Cycling Southern Iceland, Top 10 Musings

This is the first of a few posts I’m going to regurgitate about cycling in Iceland. This post is focused primarily on the technical details that make or break a bike tour, posts to follow will be more about Iceland with pretty pictures, etc.

Top 10 things to consider when planning your cycling trip across southern Iceland:

1. The weather.
2. The weather.
3. The weather.
4. Your tires. Are you planning to head off the ring road at all, or continue past Höfn? (as of 2008) Then you need something that can handle gravel roads. 35mm and up, I’d recommend. If you stick to the paved part of the ring road, I’d recommend 28mm and up. (I did it in 23mm, and never felt good about my contact with the road. Averaged one flat per day.)

   The roads wear down differently in Iceland (compared to California). It looks like their asphalt mixture is higher in gravel and lower in tar. In any case, rather than potholes or seams in the road appearing, it turns into a bed a sharp rocks. Works great if your tires are much bigger than the rocks. Not so awesome if they’re about the same width. Like I said, I averaged one flat per day… some of those were tire slashings.

   

5. The weather.
6. Feeding yourself. It’s challenging to find any food for parts of the ride. There are 50km stretches with no settlement whatsoever, let alone food. When you do find food it’s generally a convenience gas station store. Don’t expect to find any power bars here. But snickers, granola and trailmix can go along way! Complex carbohydrates and protein are your friend, excessive fat and grease, not so much.

   

7. The weather.
8. Sleeping – every community, if it has a gas station, also has a campsite and a hostel. The hostels generally expect you to supply your own sleeping bag. The campsites, which are generally right next to the hostel, are very nice and usually include all the amenities (like a hot, clean shower) that the hostels have, minus the French dude who snores a whole bunch, and his French friends who snore a lot too. (nothing against the French here, I swear)
9. Uh gee, the weather?
10. Bike tools and parts. There is one bike shop south of Reykjavík, in Selfoss, and it carries a very limited selection of parts. So if you don’t want a broken chain to turn your tour into a different type of adventure, you need to carry a spare chain and chain tool. Same with a broken spoke. Same with a slashed tire. Etc, etc.

    

Bam, end of top 10. Notice ‘traffic’ didn’t make the cut. Not even close. Once you get out of Reykjavík’s urban area, this is a complete non-issue. Iceland drivers drive fast, and are not very bike-savy, but they’re aren’t all that many of them to worry about!

‘Mountains’ or ‘hills’ didn’t make the cut either. There are a few steep grades (like 12%). But the highest paved pass in all of Iceland is only some 600m or so. By California status, that would be a ‘hill’. I didn’t run across any climbs taller than ~200m.

Now, let’s talk a little more about that weather thing. As a cyclist in Iceland, there are three important parts of weather you care about:

• Wind: The wind is always blowing in Iceland. The question is, what direction? And how hard… hard enough to push you across the lane/to a stop? Or just an annoyance when you’re fiddling with the map?
• Rain: Nearly every day in Iceland is at least partly cloudy. Any cloud may dump a short load of rain as it blows quickly by. A good day is no, or almost no rain. A average day is scattered rain. A crappy day is sheets of rain, coming down all day. You are soaked in minutes.

  I got nailed by this soak-you-to-the-bone storm about 5 min after this picture was taken.

  

• Temperature: Comparatively, this isn’t such a big deal. But Iceland in September does hit a very key spot on the thermometer for cycling. In my experience, if it’s above about 15C (~60F) while cycling, it’s hard not to be warm enough… your body is just generating so much heat from the energy you’re exerting. And below about 10C (~50F) it’s very hard to not be cold. The wind chill from your movement through the air just sucks your heat away. Southern Iceland in September is playing around in this no-mans land… I had morning temperatures as low as 8C, and daytime ones as high as 14C.

This is your new best friend: http://en.vedur.is That’s the best weather resource out there for Iceland. Problem is, its confidence interval is about +/- 1, on a scale of three. So, if it says good, that means ok or good. Bad means ok or bad. And a prediction of ok means nothing. And… of course, that’s the usual prediction. As one store clerk put it when I asked her how the weather was supposed to be the next day – “oh, more Iceland!”. Yup. All righty then.

I don’t want to give the impression that cycling Iceland is all pain. But compared to other places I’ve toured (California, Holland) Iceland is much more challenging on the ‘basic survival’ level. Just don’t take it lightly, and come prepared!

More fun picture posts coming. Stay tunned.