Land of fire and ice. Our epic Iceland journey comes to an end.
Dateline Egilsstadir, Iceland
Thursday 17th July 2025
Series 2 Instalment 7
Ok so I’ve put on a few pounds and I need a shave. No one is perfect you know.
We’ve learned a few interesting things in Iceland, like Iceland has no ice! No really, the guy next to us in a bar ordered a whisky with no ice and the barman said “no worries, we don’t have any”. This apparently is common here. We have not seen ice for sale anywhere, unlike Australia where every corner store and service station has bags of the stuff. Must be something to do with the climate.
There is also a very macabre, dark chapter of history buried centuries ago in the Icelandic story. During the 17th century, dozens of people, mostly men, were hunted, persecuted, prosecuted and put to death by burning at the stake, almost always while fully conscious, for the alleged crimes of witchcraft and sorcery. In a museum dedicated to this black period in history we find confronting images and artefacts from this ghoulish time. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. You know you shouldn’t look but you can’t take your eyes off it.
Now Iceland has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and we can report a very low level of police presence. We surmise that people in general are satisfied with their lot and see no need for things like theft. Either that or they are just frozen into a state of torpor and can’t move fast enough to commit crimes. Just kidding, they are a very active and productive lot. They are also a happy bunch. In fact Iceland is rated as the 4th happiest country in the world so they are obviously doing something right. They also formally abolished the death penalty in around 1927 though the last execution took place in January 1830, almost a century earlier when two people were beheaded for two murders.
The axe used to behead the last two prisoners ever executed in Iceland
We reckon there is something very civilised about a society that can rise above the eye for an eye mentality that sustains the barbaric practice of institutionalised murder dressed up as justice. The fact they have understood this for nearly 200 years should be a lesson to us all.
All this happiness and honesty seems a little incongruous when we consider the price of everything here. It’s a wonder theft is not rampant.For instance petrol is nearly $4 AUD/litre so filling the bike every 500 km costs around $100! Yikes. Food is similarly expensive with a salmon and veg main for instance costing about $75, beer about $20/pint and even a burger and chips is $45, pizza $40-$50. As extreme as the prices are we really don’t mind as the food is amazing so we treat ourselves to one really good meal per day to supplement our meagre rations of road snacks and, usually a breakfast of yogurt and/or cereal. The coffee by the way is woeful. But we repeat, the food is brilliant. The lamb, genuine Icelandic lamb, must be experienced to be properly appreciated. This coming from Sally, the daughter of an Aussie sheep farmer is rare praise indeed.
Our Icelandic road trip continues, south out of the western fjords and onto the next western peninsular and the town of Grundarfjordur, a tiny hamlet of maybe a couple of hundred residents facing the Greenland sea and set beneath the spectacular Kirkjufell Mountain, a towering, extinct volcano.
Kirkjufell
There are more waterfalls here than we can comprehend and the entire peninsular is a series of dormant or extinct volcanoes.
More waterfalls than we can comprehend.
The whole landscape is breathtakingly magnificent, but well it had to happen didn’t it? It’s raining. Bugga, damn and shit! So a day is spent just chillin’ in our apartment which is literally across the road from one of the nicest restaurants anywhere. As with many food service outlets it is run by foreign nationals. So far we have enjoyed the hospitality of Scottish, Thai, Dutch and others. This time it is Poles who greet us with “Come, come, come inside so I can tell you the house rules. First you must eat candy” he says thrusting a large bowl of sweets under our noses. With a well rehearsed routine he has us in fits of laughter as we take our seats. Did I mention the food was superb?
This actually qualifies as fish and chips in Iceland. Note the chips are roasted tiny potatoes. Yum!
The weather has cleared by mid morning the next day so we make our way toward Reykjavik, again avoiding the major roads, preferring instead to explore the back roads and byways. This soon sees us riding through some lush green farm land in valleys shadowed by dramatic volcanic mountains. We climb quickly out of the valleys and suddenly find ourselves on the moon. There is zero vegetation, our world is strewn with rocks, sand and dust and yes I realize there is probably no water on the moon but here waterfalls crash down cliffs and at just on 800 metres above sea level there is a vast glacier. We find a treacherous, rough and rocky track through an old lava field leading up to the edge of the ice and decide to go for it. Bouncing from boulder to pothole to loose gravel and sand pits for seven km we finally make it. We park up the bikes at the very edge of the glacier and leap about hugging each other like a bunch of six year olds. The only other people to ever come here are tourists who are ferried in from the nearest town in ridiculous, climate controlled eight wheel drive monster-truck buses. They have paid handsomely for a two hour “experience”. We are fairly certain that a percentage of them see us bounce past and ask themselves just who is having the priceless experience.
We rode to a fu#*ing glacier!
We tumble back off the mountain, glide through more awesome moonscape wasteland, back down to vegetation and find ourselves in the biggest city in Iceland, Reykjavik. The entire population of Iceland is 400,000 and Reykjavik has almost 30% of them. Iceland has a land area roughly one and a half times that of Tasmania so you get an impression of just how sparsely populated it is. Reykjavik despite having been settled since the 9th century, is a modern and prosperous small city with parks, museums, galleries and a great food culture. The city is on the only real harbour in the south so plays host to gazillions of tourists during high season, which is now.
The rainbow street. Diversity and inclusion are celebrated big time in Iceland
A day is spent wandering the streets of this attractive, small city checking out the truly excellent national museum, the super modern church at the centre of town and generally just, you know, checking the joint out. Sally gets cozy with a “Big Friendly Giant” and Scott gets very disappointed with Icelandic food for the first time when he orders fish cakes for lunch despite all of us warning him they were likely just fish factory floor sweepings and bread crumbs. He found out the hard way.
