of the Earth could begin from a mountain you could already see.

Kirkjufell is the photograph the country sells. The 463-metre cone sits on the north coast above Grundarfjörður with a small triple waterfall in front of it, and on a clear day at midnight in June the sun grazes the western horizon directly behind the peak. The Game of Thrones production called it Arrowhead Mountain and the local farmer started charging for the parking lot. He is not wrong to. The mountain has paid him for the view his sheep used to graze.

The other thing Snæfellsnes has is the absence of trees. The sagas mention forests; the Viking settlers burned them for charcoal and ran sheep where the saplings tried to come back. A thousand years on, the peninsula is moss and lava and grass and the horizon-to-horizon sky that the missing trees uncover. The black timber church at Búðir stands alone on a green lava field for the same reason the country reads itself as cinematic — there is nothing in the frame that does not belong there. At Stykkishólmur the wooden houses turn gold over Breiðafjörður at midnight and the ferry to Flatey leaves twice a day.

Chapter 03 · Jun 21–22 Days 4–5

Vík · the south coast

Two days under the south coast waterfalls. Wind off the Atlantic, black sand under bare feet, basalt columns stacked like organ pipes.

2 nights

Drive Stykkishólmur → Vík · via Reykjavík · ~370 km · ~5 hr with stops

Weather the south is the wettest stretch; pack the shell

Things to do

Seljalandsfoss · the one you can walk behind · waterproofs essential
Skógafoss · 60 metres of curtain · the staircase to the top deck
Reynisfjara black sand beach · sneaker waves kill people every year, stay back from the surf line
Dyrhólaey arch and lighthouse · puffin colonies on the cliffs until late August
Plokkfiskur and rye bread at Suður-Vík restaurant · the village kitchen the locals queue at

The wind here can flip a car door · park nose into the gusts and hold the door with both hands

Bookings

hotel Vík village · 2 nights with sea view pending

rental Continue 4×4 from day 1 pending

Top up at the N1 in Vík before heading east — long gap to the next station

Chapter 03 · the story

Reynisfjara is not a beach you swim from. It is a beach the Atlantic still owns — black volcanic sand, basalt columns stacked like a church organ, and sneaker waves that pick a person off the strand every other year and do not give them back.

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Vík í Mýrdal is the southernmost village in Iceland — 600 people, one church on the hill, one supermarket, one road in and out — and it sits at the foot of Mýrdalsjökull, the icecap that hides the Katla volcano. Katla erupts on average every fifty years. The last big one was 1918. Geologists have been politely nervous since about 1980. The village above the church is the assembly point when the jökulhlaup — the glacier flood from a sub-ice eruption — comes down the river. Everyone here knows the route.

The beach at Reynisfjara is two kilometres west and the basalt columns at the cliff are the same hexagonal joints as Hallgrímskirkja’s pillars — slow-cooled basalt, the lava finding six-sided geometry as it shrinks. The Reynisdrangar sea-stacks offshore are 66 metres tall and the folklore says they are trolls caught dragging a three-masted ship to shore when the sun came up and turned them to stone. The folklore is not what the sea-stacks do. They break the swell from the south and the surf comes in sideways through the gap, which is why the waves on this beach are unpredictable in a way the laminar surf at a normal beach is not. The warning signs are in five languages now.

A kilometre west of the beach the Dyrhólaey promontory rises 120 metres above the surf and the arch at the tip is wide enough to sail a small boat through. Puffins nest in the cliff burrows from May until late August — 60% of the Atlantic population breeds in Iceland — and the lighthouse keeper at the top used to count them. The wind on this coast can flip a car door and the rental excess will not cover it.

Chapter 04 · Jun 23–24 Days 6–7

Höfn · glaciers and langoustines

Two days at the foot of Vatnajökull. Icebergs drift past your window in the morning, langoustine comes off the boat by afternoon, and the glacier itself is close enough to walk on.

