DRIVE ‘TIL YOU DROP

When someone tells you they drove the Ring Road around Iceland’s outside perimeter, the first question you should ask is: “In how many days?” Anything less than eight days, and your next question should be, “How many hours did you drive each day?” Their answer will be something like eight to ten hours a day. And that’s certifiably crazy if you ask me.

When I put our trip together, I started with the premise that we wouldn’t drive more than three hours a day—and preferably less as the trip goes along because your tolerance to driving diminishes. It takes some serious route planning to target the cool sites and put them together in a manageable itinerary that doesn’t turn your vacation into a tedious jumble of discomfort and leave you driving your ass off. I enjoy putting together such a travel plan and I’m quite good at it.

We encountered many people—especially travelers taking very expensive guided tours—doing the Ring Road circle jerk in five days, and that’s akin to paying big bucks to have someone torture you every day for a week.

And here’s another thing to consider: the Ring Road is a very unpredictable and unforgiving road to navigate. It’s a drive that requires skill and your constant attention. The road is narrow and it’s raised about twenty feet above the surrounding landscape, meaning, if you lose control or veer off the road, you are quickly going airborne. Then there are the sleepwalking sheep that hang out along the edges of the road waiting for Godot, the extreme weather, one-lane bridges, blind turns, twists and turns, and the occasional slow-moving farm tractor taking up the whole road.

Don’t get me wrong. The road is well maintained, though it puddles up after rain, and it can feel like you’re suddenly hitting a goddamn wall if you’re driving too fast. I have never driven a more interesting and entertaining road. Its natural beauty is like nothing else you will ever see because Iceland wears its big boy pants every second of every day. It is without a doubt, the greatest road show on earth. But it can bite you in the ass without warning!

Traveling around Iceland is a constant tradeoff between driving and stopping to see the wonders of nature. If you’re driving half the day, that leaves little time to get out and stroll around, much less hike. And many places of interest require at least an hour of walking out and back. So, do the math.

To give you a sense of the remote nature of the northern section of the Ring Road, there are these amazing cairns consisting of large basalt blocks that stand about waist high. In the past, Icelandic settlers relied on foot or horseback travel, as there were no roads and only sheep trails crisscrossed the unforgiving landscape. To aid navigation, they built cairns, which became crucial for finding one’s way through fog, snow, or rain.

Today’s 3-hour fun fest drive consisted of geysers, a geothermal power plant, a blue lagoon crater, Europe’s most powerful waterfall, and some high-end hot springs baths along a majestic lake, ending at a tiny fishing village at the very edge of civilization.

The Leirhnjúkur Lava Fields and Geothermal Area are as close to another planet as you will ever see. The landscape is orange nothingness with streaked snow cone hills in the background and gray bubbling sulfur pools interspersed with nasty mini-geysers that never stop hissing and spitting stinky steam into the air. This place puts Yellowstone to shame. And it was free, like everything we had visited so far in Iceland! They don’t charge to get into their parks.

Obviously, this is an area of mega geothermal activity. And here’s why.

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The planet’s longest mountain range, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, is rising up between the American (North Atlantic Plate) and European (Eurasian Plate) which are moving apart at the rate of about 2 cm a year. Magma from the earth’s core is filling the void and it’s all happening under and up through the surface of Iceland’s tortured terrain.

And to illustrate this science lesson, our next stop was the Krafla Power Plant where they produce gobs of power by piping geothermal gas to a handsome red power plant, where they make steam that spins the mighty turbines, which produce cheap electricity. From the hill above the facility, it looked like a toy power plant you might see on a train set.

On a crumbling orange cinder mountain above the power plant sits the Viti Crater, yet another component of the Krafla volcanic system. A bright blue lake fills this crater, and you can walk around the ridge where you’ll pass a few other hot springs and steam vents. However, if it has rained recently, the place turns into a giant mud ball. The hikers looked like they were wearing floppy clown shoes and it was genuinely amusing to those of us who were wise enough to avoid the muddy rim trail.

Our next stop, Dettifoss, was about thirty minutes away and is one of those must-see attractions along the Ring Road. Everybody does it, so you are going to have lots of company no matter when you go.

Dettifoss is Europe’s most powerful waterfall. I’m not really sure what the hell that means. I think they just like to say that every major waterfall is the biggest or baddest something or other, and that’s cool. We all want to be special.

It’s about a half-mile hike from the crowded car park to the falls, but like at the Godafoss Waterfall, there are trails all over the place, some high and some low, and nobody really knows where they’re going, so the tourons spread out. But once you get to the falls it gets pretty crowded, though it doesn’t really matter because it is so incredibly, dare I say “powerful”, that it will stop you in your tracks and take your breath away. It’s not as tall or majestic as Niagara Falls, but it packs a pretty punch. And it creates a rain storm of spray, so you really can’t stay there very long without getting soaked.

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Now came the driving part of the day. It was two hours to the Vok Baths near the lakeside town of Egilsstader and the Ring Road took us through a myriad of phantasmagorical landscapes—Mars, bottomless canyons, barren nothingness, raging rivers, lava beds, glacial lakes, green grass farms dotted with black and white sheep, and two thousand-feet-tall snow-capped ridges where powerful waterfalls flowed and tumbled down the rocky mountain sides every mile or so. We must have seen fifty quarter-mile-long cascades in a 20-mile stretch of highway. After a while, we were like, “Yeah. Whatever.”

The Vok Baths were the perfect way to end a busy day of driving and hiking. They bill themselves as “Iceland’s only geothermal floating baths”. Yeah, maybe. It resembles some California health spa or cosmic retreat—the kind of place where you might see some of the beautiful people cavorting. It’s modern chic, with large tinted glass windows and slick stone surfaces. It even had Japanese ting-ting music playing softly over the PA. I thought it was vaguely pretentious but in a welcoming way. And who cares anyway? It’s about the baths, not all that other stuff. And the floating metal baths were cool. And by that I mean they were not hot springs. They were warm baths. There was a poolside bar with stone tables in the water to hold your smoothies, plus two floating infinity pools ending at the silvery lake. There was even “healthy” algae growing in the water. And you could jump straight into the nut-crunching cold water of Lake Urridavatn. Inna warned me that I’d have a heart attack if I jumped in such cold water, but I took the polar bear plunge just the same. We spent several very enjoyable hours at the Vok Baths getting clean and refreshed.

We got some expensive gas in Egilsstader ($9 a gallon)—HELLO, AMERICA!!!— and then took a splendid detour along Scenic Route 92 to our hotel on a lovely fjord in the storybook fishing village of Eskifjodur. It reminded us of the secluded and laidback Isle of Mull in western Scotland. It felt like we were staying on the very edge of human existence. It was the end of the proverbial line.

We ate dinner at Randulf’s Seahouse on a dock above Eskifjardara Fjord. It was a former herring house where Norwegians lived seasonally, processing herring. It felt like we had suddenly been transported to Scandinavia in the 1830s. Half the menu featured their specialty dishes, reindeer meatballs, and other reindeer delights. I opted for the Seafood Soup and a wee dram of Balvenie scotch.

Like earthbound time travelers, we had landed in an old world where people ate reindeer and wild fish in lamp-lit wooden barns.

What could possibly come next?