Icebergs, Lava Fields and Aurora Borealis

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to have the chance to visit the beautiful country of Iceland with a few friends and I can’t wait to go back again. If I remember rightly it was only £20 to fly back from Iceland… That’s less than a Nando’s meal for two!

So this is a short recap of my week long visit to Iceland, and hopefully it’ll convince you to go there too…

Just a side note, I took all of the pictures on a Samsung Galaxy S8+ so excuse the quality, but I’m definitely taking a DSLR next time…

We flew over in November and the weather was closer to 10°C for the entire trip, so not quite what I was expecting… I imagined snow everywhere and roads covered in ice, almost like a scene from ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. When we landed in Keflavík airport in the early morning it was still dark. It turns out that they only get around 8 hours of daylight in November which doesn’t leave you a lot of time to see an entire country in a week! #challengeaccepted

So we jumped into the hire car and set off north for Reykjavík. Our plan was to drive clockwise around the whole country and see as much as possible. I’d love to take the credit for organising the whole thing but I can’t, everything was timed to perfection!

The map of the ring road route we drove in a week (or close enough)

I’m not going to lie, I found it tricky adapting to driving on the wrong side of the road and had my friends on the end of their seats a few times as well! But once you’re on open stretches of road (which was 99% of the time) then it’s not too bad.

We didn’t hang around in Reykjavík for too long but it was much smaller than I imagined for being the capital. We visited the famous church ‘Hallgrimskirkja’ which was immense and dominated the skyline, not to mention the size of the organ inside!

A couple of days in and we stopped at a village called Grundarfjörður which just happened to be next to Kirkjufell mountain. I don’t watch Game of Thrones but apparently it’s a very popular landmark… I took plenty of pictures before it got dark, but what we didn’t expect was the Northern Lights to appear that night. Shame I didn't have a proper camera to hand…

We came across so many waterfalls and geysers, so I’ll leave some of the photos below as we drove clockwise around the island…

Once we got down to the south west of the island, we came across Vatnajökull National Park where we threw on some snow boots and climbed a glacier. The views from the side of this glacier were amazing… Not to mention that we were hiking on ice all the way up, so if it wasn’t for the boots and crampons we’d have just slid off the side of the mountain. At one point I took one of my crampons off to adjust it and as soon as I put my boot on the ice I realised how dangerous it was as I nearly slipped and almost lost my icepick!

Then we drove to Jökulsárlón which is essentially a lake full of icebergs! We jumped on a boat and drove as close to the icebergs as possible without ending up like the Titanic… These pictures don’t do it justice, it’s somewhere where you have be to really appreciate it.

We continued our journey around the south of the island which included parking up and walking for over an hour to visit an old plane wreckage in Solheimasandur (4 mile round trip to be exact), a giant waterfall, huge geysers, and of course the Blue Lagoon. The south of the island is more popular with tourists as it’s closer to the capital so it was very difficult to take pictures without lots of people in the background, but nevertheless it didn’t spoil anything.

I would definitely recommend visiting Iceland, even if you just spend a few days there and visit the south of the island. I took over 750 pictures and videos over 7 days but I didn’t feel like posting them all on here as it would have taken forever. I put all of the video clips into one video which is currently on my YouTube channel, but I’ll add it below for you to enjoy! It’s definitely worth watching all the way through, especially if you’re looking to visit Iceland in the future as it tells more of a story than the pictures alone.

I hope you enjoy and hopefully I’ll have more time in the near future to post more regular material. Thanks for visiting this post as it took me a lot longer than I had originally planned, and the video below was all recorded in 4K if you want to experience Iceland to its fullest.