2 nights

Drive Vík → Höfn · Route 1 · 273 km · ~3.5 hr with stops

Stop Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon and Hofskirkja turf church on the way

Things to do

Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon · zodiac among the drifting bergs
Diamond Beach · iceberg shards stranded on black sand at low tide
Vatnajökull glacier hike from Skaftafell · crampons, rope, and blue ice
Fjallsárlón · the smaller, quieter lagoon ten minutes west of Jökulsárlón
Humarsúpa and grilled langoustine tails at Pakkhús · the harbour kitchen the village runs on
Vestrahorn at Stokksnes · black-sand mirror at low tide, dragon-tooth peaks
Hoffellsjökull glacier lagoon · the quieter outlet of Vatnajökull, an hour east

Two nights gives the morning lagoons clear weather windows · afternoons are for the village and the glacier hike

Bookings

hotel Höfn harbour · 2 nights near the langoustine port pending

activity Jökulsárlón zodiac · 40 min pending

Book the morning slot; afternoon wind shuts the boats down

activity Vatnajökull glacier hike from Skaftafell · 3 hr pending

Guided only — book the day before for the morning ice

Chapter 04 · the story

At Jökulsárlón the icebergs are in the sea. Vatnajökull calves them at the head of the lagoon, the tide drags them out through a quarter-kilometre channel, and the next morning they are back on the black sand at Diamond Beach as polished gravel.

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Vatnajökull is the largest icecap in Europe by volume and covers 8% of Iceland — 7,900 square kilometres of compressed snow, up to a kilometre thick in the middle, with seven active volcanoes underneath it. The southern outlet glaciers grind down from the plateau toward the Ring Road and stop a few hundred metres short of it. Breiðamerkurjökull is the one with the lagoon. It has been retreating since 1934. The lagoon did not exist before then. The ice is the thing the road came to see, and the road is watching the ice leave.

The bergs in the lagoon are blue because the snow that fell on the plateau a thousand years ago was crushed of every air bubble by the weight on top of it, and what is left absorbs every wavelength except the blue one. They drift, they tip, they roll — a 30-tonne berg will spin without warning when the underwater balance shifts — and the zodiac boats keep a respectful sixty metres back. Across the channel on the beach, the seals haul out on the gravel banks. The current carries the smaller fragments into the surf and the surf returns them to the black sand at low tide as glass-clear chunks the size of a fist. Diamond Beach is not a marketing name. It is a literal description.

Höfn í Hornafirði is fifty kilometres east, a fishing port of 1,700 people on a sandspit, and the langoustine — humar in Icelandic, technically a Norway lobster — come off the boats and go directly into the kitchen at Pakkhús. The harbour bowl of humarsúpa is the regional centrepiece. Eight hundred grams of tails grilled with garlic butter is what the village eats on a Friday. The glacier is forty kilometres away. You can see it from the table.

Chapter 05 · Jun 25–26 Days 8–9

Seyðisfjörður & the Eastfjords

A fjord town at the end of a single mountain pass — wooden houses in pastel rows, a rainbow painted up the street to a blue church, and the weekly car-ferry to Denmark in the harbour.

2 nights

Drive Höfn → Seyðisfjörður · Route 1 + 93 · ~270 km · ~4 hr via Almannaskarð pass and the Fjarðarheiði descent

Ferry the Norröna car-ferry to Hirtshals (DK) calls here weekly · plans, but not boarding, this trip

Things to do

The rainbow street up to Bláa Kirkjan · the blue timber church at the head of the fjord
Tvísöngur · the five concrete domes on the hillside · sing inside and the dome answers
Skálanes nature reserve · the gravel track out to the cliffs, kittiwakes and arctic terns
Drive the Fjarðarheiði pass into Egilsstaðir · the snow line stays late even in June
Hengifoss day trip from Egilsstaðir · 128 m drop with red striations in the basalt
Vök Baths on Urriðavatn · the floating geothermal pool, lake-cold dip on the side
Arctic char from the fjord · Egilsstaðir lamb at Salt Café · Klausturkaffi cake at Skriðuklaustur

Fjarðarheiði is the only road in or out · check the road status in winter, but in June it is fine through the long evenings

Bookings

hotel Seyðisfjörður · 2 nights in a pastel timber guesthouse pending

rental Continue 4×4 from day 1 pending

Almannaskarð and Fjarðarheiði both paved; no F-road required

Chapter 05 · the story

The only road into Seyðisfjörður is the descent from Fjarðarheiði — twenty-seven kilometres of switchbacks dropping 620 metres down the steepest fjord wall in the country, finishing at a rainbow painted up the main street to a blue timber church.

