Bikepacking Iceland

I've wanted to go to Iceland since I first learned that it was a place. During August of 2023 I decided to go on a 18 day solo trip and ride as much of the island as I could. I wasn't able to get everywhere, but I really enjoyed my time there and can't wait to go back sometime.

Because Icelandair lost the bag containing my sleeping bag, helmet, and spare clothes, I had to book a hotel in Reykjavik last minute until they could find the bag and bring it to me. The Keflavik airport does have a special area for bike assembly and disassembly, called the bike pit. I hauled my tired cardboard box out to the repurposed shipping container in the parking lot and got to work. One important thing to note is that there is no official space at the airport to store or buy a bike box. Some people I met had luck storing them at a car rental on the other side of the airport but I just hoped someone would be arriving with a box as I left. This will come up later!

Bike assembled, I loaded up the gear and bags that I did have and set off to Reykjavik on a divided highway in street clothes without a helmet. Weaving through interchanges and dodging tour busses and semis I made it to the hotel. I then spent the next day exploring Reykjavik and waiting for my bags, which did eventually turn up. The third day of the trip would be the first full day on the bike.

I woke up slightly feverish with an expiring hotel reservation, so I set off towards Thingvellir along the bike paths of Reykjavik. Once outside the city I returned to the shoulder of the main road between the two. This is part of the "golden circle" tourist route in Iceland, and as a result the road was extremely busy with cars and campers. When I actually arrived at Thingvellir National Park, it was drizzling and there wasn't much going on. Worried about how much ride I had left, I took off without taking many pictures.

I had initially planned to ride from Keflavik to Thingvellir in one day and camp there, but due to the missing bags, I had to scale back my plans. Instead, I turned towards Borgarnes where spending the night at the campground would set me up for a quick journey to the Westfjords, one of the places that I really wanted to ride this trip. My route took me onto the ring road towards the end, and after about half an hour of constant traffic with no shoulder, I made it to Borgarnes and decided that I would never ride on the ring road again. Exhausted and sick, I ate a couple pizzas and retired to my sleeping bag.

The first couple hours took me back off the ring road from Borgarnes to Stykkishólmur, where I could catch a ferry to the Westfjords. There was one leaving in the afternoon, so I hurried over and got there with an hour or two to spare. After the best burger of my life in an Icelandic gas station's NBA-themed restaurant, I headed down to the harbor. Once across, I rode the short distance to the nearest campground and called it a day.

Setting off from Flokalundur, I headed west along the southern shore of the Westfjords. About half an hour into the ride, I saw something small and dark on the road. As I got closer, it darted up the hill and I found myself looking at an arctic fox. Neither of us moved for a couple seconds before it bounded up the hill and out of view. The bulk of the ride was three climbs out of fjords, each over 500 meters of elevation with rolling roads along each fjord. Without a doubt it was the hardest day on the bike, but with enough chocolate milk and Oreos I made it without having to walk up any of the climbs.

After the first climb and descent, I made a short diversion to the Garðar BA 64, a ship that was built as a whaler around the same time as the Titanic, converted to a fishing boat, and then beached in a fjord. Now it sits next to a gravel parking lot, some picnic tables, and a faded information board. The motley collection of tourists that had bothered to go beyond the ring road the Westfjords (including myself) slowly circled the ship, taking pictures at just the right angles to crop everyone else out so it looked like we were alone, then moving on and letting the next person take their spot.

After a hard day 5, I had a late start on day 6. The road took me along the shore until the it could no longer tuck itself into the cliffs lining the fjords and climbed into the flatter terrain above them. After rolling terrain up top, I descended back into the fjord containing Dynjandi, a 100 meter tall waterfall that expands from 30 meters wide at the top to 60 meters wide at the bottom.

As the rain rolled in again I got cold, looked at the massive pass I had planned to climb over to the west, and decided to ride through the convenient tunnel that had been built to replace it instead. Bikes are allowed in most tunnels in Iceland, and this one was well lit, had a wide enough sidewalk, and I only saw a couple cars as I raced through the 5km long tunnel. The sun set around 10:30 pm, silhouetting the entrance to the fjord as the weather cleared up again.

After waiting for the first cafe I'd seen since Reykjavik to open, I headed off to Isafjordur. Isafjordur is the largest city in the Westfjords, and the only place with a bike shop on my route until I got back to Reykjavik. Having used a tunnel to skip a mountain pass the day before, I decided that I had to do the one into Isafjordur. The sky had cleared up again, and I left the paved road behind for the switchbacks and rough gravel road. There was some hike a bike involved, but I made it to the top and rolled down to Isafjordur where I restocked and rested.

After a week of riding, I decided that day 8 would be a rest day to recover from a couple hard days. But no day is a true rest day, so I spent an hour heading 25 Km down the road to Sudavik, where I spent the night. After all, the wind was starting to pick up and it was an hour less I'd have to do on day 9. This turned out to be a good thing, since I had a tailwind on day 8, but the wind shifted the next day, transforming into a headwind that would stick with me the next few days

By the evening of day 9, the wind was gusting so hard that my sunglasses blew away and my tent poles were bending in the wind. I struggled into a headwind across a fjord and over a pass. Set up behind a berm in the campsite outside the abandoned wing of a rundown and mostly empty hotel, I met some German guys who I had passed earlier in the day as well as a Norwegian couple. The hotel was built around hot springs, but the pool was closed for cleaning, and the showers were either scalding hot or freezing cold.

