Half past ten on a Tuesday night in late September, parked on a gravel pull-off by Kleifarvatn lake, engine off. Our guests, a couple from Singapore celebrating twenty years of marriage, had been asleep in their Reykjavík hotel forty minutes earlier. Now they stood beside our van holding cups of hot chocolate, staring at what […]

Last month we tried something here we had never done before. We published the full program and the full price of a private Ring Road tour before it ran. Nine days, two travellers from California, 2,503,000 ISK, call it 19,700 dollars. We promised to write down what actually happened once they flew home, and judging […]

This coming Saturday a couple from California land at Keflavík at a quarter to nine in the morning. They have nine days. They are not basing themselves in one town and taking day trips out from it. They are going all the way around the island, the full Ring Road, with their own guide and […]

A couple of years back, I guided five hikers along the Laugavegur. All of them were over seventy. All of them had been serious hikers their whole lives, the kind of people who knew what a multi-day trek was supposed to feel like. By the end of the trail, one of them had been pulled […]

It is ten in the morning at Seljalandsfoss, and the car park is full. Coaches are arriving in sequence. A queue has formed along the path that leads behind the waterfall — the shot everyone came for — and the mist rising off the cascade has turned the ground into a mud slick that claims […]