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Seyðisfjörður is a town of 650 people at the head of a 17-kilometre fjord on the east coast, and for most of the year the only way in is the single pass over Fjarðarheiði — closed by snow some weeks of every winter, in which case the village is reachable only by the ferry from Denmark. The Norröna sails weekly from Hirtshals, forty-five hours each way, and unloads cars and trucks onto the quay at the foot of the rainbow street. The schedule is the same schedule it has had since 1975. The ferry is how the bigger things get in.

The blue church — Bláa Kirkjan — was built in 1922, blew down in a storm, and was rebuilt board for board in 1989 with the same Danish-imported timber. The rainbow that leads up to it was painted onto Norðurgata in 2018 for the town’s Pride. The mayor left it. It has stayed. The two facts — the 1922 church and the 2018 paint — are the town in miniature: the wooden buildings are mostly Norwegian timber houses prefabricated in Stavanger in the 1880s, shipped over to support the herring boom, and the town has spent the century since deciding what to keep.

Up the hillside above the harbour, Tvísöngur is five interlocked concrete domes the artist Lukas Kühne tuned to the five notes of Icelandic fimmund harmony. You walk up a gravel track for twenty minutes, sing inside one of the domes, and the dome answers in its own pitch. The fjord answers nothing. The herring left in 1968 and have not come back. Two hundred trawlers used to anchor in the bay each summer. The town now anchors one ferry a week.

Chapter 06 · Jun 27–28 Days 10–11

Mývatn · sulphur and steam

A volcanic lake where the earth still breathes. Mud pots bubble at Hverir, lava castles stand at Dimmuborgir, and the bath water smells of struck matches.

2 nights

Drive Seyðisfjörður → Mývatn · via Egilsstaðir on Route 1 · 265 km · ~4 hr

Stop Dettifoss on the side road north, then Goðafoss to the west

Things to do

Mývatn Nature Baths · the northern, quieter answer to the Blue Lagoon
Hverir geothermal field · fumaroles and ochre mud pots at Námafjall
Dimmuborgir · the dark lava castles · walk the Kirkjuhringur loop
Grjótagjá cave · the geothermal pool, too hot to swim in now
Rúgbrauð baked underground at Vogafjós · dark rye, warm from the hot spring

Midges (mý) put the name on the lake · evenings near the water need a head net in June

Bookings

hotel Reykjahlíð · 2 nights lake-side pending

activity Mývatn Nature Baths · evening entry pending

Late evening is quieter and the light is at its best

Chapter 06 · the story

The pseudocraters at Skútustaðir are not volcanoes. They are steam explosions from 2,300 years ago — lava ran over a wet marsh, the groundwater flashed, and the crust above blew up in a thousand small round holes. The lake fills the rest.

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Mývatn means midge lake. The midges arrive in June in clouds so dense the locals wear head nets to mow the grass, and the lake ecosystem is the richest in the country precisely because of them — the chironomid larvae feed the trout, the trout feed the arctic char, the char and the midges together feed the duck population, which is the largest concentration of waterfowl species in Europe. The midges do not bite. They get in the eyes and the mouth and the coffee and they are the price of the lake being alive.

Krafla is fifteen kilometres north and still warm. The fissure erupted nine times between 1975 and 1984, the lava field at Leirhnjúkur is still hot enough to scorch a boot sole, and the geothermal power station drilled into a magma chamber by accident in 2009 — they hit 900-degree molten rock at 2.1 km depth and had to cap the well. The Mývatn Nature Baths sit on the same heat. The water comes out of the ground at 130 degrees, gets cooled to a swimmable 38, and smells of struck matches because of the hydrogen sulphide. Eight hundred króna cheaper than the Blue Lagoon. A tenth of the crowd.