Next morning it is raining again but we are determined to see the south west corner of the island where all the volcanic activity has been in the recent past and by recent I don’t mean on a geological time scale, I mean three months ago. After miles and miles of old lava fields we see vast clouds of steam ahead as we approach perhaps Iceland’s most famous tourist trap, the Blue Lagoon. But before we can get there we find the road cut by an almost cooled lava flow from April this year. Rivers of craggy black rock, broken, twisted and jumbled across the landscape for kilometres around us, block our progress.
The ultimate road block, a bloody volcano!
Thankfully it has cooled just enough for local authorities to bulldoze a road through and traffic is allowed to continue but not before we stop to take a few snaps and I climb onto the grotesque black mass to try to get a view of just how enormous it is.
As we leave this desolate scene behind we ride through a slightly older lava field with the first fragile signs of life starting to show through the jumble of black boulders in the form of mosses and lichen. A little way further and the rocks are totally covered with moss and the first hardy grasses appear. Then the grasses start to share their world with small shrubs and eventually, there is rich farmland. It occurs to us we have literally ridden through a bio/geological time scale. We have witnessed the very birth and evolution of life on earth in a few short kilometres on a tiny island in the vastness of the North Atlantic!
Aww, so cute!
Our next stop is at a horse farm in an area known as the Golden Circle with wondrous natural beauty all around. There are hot springs, geysers, waterfalls, canyons and glorious farmland as far as the eye can see.
Geyser erupting every few minutes blasting boiling water and steam high into the air.
Our hosts, Krissa and Aggi are the most decent and generous people we could hope to meet. Krissa and Sally immediately strike up a firm friendship through their shared passion for animals and nature. Aggi gives us wonderful insights into some of the history of his beloved country. For instance we have been puzzled by the near total lack of trees, assuming that they were all cleared centuries ago by uncaring Viking settlers. Actually it was their sheep. When the first settlers arrived in 874 ad. with their sheep the land was covered with a type of scrubby birch forest with little timber value. These scraggly little trees drop seeds each year which then sprout into new baby saplings. These are sugar coated candy to sheep who munch them to death as soon as they appear. Eventually the adult trees die of old age and there are no replacements. In a couple of centuries the entire island is devoid of trees but the sheep happily move on to the next best thing, grass which can actually survive heavy grazing.
After two glorious days on this beautiful, serene property we make a major push around the south east coast to our last two night stop in Egilstsadir, just a few kilometres from the ferry port. But it is much more than just a mile crunching exercise as Iceland continues to overdose our senses. Within a few minutes of leaving our base we discover the heart of Iceland’s dairy industry, sprawling across thousands of hectares of the most beautiful and very flat farmland imaginable. Being summer, many of the cows which are normally shedded for the long harsh winter are now out in the glorious sunshine stocking up on green grass and vitamin D.
A couple of hours later and we see the first signs of the vast ice sheets that dominate this part of Iceland. The further we go the more dramatic the landscape becomes. Thousands of years (Iceland is geologically one of the youngest lands on earth) of volcanoes and glaciers have shaped this region, and indeed all of Iceland into a bizarre “Game of Thrones” or “Middle Earth” scene. There is no need for fantasy movie directors to create CGI scenes, they can just come here and film the real thing at every turn. And as Scott so eloquently puts it, “You need to be patient in Iceland if you want to see a waterfall. At times you might have to go a whole mile or even two before you see one”
It’s almost a mile since last we saw one!
Then, almost impossibly, the glacier comes right down to the road at sea level. Icebergs are floating down the river under the bridge as we roll slowly by, mouths agape and muttering expletives inside our helmets.
Icebergs waiting patiently in the lagoon for their chance to escape to the open ocean.
Icebergs floating under the bridge and out to sea.
A final “shortcut” sees us tackle a slightly treacherous track over another mountain to our destination and a date with another superb Icelandic restaurant, but with even more insane pricing than we had been used to. Our last full day in Iceland is spent checking out a canyon, visiting a reindeer rescue farm where we learn a whole bunch of stuff about these unique animals and meet a really fascinating young guy who works there. He immediately realizes we are more in tune with the animals than most tourists and gives us a little extra behind the scenes experience with the orphan baby reindeer.
One of the orphaned babies.
As they were when they arrived into care, rescued during a winter blizzard in the mountains of Iceland
The guy himself, a marine biologist on a summer break, at the tender age of maybe 30 has travelled to 72 countries, mostly by hitchhiking or on a variety of old motorcycles, crossing borders illegally and generally living life to the fullest. We see him as a kind of kindred spirit and bemoan the fact that far too few young people live this way today. In a pizza place, over lunch we meet more kindred spirits in the form of a British couple also touring by bike. Sally is overjoyed to learn that the young lady in the pillion seat is within a few months of her own age. She was beginning to think that women of a certain age just don’t do this type of adventurous thing any more.
Yes we tried it, no it was not the worst pizza ever!
We have also just learned that the volcano that had spewed lava across the road a couple of months ago has just erupted again over night triggering the evacuation of the Blue Lagoon and the town of Grindavik where we had a delicious fish lunch just three days ago. We have experienced many once in a lifetime things in Iceland and to see an actual erupting volcano would have been too much to expect. As it turns out we missed it by just three days.
It’s a photo of a photo and we missed it by three days but you get the idea.
After we sign off from this post we prepare for the ferry journey to the Faroe Islands and then on to Germany and Norway. We are also bracing ourselves for what will be a sad farewell to our fabulous travelling companions of the last two weeks, Scott and Gina as they make their way back to family in Sweden to prepare and plot for their next adventure somewhere around the world. They may well be citizens of the United States but nowadays they consider themselves to be citizens of Earth.
We’ll keep you posted on what happens next but after Iceland it’s going to need to be special to impress us but then everywhere can be special can’t it.
