Hello fellow travellers!! If you are reading this you are probably an adventurer and I am going to take you on an awesome adventure ride in the land of the Vikings! This is my first post here on Tripoto and I hope I have a good kickstart here.
Iceland is really a gem on planet earth. The landscapes take your breath away! And not to forget the Northern lights!! I am really impatient to get back there again. There are two Icelands, the white Iceland in winters and the green Iceland in summers. I witnessed the white Iceland, hopefully I will see the other one soon.Iceland was discovered and settled by Vikings from Scandinavia. Like any other Scandinavian countries Iceland is a very expensive place to go. Winters being an off season the prices are half of what they are in summers, and it is still more expensive than any other European country(except Switzerland and Scandinavia). For instance, I paid around 35 euros for one night in a hostel in Reykjavik, the same hostel in June/July costs more than 100 euros.This is going to be a detail of my crazy adventure road trip to Iceland. All the adventures, crazy stuff, fun, accidents and something special(watch out for it in the pics) took place between 30th Dec, 2015 and 10th Jan, 2016 in the land of Ice and fire.Here is a little teaser
The view just after getting out of Reykjavik. Only few kms is 4 lane. Rest of the ring road is 2 lane
The mighty Gulfoss, our first camping place of the road trip
A little bit of insight into the trip. We were four travellers or lets say four strangers(nobody had ever seen each other before coming to Reykjavik) in a camper van for the next 10 days. Travelling, eating, sleeping in a camper van. The van was our moving home for the next 10 days. Just a gentle reminder that it was January in Iceland, a Viking island close to the Arctic circle, which meant we only had 4-5 hours of day. (Winter is coming! Long night! GoT fans here?) Add to it the extreme cold and high velocity winds reaching upto 100kmph and more. We had a perfect recipe for extreme weather conditions.Most of the ring road is along the coast. And the coast is surrounded with warm ocean currents, which keeps the temperature on the scale kind of warm. The average temperature for most of the ring road along the coast was around -5 degrees celsius. Doesn't sound much cold, right? That's what we thought when we checked the weather forecasts, but the ground reality was something completely different. Though the temperature was -5degrees, the "real feel" temperature was always below -10 degrees. Why? The winds! Iceland is extremely windy, it makes the conditions extremely worse. The car insurance specifically outlines the fact, "Any damage to the doors getting caught in the wind is not covered". And trust me the wind is strong enough to rip apart the doors from car. We always had to hold the door with all our strength while opening it.The minimum temperature(not the real feel) we experienced was in Reykjahlid, which is considerably far from the coast. That night the scale said -15 degrees celsius and the real feel around -25 degrees celsius.
Route 1 or famously known as the Ring road
Now you know have some insights of the trip. In my next post I will get into the details about how four strangers ended up planning this trip and Day by day details. Starting with the new year's eve in Reykjavik