What Iceland does with this kind of heat is the answer to everything. Ninety per cent of homes are heated geothermally; the pavement in central Reykjavík is heated to keep the ice off; greenhouses at Hveragerði grow tomatoes through the polar night. The public sundlaug — the geothermal swimming pool — is in every village above a thousand people, two hot pots and a 25-metre lap pool, open from 6:30am for a thousand króna. It is what the country has instead of pubs. Mývatn is the same idea, sized up.

Chapter 07 · Jun 29 Day 12

Akureyri · the northern capital

A fjord town with the most northerly botanical garden in the world and traffic lights that wink at you in red hearts. Last night before the flight south.

1 night

Drive Mývatn → Akureyri · Route 1 west · 100 km · ~1.5 hr via Goðafoss

Out AEY → KEF domestic next morning, then KEF → HKG that evening

Things to do

Akureyrarkirkja · the basalt church above the fjord at midnight light
Lystigarðurinn · botanical garden, the most northerly in the world
Kjötsúpa at Bautinn · Icelandic lamb soup, the kind that warms a long drive
Bæjarins Beztu of the north · Brynjuís for the soft-serve the locals queue at
Hauganes whale-watching · minke and humpback in Eyjafjörður

Return the 4×4 at AEY airport · domestic terminal is small, allow 60 min for the bag transfer at KEF

Bookings

hotel Akureyri centre · 1 night near the church pending

flight AEY → KEF → HKG pending

Same-day connection; book domestic and international as one ticket if possible

Chapter 07 · the story

Akureyri's traffic lights wink at the cars in red hearts. They were put in after the 2008 banking collapse — a small civic gesture, free to the municipality, to remind the city that it was still itself while the country sorted out what it had lost.

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Akureyri sits at the head of Eyjafjörður, the longest fjord in Iceland at sixty kilometres, and is the country’s second city at 19,000 people — a tenth of Reykjavík, ten times anything else north of it. The Ring Road that has carried this trip 1,332 kilometres around the island arrives here as the main street, runs along the waterfront, and then turns inland again. The loop closes at Goðafoss forty kilometres east — the Waterfall of the Gods — where the lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði threw his pagan idols into the river in the year 1000 after the Althing voted to convert to Christianity. Iceland’s national religious turn happened over a single weekend at the parliament rock, and the falls are the only monument.

The botanical garden — Lystigarðurinn — runs up the slope above the town centre and is the most northerly of its kind in the world. It opened in 1912, sits at 65.7° north, and grows around 7,000 species of plants that the gardeners have coaxed into surviving the latitude — alpine flowers, Arctic willow, a hundred kinds of saxifrage, and trees that have to be wrapped each October. Entry is free. The gardeners are paid by the municipality. The point is to prove that things grow here.

Akureyrarkirkja sits above the town like its cousin in Reykjavík — same architect, Guðjón Samúelsson again, same basalt-column abstraction in white concrete — and at midnight in June the light on the church is the colour of a paper lantern. From the steps the fjord is sixty kilometres of flat water all the way to the open Atlantic. Tomorrow morning the small Fokker turboprop lifts off the strip at AEY and the loop is complete. The icecap is behind. The hot pot at Sundlaug Akureyrar opens at 6:30am for one last soak before the flight.

Jun 30 · Day 13 · the last one

Last lupines on the fjord. Then the flight home.

Final evening above Eyjafjörður, the fjord pewter under a sun that refuses to leave. A bowl of kjötsúpa at a roadside hut, harðfiskur and butter for the drive. Akureyri by morning, Keflavík by evening, Hong Kong by the day after. Twelve nights — every one of them yours, the full Ring Road behind, the smell of sulphur and the rumble of glacial water already half-remembered.

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