Back to Iceland

Vacationing in Iceland, for a change.

I’d been to Iceland twice before in 2013 and 2014, both times in September. Both were working trips — first scouting for conference planning, then back for the conference itself — but this 2025 trip was more of a vacation. A rarity for us.

I’d loved Iceland in the Fall but our schedules this time around directed us to dates in May and June. A much busier season to visit but I’d hoped to be able to have a similar experience. Of course, no two trips are ever the same — even when you’re returning to a familiar place. This time proved no different. It was a great experience, but a different one. Admittedly, I was less focussed on getting “the shot” and more on just having an enjoyable trip. I’ll post in more detail on some specific differences between my various visits but, for now, I just want to do a brief overview of this latest visit, mostly in terms of landscape.

As usual, I probably tried to do to much on this trip. Previously I’d only visited Iceland’s south and western sides. This time I wanted to do the full ring road to fill in my previous gap between the West Fjords and Egilsstadir in the East Fjords.

We started with a couple of days in Reyjavik, then headed out across the south coast. By the time we reached the waterfall Seljalandsfoss, I was already seeing big differences from my previous visits. Not only seasonal differences, but the changes that large numbers of tourists had brought since my last visit in 2014. There were more tourists than I’d seen previously, but that was to be expected since I was on the cusp of the busy season this time, not on the back end of the autumn shoulder season like in the past.

Now, in 2025, many more of the sites along the south coast have been developed. They have improved paths, restroom facilities, shops in some cases and large new paid parking lots. You pay for parking via an app or at an electronic kiosk, where there often seemed to be a line with people having varying levels of success. On our second day we opted to download the app but it took about 30 minutes in the remote area where we were and then didn’t work properly once downloaded so we were back to using kiosks whenever possible.

I understand that these are all things that had to happen to help protect the sites from over tourism, but I found myself being glad that I’d seen many of these sites before the changes. Ten years ago it was mostly the Golden Circle sites that were really developed like this. Now it seems to be much of the South Coast.

I was also having a little trouble adjusting to seeing Iceland in Spring. I love the earthiness of the Fall colors and the moodiness provided by the increasingly frequent storms. So far on this trip it had been reasonably cheerful weather, but I started to get a taste for that moodiness once we passed Vik.

Given the growing visitor numbers, I see it now as having been fortunate that I was unable to book the hotel I’d stayed in previously in Vik. Instead, we’d had to push on to the remote Fosshótel Núpar. Alone on a flat lava plain surrounded by bluffs, shrouded by the approaching rain, this started to feel like the Iceland I remembered. Maybe I’m just not suited to sunny weather but I’ll take a moody cloudy day anytime. This may not look like everyone’s idea of the perfect hotel, but I thoroughly enjoyed the location.

One other thing that was different about this Spring/Summer trip was the length of the days. I already knew about and was expecting the long days and never-truly-dark nights, but I didn’t entirely anticipate how much it would affect the light quality for photography. With the short Fall days on previous trips, it seemed like the light was always glorious. The sun never got that high so it felt like sunrise and sunset lasted for hours each. This summer trip was not as dramatic in terms of light quality, although cloudy days added their own drama.

The following day we backtracked to visit a canyon we’d passed the day before (more on that in a future post), visited the glacier lagoon and settled in at another Fosshótel near Hofn. More paid parking at both the lagoon and the canyon and, while we didn’t end up going down there on this trip, I understand that there is now a fee for visiting Stokksnes (the famous jagged coastal mountains surrounded by black beach).

Once we passed Hofn and turned north into the East Fjords, things were more as I remembered from ten years ago. Much less tourism infrastructure.

I’ll also note that Highway 1 along the south coast seemed to have seen a lot of upgrades since my last visit. It’s still fairly narrow with no shoulders in most places but many of the one-lane bridges had been replaced. At least I thought I remembered there being many more before. Past Hofn, the road was still very good, but the narrow bridges and tunnels returned.

I had been excited to finally see the lupines in Iceland. I had thought we might be too early but, in fact, we seemed to see them at their peak. Oddly I didn’t see them as much in the places where I’d been used to seeing them in other people’s photos (around the church in Vik, for example) but they were often thick along the roadside where — I believe — they are used for erosion control.

After a night in Egilsstadir, we were finally in country that was totally new to me. It was fun to not know what might be around the next corner. The landscape was quite vast and varied. Wide cultivated valleys gave way to alien moonscapes. It rained off and on, but never so much to be a driving hazard and I was happy to have skies to match the dramatic landscapes.

The last new-to-me waterfall before spending two nights in Akureyri was Goðafoss.

With two nights in Akureyri we decided to just leave the car parked for the duration and explore on foot. More on that in a future post.

The weather reports were starting to look menacing and we were consulting with the hotel staff for details of the road ahead. They confirmed that the weather did, indeed, look serious. The island had had a couple of weeks of beautiful summer weather but now it looked like winter was going to return with a vengeance. On the day we would be leaving, the Akureyri area might get a foot of snow. Since we were staying on the ring road, we did not opt for a four wheel drive car and the staff confirmed that we would be making three mountain passes on our first day driving out.

We made an early start and managed to stay ahead of the worst of the incoming storm. Aside from a few quick stops when something caught our eye, we pretty much drove straight through to Borgarnes which completed the new-to-me section of the ring road. While Borganes is not far from Reykjavik, we planned on exploring the Snæfellsnes Peninsula before heading back to the city. Checking in at Borganes, the wind was impressive and reports were that it was going to get worse the next day as the effects of the storm were still being felt. We decided to cut our last day short and head more-or-less directly back to Reykjavik for our final two nights.

It was one of the windier drives of my life and I was, for once, happy to have not opted for a higher-profile 4×4.

Back in Reykjavik we ventured into town for a little more shopping and a little more street photography experimentation with my new Fujifilm cameras (more on that later). Then one last dinner at a surprisingly good Indo-Italian restaurant near the hotel that definitely felt more like a locals’ spot than anywhere else we’d eaten.

Once home, I set back out almost immediately for some local shoots around my home state, then I had to immediately shift gears and start prepping for my next international trip which begins tomorrow. I have a lot more to say about photographing Iceland – and working with the new Fujifilm cameras – but those stories may need to wait until I return home.

One last thing – this was also my first trip out with my new Wandrd bag and it worked great. Flying home through JFK, I had a woman stop me in the airport to ask how I liked my backpack. “It’s my sons’ company,” she added. Small world!