I don't really have many pictures from this day. The wind was still really strong, but it started with a tailwind down the fjord. On the other side it was a headwind since I was going the other direction, but I hadn't seen anything yet. As I rounded the corner and headed East, the wind turned into a crosswind from the North. The semis would briefly block the wind, sucking me towards them, only to get gusted by the full force of the wind after they passed. Leaning into the wind, I tried to ride closer to the middle of the lane so that when a gust hit I would get blown towards the edge of the road rather than off it entirely. It didn't work. My bags acted as a sail, and as somewhat of a kite myself I could barely control the bike. One exceptionally strong gust slowly drifted me off the road, and my bike stalled and tipped as it hit the soft gravel of the side of the road. After another close call, I gave up on riding and walked my bike. I'd keep my bike on my road side in order to protect me from cars a little more, but that meant that if a strong gust hit, I'd get a bike blown into my legs. As it was, my bike sometimes lifted off the ground as I hiked up the pass, with only my body stumbling against the crosswind keeping it from blowing away. Eventually, I climbed out of it. After descending through a valley, I turned South towards Holmavik and finally got a tailwind for the last 10 Km or so.

Although Holmavik itself was relatively sheltered from the wind, it had shifted overnight to once again be a headwind. After visiting the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft (where I saw a real pair of necropants!) and the Sheep Herding Museum, I continued towards the ring road. The main road went off to the West, but I continued on a gravel road that rose above fjords and climbed into the clouds. After I descended back to the coast, the wind was negligible by comparison and I sped towards Bordeyri.

From the campground in Bordeyri I could see the ring road, for the first time since I had left Borgarnes on day 4. After my experience riding a short bit of the ringroad on day 3, I didn't want to ride it any more than I had to, so I rode from Bordeyri to the gas station at the junction with the ring road. I had heard that the Icelandic public transport operator had bike racks on their long distance busses, so I cooked some oatmeal outside the gas station and waited. After removing a couple bags from my bike, I put it on the rear rack and sat in the back so that I could look out the rear window and make sure that my bike was still there whenever I got worried. The rack worked, and a little while later I was unloading it at another gas station in Blönduós. After another gas station hamburger I set off towards route 35, which is one of the easier highland crossings. The route took me along gravel backroads through farmland before climbing up into the highlands. I crossed a hydroelectric dam and arrived at the Afangi mountain hut where I would spend the night.

This day was rough. Afangi sits on the edge of where sheep are willing to go, but from then on I would be alone. Because this road is one of the easier crossings of the highlands, it's relatively well travelled. The Dacia Dusters (basically every rental car in Iceland is a Dacia Duster) lived up to their name, but I wasn't prepared for the washboarding. There was no escape from it for about 7 and a half hours of arm numbing vibration. At some point I ran out of food, and the vibes got pretty bad! Eventually I made it to pavement and sheep, and rolled into Geysir exhausted and hungry, but back on the golden circle.

After a brief stop at Geysir, (which is where we get the word geyser from) I made it to a shop and restocked. Accompanied by rain, rolling hills, and a headwind I made it back to the ring road, which I followed to Hvolsvöllur. The stretch of road between Hvolsvöllur and Vík í Mýrdal has a bunch of things that I wanted to visit, but I also knew that I would only have enough time to ride it one way. Because the wind was blowing from the East, I decided to camp in Hvolsvöllur and catch another bus along the ring road the next day. I did visit what must be one of the only taco trailers in Iceland and it was pretty good!

Day 15 was just spent waiting for and then taking the bus from Hvolsvöllur to Vík í Mýrdal. After taking all the bags off my bike and just riding around enjoying how light it was I put them all back on and spent day 16 riding right back to Hvolsvöllur. My wind gamble paid off, as I had a tailwind the entire way. I flew across the glacial plains in the shadow of the mountains, visiting that one crashed dc-3 everyone takes pictures of and a couple waterfalls along the way. I ended day 16 camped out in Reykjavik, having made it to Hvolsvöllur in time to catch the bus.

I don't really have anything to say about the ride itself during this day other than it was a Friday and I had a flight Saturday morning. My plan was to ride to the airport on Friday, track down a bike box somewhere, spend the night at the airport, and then get on my flight the next morning. Things did not go according to plan.

I arrived at the Keflavik airport to find that they had cleared out the bike boxes. The closest bike shop was in Reykjavik and I just barely couldn't get back into town before they closed. Instead, I decided to go to the supermarket in Keflavik and buy the heaviest duty bags they had. I got a whole roll and started putting my bike into them. Then some cyclists showed up. They had just arrived from Spain and left their bike boxes in the bike pit. It was just what I'd been hoping for! Except, they left a note asking that nobody move them since they needed them to fly back. I knew that they would be removed no matter what, but when faced with this ethical dilemma I couldn't bring myself to take the box. Instead, I put more bags on the bike until I ran out. I hauled my blob to the terminal and settled in for the night alongside the hundreds of other people waiting for their flights the next morning. Fortunately, the check in agent accepted it as a properly packaged bike (I didn't even have tape) and it arrived safely in Edinburgh. That leg of the trip is a whole other comedy of errors, but that's a story for another time.