Iceland isn’t much for paved roads. Past about 100km south of Reykjavík, there is a whole one paved road for the next ~500km. Then that too turns into gravel. If you were leave that one paved road and head straight north cross-country across the icecap(s), you would not hit another paved road until you had crossed the entire island and were sitting on the north coast.

Because of this, most people cycle Iceland on mountain bikes, or at least road bikes with urban or mountain tires on there. However, if you’re a Roadie and you kinda just threw your bike in a box the night before your flight, you might have racing tires on there. This means you’re sticking to the paved road. And thus, you’ll see most the same raw, stark, strong, breathtaking sights pictured here.

From Reykjavík I headed to the northeast to the Althing, following this guide (search for ‘In and out of Reykjavik’) to get out of town. The Althing’s big claim to fame is that was the world’s first democratic parliament – 930AD, a bunch of Icelandic Vikings. As historical sites in Iceland go, this is the big one. The Icelandic people pull most of their proud self-identity from their Viking ancestry, even if it has been shown that genetically that they’re also Scottish and Irish. Even if not completely in body, at least in mind, culture, language and spirit, they are the Viking people.

Modern Icelanders have marked their best-guess of where the Althing was held with an Icelandic flag.

Against these cliffs, the speaker’s voice would resonate and project out to the envoys that came from across the island.

From above the cliffs of the Althing:

The Althing was held at the head of lake Thingvallavatn.

From the Althing, I cut down to Selfoss. The road was completely empty for the first hour or so… beyond the half dozen vehicles or so that roared by, I saw no sign nor heard no sound of mankind beyond the growling of my tires spinning swiftly on the worn pavement below. Zen factor: extremely high.

Cycling from Selfoss down towards Vík (at the southern tip), your trip is dominated by the approaching Icelandic bluffs.

As they approach, you’ll notice thin white lines cutting down from the top to the flats below. Those are waterfalls.

Heading around Vík up toward Skaftafell National Park and the huge Vatnajökull Icecap, the grasslands move away. You begin cutting across huge wastelands, created by the icecap dumping rocky sediment down over and over for a few millennia.

The glaciers coming down off the icecaps are intense. I’ve seen glaciers before in California and Canada, but this was something else.

The largest dump of the Vatnajökull actually makes it all the way out to the sea, throwing small icebergs out into the Atlantic where they quickly melt. You get to ride across a steel bridge with icebergs underneath. What is this, Narnia?

Having a waffle next to a glacier and a few icebergs. That was one damn good waffle.

As you approach Höfn, the wasteland changes back over to farmland, still backed by glaciers coming down from the icecap.

Unfortunately, I (actually, more like Stanford to pass the buck) timed my trip to miss summer by about a week. I got rained on everyday and faced strong headwinds about half the time. As the storm got worse, I bunkered down in Höfn for a few days to wait it out. This is the best (and coincidentally, the only) coffee shop in Höfn. Free wifi included! Highly recommended.

After three days of waiting, the weather prediction was ‘bad’ for the next five… so I bailed. Back to Reykjavík. As a student, my flight on Eagle Air was just under 10k Krona (~100 USD), which is like 10% more expensive than the bus and about 8 times faster. They are bike-friendly… no extra charge if you’re under 20 kilos.

Hello, small plane flying in bad weather.

I spent several more days (and nights – great nightlife, no need to sleep) in Reykjavík bouncing around. They have a nice network of separated bike trails that rings the city several times over.

Finally, I rode out to the international airport in Keflavík for a flight to Berlin via Iceland Express – also relatively bike-friendly. No bike box or bag required. Once you get out of Reykjavík, the ride to the airport is on the freeway shoulder. The entrances/exits are a little intimidating but they’re pretty empty of traffic cause everyone’s going to the airport. It’s really a pretty fast and efficient ride. When I first arrived in Iceland, I didn’t ride from Keflavík to Reykjavík… but if I do it again, I will. It’s a fat 10 foot shoulder the whole way. Pray for tailwinds!

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.

Greater Reykjavík holds only about 200k residents (~2/3 of Iceland’s total population), but the city puts on a show of more than three times that, by US standards. Commerce is concentrated in the downtown core, which, along with pretty much the rest of Iceland, is under seemingly continuous construction. It’s difficult to get an overview shot of downtown, but this is from one of the parks on one of the surrounding hills, looking west here.

Everything in Iceland is extremely clean, functional, precise, well-maintained, quality, clear, ridiculously safe (even the police, of which you will not see any, do not carry guns) – if you’re OCD, you will find peace here. This is all by US standards. In one week of wandering I have yet to come across a dirty bathroom, a door that doesn’t quite fit, a resentful cashier, or even moldy bread. And I’ve been staying in the cheapest places in the country – camping, hostels and guesthouses. As far as I can tell, there is no (like, zero) pavement in Iceland that is as bad as San Francisco’s average street. And I’ve ridden over some 500 miles of it – and I’m not exaggerating. That ‘higher standard of living’ thing – it really shows.

One of the dominating features of Reykjavík’s skyline is this huge church, the Hallgrímskirkja. Which, of course, was under (re)construction when I was there.

Appearently that statue out in front was a gift from ‘The People of the USA’ to those of Iceland in 1930, in celebration of the 1000 year anniversary of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracy. Go us! Kinda like the Statue of Liberty, just more, well, how to put this nicely… economical.

Speaking of Americans, aside from those on my flight in from San Francisco via Minneapolis, I neither met nor overheard any American accents during my two days in Reykjavík. The closest I found was Montreal. Which, as anyone from the Heartland will tell you, is a long, long way from American.

That’s not to say you can’t get by with English. You are 100% fully functional with English here – if you manage to find an Icelander that isn’t fluent in English, then they’re not actually an Icelander… they’re a French tourist or something.

Reykjavík’s downtown has European-style narrow streets, with a streetwall of 3-5 stories. Aside from the expressways, roads and streets do not have shoulders – rather a sharp curb to mark the end of the street and the beginning of the not-street. Very pedestrian friendly, if not so much for bikes. All the crosswalks are raised to the level of the ’sidewalk’ (which, outside the downtown, is generally a completely separated paved path, more like the American idea of a ‘multi-use path’ – bikes are legal). This isn’t a Reykjavík thing though – it’s an Iceland thing. You’ll find this even in little communities of a few hundred people hundreds of km from anything bigger – the crosswalks are raised and made of brick. What, building for people not cars? Silly hippies.

And it’s true – most everything in Reykjavík (and Iceland in general) is expensive. I paid 900 Krona for a beer with dinner in Reykjavík – about 10 USD. In general, expect to pay about twice as much as in the US. The big exception: budget sleeping. Just like seemingly every single community over zero residents, Reykjavík has a campsite (in town) and a hostel. The campsite will run you under 10 USD, and a bed in the hostel (bring your own sleeping bag!) will run you 15-20 USD. I stayed in the campsite:

Finally, why on two wheels? Well, two reasons for that. First, Reykjavík is relatively auto-oriented compared to its European counterparts. There are very functional and efficient expressways that divide the downtown from its waterfront and the parks that stretch along it. Parking is only regulated in the central downtown core. Bicycles are a new thing in Reykjavík… but those ‘multi-use’ paths are being built everywhere across the city. There is no rail system in Reykjavík (or Iceland at all, for that matter). The bus system is much stronger than those you’ll find in the states, but still isn’t enough to make transit preferable. So, this all adds up to – unless you choose to rent a vehicle, exploring Reykjavík by bike is a smoother ride than by foot/bus.

Second reason to go on bike… after exploring Reykjavík, you can go on tour across the island!