The Iceland Traverse - Day 0

At this point we have already landed in Reykjavik, bought as much food as we could find and packaged one of our resupplies. The best laid plans have slightly fallen through giving us a predicament… a 10 days food carry and no solid way of getting to the northern terminus. After dropping resupply 1 off at the local bus stop to be held at Landmannalaugar, I ran to the airport just in time to catch the flight north to Akureyri. The flight took us over beautiful black deserts and volcanoes until we entered the green, mountain surrounded valley the town is situated in.

Akureyri

We had a wonderful stay and time to check out the area and packed our big resupply for the highlands. We couldn’t however post it until 10am the next more meaning we would miss our bus to Húsavík, half of our journey to the terminus.

After posting we hiked out of town and set up with our thumbs out hoping for a kind passer by. At this point we are not expecting to get the 250km (156miles) to the northern terminus as much of northern Iceland is remote and sees very little traffic.

Hitching out of Akureyri

A kind local picked us before long and promised to take us some of the way to Husavik. We stopped at waterfalls and a few sights along the way and learnt a lot from the very proud and knowledgeable locals.

We were dropped at a junction with 11km to the next busy road and another 30km on top of that to Husavik. We began the hike to the busy road trying to hitch from the car or two that passed every half an hour. Within 2hrs we were picked up by a lovely Brazilian family on a road trip holiday that took us all the way into Husavik. We grabbed a quick late lunch and got back out on the road.

Husavik

At this point it’s 4pm and we are hardly even half way. We plan other routes if we cannot get further than this point and emergency camp sites as well. But after an hour and a half a German couple also road tripping pick us up and took us a huge distance to a campsite near Dettifoss.

On the road near Skinnastaðir

It’s pretty remote now and we suspect this is our limit but the first car that eventually passes picks us up and takes us just a few miles to the site we planned for night 2. Now this is really our limit. Or so we thought. First car again! A young Icelandic couple headed for a holiday, working in a remote town in the north, and they would be crossing the final junction up to our spot! But even better they took us all the way there. Near 20km out of there way late in the evening. How lucky we were to find them.

Raufarhofn is the end of the earth. That’s how it feels anyway. We checked into a lovely hostel and had a wonderful meal at the local hotel. Pretty much the only people we saw were the hotel owner and the hostel owner. It was cold, an extremely cold wind that cut through us enough to unsettle us for what might be to come.