Beginner Backpackers Exploring Iceland
This was our first big backpacking trip and it didn’t disappoint. We backpacked through the Iceland highlands for 5 days and 4 nights and then lived out of our Dacia Duster rental car for the rest of the trip. You might think we chose a crazy vacation, but we loved it and it was a great introduction to backpacking - with a lot of rain and a lot of learning experiences along the way. As this was our first introduction to backpacking food - we naturally overthought all of it. Right before the trip we read that Iceland only allows each person to bring 3000 g of food in their checked baggage. That weight limitation, plus the volume limitation of how much food can fit in our backpacks, led us to do some pretty significant food calculations. We planned out meals using some of the most highly recommended meals and snacks - some of which were hits and others may not make it into the meal rotation for the next backpacking trip. We laid everything out on the floor of our apartment and did some serious math using a spreadsheet to calculate calories / gram and maximize our calories per day while sticking within our weight and volume constraints. It was probably overkill, but we did not go hungry!
When we arrived in Iceland we had to get a bus from the airport to the capital city of Reykjavik where we caught another bus into the Highlands. This bus had the largest tires we’d ever seen and could ford any river without even slowing down. Several hours later, we arrived to our first campsite and felt warmly welcomed by people playing a game that I’d played only a few weeks before at a coworkers house called “Kuub”. It felt really nice to have that slight feeling of familiarity so far from home after a very long day of travel.
We found a local hot spring, bought a beer from a van that sold coffee & beer and spent the evening exploring the area. We even hiked up to one of the smaller mountains beyond the campsite and started to soak in the fact that we had made it to Iceland! Little did we know, this first afternoon was the most sun we’d see on the entire trip - but at least we made the most of that little bit of sunshine.
The first day of hiking involved a lot of treeless scenery like you can see in the photos above - it was breathtaking. The colors were so vivid, yet so muted, and the contrast between the copper colored mountains and the bright, blue water of the geothermal ponds was striking. Each day we had a campsite that we needed to make it to, given the campsites are distributed along the route and there’s no dispersed camping outside of those zones. On rainy days, that provided a lot of forced encouragement to keep on hiking, but our feet were soaked almost the entire time. Our decent snack selection kept us going for a while, but then we met some trail friends named George and Armond who happened to be hiking a similar section of the trail to us at the same time. We would frequently “leapfrog” George & Armond along the way, and finally decided to have a meal with them along the trail. We did not pack well compared to them. George and Armond were from Belgium and brought small pieces of bread, spreads, jams, and would make fine toast over their little camp stove. It made our Starkist pouch of Buffalo Chicken and a plain tortilla look pretty sad. Funny enough, they commented on our meal and asked what the Buffalo Chicken in the bag was. Apparently, it very clearly pointed us out as Americans! I don’t know if it was that or the jar of peanut butter that gave us away...
As the hike continued, we experienced the beauty of the campsites along the route and found that the experience was incredibly tranquil even shared amongst the other people at the site. The fellow hikers were all so friendly and enjoyable - but we saw a little bit less of them than we may have otherwise if we’d had a bit less rain. On the plus side, we became PROS at putting our tent up in the midst of a downpour. We worked on assembling the tent under the fly and even assembling the tent near the small buildings and then running it out to our tent pad fully assembled. We tried just about everything to not let the inside of the tent get wet because it was the only dry thing we had. Our clothes, socks, and shoes were soaked by Day 2 and every night we would create the “swamp jungle” by hanging our wet clothes from the guy lines in the tent to dry. The wetness would drip back down on us in our sleeping bags, but it at least allowed us to slightly dry out our clothes.
We tried sleeping some during the day to allow ourselves to see sunset and sunrise given the sun was up almost the full 24 hours of the day. Flipping our sleep schedule proved to be a challenge but led to some pretty funny tent selfies with our cute eye masks.
We soaked in every ounce of sunshine we could find along the trail and started to find the uniform texture of our backpacker meals less and less appealing with each new dinner and breakfast - especially the dehydrated eggs. Fortunately, our planning paid off and the glamping yurt we booked for the night after the backpacking trip had a lovely breakfast spread that was very welcome after our eggs in a bag for several days straight.
To some people, this might just look like a Canvas tent, but to us - this looked like a very nice, dry, warm place to sleep - and it was lovely!
We explored and did some more hiking in the area before heading out of the Highlands, and then went back to Reykjavik to pick up our rental car and start the next phase of our Iceland adventure! For the second half of the trip, we lived out of our rental car and traveled along the coastal region of Iceland. We saw glaciers, black sand beaches, and lots of waterfalls. We hiked through a lot of rain, but had a warm, dry car to come back to. We heard that the food in Iceland was supposed to be delicious, but we never really experienced the local cuisine because the food was very expensive. We chose to eat a lot of baguettes and cheese from the gas stations / “travel centers” positioned around the “Ring Road”. Our favorite snack became these chocolate biscuit cookies that we fondly termed the “Iceland Cookies”.
One of our biggest accomplishments was finding a place on Google maps that we’d had our eyes on from an instagram post for a long time. We knew that the place was in Iceland, but had no idea where and after hours of searching ahead of the trip - we thought we’d found the place. Sure enough, when we found it - it was pouring rain and you could hardly see the viewpoint, but we had found it! It felt like such an accomplishment and the weather didn’t really matter one bit at that point.
Iceland was unbelievable. Looking back and writing this, it sounds like everything could have gone better with the weather, our food, etc. but in reality - it was a perfect trip. We had a blast, we were able to stay warm (although not always dry) and we gained such an appreciation for the beauty and tranquility of backpacking. I think it’s only the beginning of adventures like this and we feel so fortunate to have been able to go on this trip & have this experience.
Plus, we brought back 20+ boxes of “Iceland Cookies” from the local Bonus grocery store in our checked bag. Little did we know, you can buy a variant of these same cookies at our local King Soopers. Either way, we LOVE these cookies and will be enjoying these for a while!
The video below chronicles this trip. Check it out!