Sometimes when you need relief from stress, from work, from bills, from life, you go to the gym. You go towards your own personal hobby. You journey to the one slice of this planet that is yours and yours alone. Something that sets your soul at ease. Something you can control and peels the orange of life from distraction. Highway 1, the Ring Road that encircles Iceland, is the crown jewel escape that is applicable to us all. No matter your hobby, no matter your workout regimen, no matter your bank account, Highway 1 will deliver the fruit, our common denominator, and take you back home.
Outside the city lights of Reykjavik, just an hour north, you begin to grasp the primitive, preserved and powerful aesthetic of Iceland. In all its natural glory and God’s original plan, a chance to partake in originality of man and Earth. Just as a child, a chance to discover this world all over again. A second chance. A do-over.
I was bound with excitement as I left Reykjavik, with anticipation pouring out of my bones. A new day, a new adventure. This would be the first day of 5 in which I’d be journeying into Iceland’s countryside, dissecting what made it tick and the clock-workers that greased the gears of the land.
I had purchased an Akaso mountable 4k camera the previous year when I visited Sonoma in Arizona and went offroading on an ATV. I brought this same camera with me and planned to mount it on the dashboard of my rental car and turn it on with scenery that my eyes could not contain alone. I had 3 hours and 2 batteries of potential footage to utilize. So, I stuck the mount to the dash, setup the camera, and I was out of Reykjavik in 20 minutes. Here is the very affordable camera I purchased on Amazon. It comes with a wrist strap that allows you to start and stop recording so you don’t have to hit the device itself and also a waterproof case and tons of mounts.
There are a few roundabouts as you head north out of town. Most tourists and sightseers start by driving the south. After reading Rick Steve’s book on Iceland, he recommended taking in the sights in the north first and driving clockwise around the island nation as you build up to the greater sights along the way in the south. I chose that path to go against the normal tourist. Most sights in the south are only a few hours away from Reykjavik, so many tour buses will offer day trips to waterfalls and back. I wanted to go against that traffic going west from east on the tail-end of the trip rather than start that way behind those very same buses in the same direction.
My first destination was Borgarnes. It is an hour north of Reykjavik and I was planning on stocking up at the local Bonus store for lunch and snacks as I ventured into the vast countryside of Iceland where there is not many stores along the route.
The drive up to Borgarnes was a wonderful Forward if it was a written version of Iceland. The marshes off the road to the left and the mountainous peak and valleys to the right echoed the pictures I’d seen of the route. In the most northwestern areas, there are fjords, but I would not venture that far northwest.
There is a tunnel a few miles long, and upon exit, you pay 1000 krona, the equivalent of $10 in the USA. Probably the most expensive tunnel I’ve paid for, but the only tunnel in the country that you have to pay. I was glad I exchanged currency at the airport of $100 to krona, but I knew this would be coming after reading Rick Steve’s. The toll-taker was a beautiful Icelandic blonde woman, the kind you would think worked a toll booth in Iceland. Any job that pays is a great job in Iceland. As you can see in the picture below, the water marshes are a popular sight along the coasts.
After the quick hour drive, I was headed to the Settlement Center in Borgarnes. This Settlement Center doubles as a museum and a restaurant. There is a 30-minute audio tour that Rick Steve’s recommended for most any language you speak. It goes over the history of how Iceland was settled by the early Nordic Vikings and how advanced they were in shipbuilding. So, I had plugged this destination into my Google Maps.
The town itself is smaller than Lawrence, Kansas. It’s more a township with a couple gas stations, Bonus store, suburb with neighborhoods. I parked adjacent to the Settlement Center in a circled lot next to a playground. Directly next to my car was a bay with a bridge I took a pic of below.
Off to my left and across the street, I noticed the perfect location to take my photos and a gravel path. I decided to venture down and explore before I visited the Settlement Center that had just opened at 10a.
With the views above, I figured if this journey was going to be anything like the first hour’s views, I was in for the time of my life, and boy, was I right. Not many get a chance to view these initial views alone, especially from the Midwest.
The Settlement Center was like how you’d expect, a few warehouses banded together with a barn-like door at the entrance. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to enter, but ended up following a few people arriving before me.
In the picture below, the entrance is the green barn door on the right in-between the other main buildings. The restaurant is on the far left. The actual audio tour is the building on the right.
