What the Cold Keeps

Every other route in this journal is an argument about buildings. This one is mostly an argument about weather.

Iceland has one road that matters. Route 1 goes round the outside of the island in about thirteen hundred kilometres, and everything worth stopping for is either on it or on a spur off it. We took a camper from Keflavík, drove it anticlockwise for seven days, cooked at the campsites, slept in it, and came back to the airport having done the whole circle. That was the plan and we completed it exactly, which almost never happens.

Why this route is mixed

I came here for the wrecks. There is a wartime landing craft rusting at the head of a fjord that I had wanted to stand in front of for years, a US Navy DC-3 that somebody put on a trailer and drove seven hundred kilometres across the country rather than let it disappear, and a wooden herring boat propped on a cradle in the town that built her in 1955.

What I got was that, plus a week of the most aggressive landscape I have ever driven through, and the honest thing is to admit that the landscape won. So this guide is not a list of ruins with some scenery in between. It is a route where a boiling mud plain, a lagoon full of thousand-year-old ice and a canyon cut by a glacier that no longer exists sit on the same map as the abandoned things — because that is the order you actually meet them in, and because in Iceland they are the same subject.

Everywhere else I go, buildings are being taken apart by cities. Here they are being taken apart by weather, and the weather is also the reason you came.

The shape of the week

Day one is the south coast: the DC-3 in its meadow, a waterfall you have to wade into a cleft to see, Skógafoss making its own rainbow, and a canyon at last light. Day two runs under Vatnajökull — a 1974 memorial chapel that is one enormous roof, a wall of basalt columns at Svartifoss, a turf church that you have to look twice at to find, and then the glacier lagoon.

Day three is the one to build the trip around. You wake on the black flats at Stokksnes under Vestrahorn, photograph a Viking village that was built for a film that was never made, and then drive most of the east coast to get onto a gravel road over a pass and down to the wreck.

Day four is the long empty one: Hengifoss in the morning, then two hundred kilometres across the interior plateau with almost nothing on it. Day five is Mývatn, where the ground does everything at once — mud pools, a crater a kilometre wide, a cave with impossibly blue water in it — and finishes with Goðafoss and Akureyri.

Day six is the drive back down the west: a three-thousand-year-old crater, and then the mountain off every calendar in the country, which turns out to deserve it. Day seven is the herring boat at Akranes before eight in the morning, the cathedral in Reykjavík, and the airport.

What the camper changes

Everything, mostly. You stop where the light is instead of where the booking is, you eat at half nine at night if that is when you get in, and the fifteen minutes between waking up and standing somewhere worth standing is the whole reason four of the frames on this route exist.

It also means the campsites are the itinerary. Wild camping has been illegal since 2015 and is enforced, which sounds restrictive and isn’t — the sites are everywhere, they are cheap, they have hot water and somewhere to cook out of the wind, and a couple of them are better locations than anything you would have booked.

The two things I didn’t plan for

The first was the sky. Two nights on this route gave me things I could not have arranged: the Milky Way standing over Vestrahorn from a headland with no light within tens of kilometres, and then, over Mývatn on the fourth evening, an aurora that filled the top of the sky at seven o’clock and kept going. September is the reason — the nights have got long enough to be properly dark and the roads have not yet started closing.

The second was a thread I only noticed on the last morning. The columns at Svartifoss, the ranked hexagons in the cliffs above the east, the torn walls at Grjótagjá — and then two churches, at Akureyri and in Reykjavík, both by Guðjón Samúelsson, both of them that same cliff rendered in poured concrete. A country with almost no building stone and almost no timber went and copied its own geology at building scale. I photographed the source on day two and the copy on day seven without meaning to.

How to use this

Nothing on this route is a way into anywhere — these are national parks, marked trails, signposted car parks and working churches, and the map below is about where to be and when the light is right, not how to get past a fence. The two places to be careful with are the graveyard at Hofskirkja, which is turf and damages easily, and the Viking set at Stokksnes, which is on a farm that charges at the gate and is the only reason the thing is still standing.

The drive above is broken into the seven days as we actually did them, with honest distances. Three of those days are long. If you have nine, put the extra two into the East Fjords and Snæfellsnes.