Iceland's Ring Road by Camper, Hot Spring to Hot Spring

The story

There were three of us and one camper van, which is exactly one seat more than the van was designed to make comfortable. We drove Route 1 clockwise over eleven nights, and the route was not planned around waterfalls or glaciers or any of the things you would put on a poster. It was planned around where you could next get warm.

This turns out to be a good way to see Iceland, because the hot water is everywhere and it is almost never where the coaches stop.

The route is decided by hot water

Iceland heats itself. Every village of any size has a geothermal swimming pool, most of them open until nine, most of them costing less than a coffee. Between them are the wild ones — rivers, concrete tanks and stone pools, some signposted, some not.

• Reykjadalur — an hour's walk up a valley to a river at bathing temperature. Go before nine.
• Seljavallalaug — a 1923 pool built into a hillside near Skógar. Cold-ish, extraordinary, unstaffed.
• Hoffell — five tubs on a gravel track near Höfn, looking at a glacier and nothing else.
• Mývatn Nature Baths — the north's answer to the Blue Lagoon, at a third of the price and with a fraction of the queue.
• Every municipal pool you pass. Shower properly first; the attendants will tell you, and they are right.

Camping here is about wind, not cold

We had one night at Vík where the van rocked hard enough that nobody slept, and we had parked badly — broadside to the gap between two buildings. The next morning an Icelandic couple showed us where to put it instead, nose into the weather and behind an earth bank, and we never had a bad night again.

You do not park where the view is. You park where the wind is not.

— A man at the Vík campsite, gesturing at our terrible choice

The other thing worth saying plainly: wild camping in a vehicle has been illegal since 2015. Campsites are cheap, frequent and often the only flat ground for miles. The rule exists because Icelandic moss takes decades to grow back over a tyre track.

Dalvík, for the whales

Whale watching is sold hard in Reykjavík and it is better in the north, where Eyjafjörður is deep, sheltered and full of feed. We drove forty minutes up from Akureyri to Dalvík and took the morning boat, which is three hours of mostly standing still in a flotation suit and then, without warning, a humpback surfacing close enough that you hear it breathe before you see it.

Take the earliest sailing. The fjord flattens overnight and roughens through the day, and a boat full of people being sick is nobody's morning.

The Westfjords are where the trip stopped being a ring

The Westfjords are not on Route 1, which is exactly why we went. It cost two days and a great deal of gravel, and it produced the two best hours of the fortnight. On the way in, Djúpidalur: a waterfall behind a farm and a geothermal pool fed straight off the hot side of it, empty at four in the afternoon.

Then Rauðisandur, which you reach by a gravel switchback steep enough that two of us got out and walked. Ten kilometres of sand that is genuinely red-gold rather than black, a tide that goes out for what looks like a mile, and four other people on it. We stayed two nights and drove out to Látrabjarg on the second — 440 metres of bird cliff at the westernmost point of Europe, where the puffins are so unbothered you can sit down a metre away.

Lie down if you want the photograph. People have gone over these edges, and the grass on the lip is not attached to anything.

— The sign at Látrabjarg, paraphrased, and worth obeying

The east is the part people skip

Most people do the south coast and turn round. That leaves the whole eastern third — six hours of fjords, switchbacks and reindeer — to almost nobody. The drive from Jökulsárlón up to Seyðisfjörður was the longest day of the trip and the one all three of us talk about.

You come over a 620-metre pass with the fjord suddenly a very long way below, and a road that switchbacks down into it, and a town of six hundred people at the bottom with a rainbow painted up the street to the church. We stayed two nights and drove nowhere on the second, which was the best decision we made.