Once inside, you immediately are struck with souvenirs. The lobby doubles as a souvenir shop with all sorts of Icelandic trinkets and a few workers speaking Icelandic and English. There are a collection of headsets to the left of the front desk and you can tune any headset to any language by adjusting a dial on the site of the ear piece. The picture below denotes the main lobby with the front desk and entrance to the self-guided tour on the right.
Once you pay and receive your headset, you walk up the stairs and into the tour. The exhibits are marked by numbers that will correspond with the number explained on your headset. You are not allowed to take pictures on the audio tour, but I snuck in a photo while aboard a mechanical Nordic Viking vessel as it demonstrated the rockiness of the waves as the Vikings searched for new land. It was very well done and I figured if I could help them tell the story of the Settlement Center, why not not a picture?
The front part of the boat you step on below rocked in a circular motion back and forth and around, just as a ship in heavy waves. There was a panoramic picture of the sea that went around you so you could pretend you were venturing to a New World.
There was also a map with electronic lights that would light up when you pushed other buttons on the side on which areas were settled in Iceland, at what time period, and by whom. I was surprised that most descendants were still living there with privately owned farms. Not much has changed since the early settler times. You can witness on this huge map, the routes of the water runoff that were naturally created to allow the ice to form their own roads to the sea.
After 30 minutes, I left the Settlement Center, checked the escalated prices of the restaurant, as I was starving as it approached lunchtime. I didn’t want to pay the high prices of $30+ for a meal, so I checked Google Maps for a local coffee shop. Thankfully, there was one right around the corner to the left.
As I drove around the corner and parked, there were 4 women working on installing new pavement on the sidewalk. I found this rather odd in that you don’t usually see a group of young women installing new pavement on a sidewalk in the USA. They had their stereo blasting to techno music, that is very popular in Iceland. Getting a little taste of the local culture.
The outside of the coffee shop didn’t look like much. But, the inside was more decorated than most any other coffee shop I’d ever been in. The rooms just kept coming and it was very spacious with a huge patio out back with a fence and mountainous view. The shop that I visited has this website: http://blomasetrid.is/
I could have read and drank coffee on this back porch for days and it was a beautifully sunny day when I was there. It turned out the north was much better weather than the south as the south is the wettest part of the country.
There were a few people in different areas of the coffee shop, but I couldn’t find a worker or a menu. So, I figured, I’d go sit near the front desk and wait for them to notice me. I sat at the front table near the window for 10 minutes, and no one approached me. Awkward. I even later realized the owner was sitting talking at the table next to mine that is featured in the website with his dog. So, with my stomach growling angrily, I was on operation breakfast and find someone that worked there. As I approached a young women in the back near the kitchen, I asked to see a menu. She immediately started apologizing as she said I looked so content that she thought I had already been helped. Go figure.
So, I ordered a Belgium waffle and a coffee. They needed to heat up the equipment, so it took about 15 minutes to make. But, man, was it one of the best waffles I’ve had in my life. Worth the wait.
I struck up conversation with the front desk worker who was sitting behind the desk on the left in the picture above, her face partially hidden by the fake trees. She mentioned this was a bed and breakfast as well and gave me their business card.
I noticed a guest book sitting on the front desk and I asked to sign it in hopes my mom coming to Iceland next month would find it, it would give her something to look for like a scavenger hunt. I thought that would be pretty cool in such a foreign land.
Low and behold, a month later, my mom visited the same coffee shop and found my note. The note and picture of her are below (as I write this many weeks after my journey).
I’ll never forget doing that and she mentions she wrote me one back in the same book so that it will inspire me to head back to Borgarnes one day. We share the love of adventure, traveling and learning.
After leaving the amazing coffee shop that I wanted to stay at forever, I needed to stock up on snacks. I visited the local Bonus store and bought some Gatorade, peanuts, Pringles, 12 inch sandwich, Ritz crackers. The store is more a warehouse with food on pallets you pluck out on shelves like Sam’s Club. You can tell everything is imported.
Upon leaving the Bonus store, I visited my first gas station in Iceland. In order to pump gas you select your increments in krona. So, I soon figured out after trial and error that 2000 krona filled a quarter tank of my Toyota Yaris. So, that’s $20 for a quarter tank, equaling over $4 per gallon. Gas is expensive. You also need to know your pin number whether it be a debit or credit card to pay for gas. It will ask you regardless.
