Southern Iceland (Day 1 – 2)

When I was pricing out Iceland, you can spend a lot of money renting a car and finding hotel accommodations each night. It’s not cheap. Most of the cheap options for hotels run a cool $200. On the other end of ther spectrum, renting a car and tent camping is a cheaper option. Since we didn’t want to lug our camping gear around for 4 months, we decided on the tiny camper van. Add on an Iceland camping pass, and we were set.After an overnight flight into Reykjavik, we went straight to the van rental. Considering neither one of us got much sleep, this day was a grumpy blur. We did a quick tour of the Golden Circle right outside of the city, which is also the most popular loop due to proximity. Note worthy were the geysers and Gullfoss waterfall- the latter being our favorite of the day.

We spent the night south of Selfoss along the coast at our first campsite. Catching a whopping 12 hours of sleep, we were finally woken up by the camp manager tapping our door at 10 am to pay our fees.

Day 2 was the day of foss’s, or in English falls. We kicked off on highway 1 following the counter clockwise route which took us through south Iceland.

Straying away from the waterfalls, we headed to a coastal attraction. Dyrhólaey sticks 120 meters out of the ocean with a natural arch. Close by we were able to see our first glimpse of basalt columns and black beaches.

We passed through the south Iceland town of Vik and entered into a desolate landscape known as the moss covered lava fields. This area is a remnant of the Loki eruption in 1783, which caused major climate changes in the northern hemisphere.

Our campsite was north of the village of Kirkjubaejarklaustur (had the map out for that spelling!)