After filling up my tank, I was off and headed to the Grabrok Crater. This crater was about 35 minutes north of Borgarnes. Of the 3 craters formerly next to each other, this was the only one left fully intact. There are steps that lead all the way up and around the tip of the crater offering tremendous views from above.
This was quite a tourist spot as there were many day-trippers there with cameras around their necks. I was still close enough to Reykjavik that there were still a good handful of tourists. The photo below replicates a stairway to heaven as you “climb” the crater.
It really doesn’t take long to climb and encircle the crater. You can do the whole thing in about 30 minutes, but I took a ton of pictures both on my phone and on my Nikon D5100. Looking back inside the crater is the photo below. The path I had just taken is on the left.
There was an adjacent crater in the picture below to the right as I was standing on the top of the other crater.
The views were spectacular, and again, I was pinching myself I wasn’t even a full day into my journey into the interior.
The local residents of Iceland are extremely helpful. Tourism is so new to them, they want to share their culture and appreciate the money it brings to their growing and developing country. The local Airbnb residents I was staying with that night, Johann and Steinunn. They were instrumental in giving me coordinates to some unexplored areas not in tourist books or maps.
One of them was a rock formation in the sea that I wanted to visit. This reminded me of the movie Goonies when Mikey finds the rock formation that fits in with his rocky trinket he’s carrying around that Chester Copperpot had used to try and find One-Eyed Willy. I needed to find this rock.
The rock formation is called Hvitserker in the northern countryside. I had to travel for over 40 minutes on gravel road until I got there in the middle of nowhere, and I loved every second of it. The landscape of the country was so gorgeous, I had the ocean to my right and country road in front of me and countryside to my left. For many moments, I had countryside all around me with green, lush fields. The water was so blue and the air was so fresh, I can still taste it. The picture below was on a short path heading towards the bluff that overlooked the rock formation down below just off the beach. I include a video below the picture as well.
The bluff overlooking the rock formation is breathtaking because you can see ocean all around you and then a brown beach. As you can see below, you are quite a ways up overlooking it all. The landscape is such that it’s very steep to get down to the actual beach. I went back and forth on doing it for 30 minutes.
As you can see in the picture above, some of the formation is covered in white excrement. This is part of where it gets its name. The word “Hvit” means “white” in Icelandic and “Serker” means long shirt. So, it’s basically a white long sleeved shirt. All rock formations have legends behind them. The legend for this one is that the rock formation was a troll from Strandir in the western fjords and couldn’t stand the Christian bells coming from the convent in Þingeyraklaustur. So, as he was on his way to tear them down, sunlight approached instead, and turned the troll into stone for all eternity.
The steepness of the landscape is below and I don’t think it does it justice. I decided to give it a go and it was the best decision.
I decided to give it a go and it was the best decision.
I couldn’t take enough pictures of the beach, the water and the formation. As you can see in the video, there was a fair amount of tourists there, more than I expected based on vehicle traffic as there was barely any.
I had to touch the water to see how cold it was, but it wasn’t as cold as I would have thought. I took plenty of pictures on my Nikon and some I will cherish forever down on the beach. Definitely was more enjoyable that I ever thought it would be.
My next “off the grid” recommendation from my Airbnb hosts was a waterfall on the interior of the countryside. This was going to be even more of an adventure and less touristy than the rock formation. I would venture into even more isolated areas than what I traveled before the farther I got from Reykjavik. This was all heading in the direction of Sauðárkrókur where I was staying in the countryside. There were hotels, but I wanted to avoid hotels at all costs and stay with the locals and immerse myself in the culture. They only gave me latitude and longitude coordinates as they didn’t have an actual home address. I learned how to use the degree symbol on Google Maps.
The waterfall I came to discover was called Kolugljúfur Canyon. There were only 2 other people there when I arrived, so I knew I was getting more and more away from the main city areas. The picture below was taken on my Nikon and you can immediately tell the big difference in quality from the other pictures.
The video below shows just how powerful the water was coming through. You park up top and have to walk down a rocky landscape and under the bridge to get to the actual falls. On the right is the waterfall, on the left is the canyon.
The photo below was taken on top of the bridge before I ventured down for a closer look. You could get extremely close to the falls.
The below video shows the canyon on the opposite side. You can tell I’m in the middle of nowhere in the gorgeous countryside. Make sure you click on the “HD” button in the lower right part of the video.
Moonlit Wings Reflect the Stars That Guide Me Towards Salvation 
quite an interesting adventure you had there.
LikeLike