How to Avoid the Crowds in Iceland

Iceland is a very popular travel destination, which means that many of the top sights are very crowded. Happily there are still plenty of wide open spaces for those of us who like a bit of solitude.

With that in mind, we headed into the Westfjords and found ourselves camped at Þingeyri. From a perusal of the map, I plotted a circular cycling route that I thought ought to be pretty much deserted. Much of it was on 4WD tracks, over a pass between two mountains at 550m, then back down to the coast and round the end of the Þingeyri peninsular. The map suggested that parts of the route were quite steep so I anticipated that some pushing might be involved. I was not disappointed.

At first, the track was pretty nice with a manageable gradient, the only obstacles being the occasional stream crossing. These were easy enough to negotiate: stash shoes and socks under the flap of the pannier and wade across.

The track continued up a valley and gradually got steeper. I could have wished for wider tyres and lower gears at times, but I still managed to ride more than I walked. Above 400m altitude snow patches started to appear, but by the time it got to the point where there was more snow than bare road I was sufficiently close to the top that I pushed on anyway and made it to the top of the pass by early afternoon.

On the other side was one large snow patch, followed by a fun descent interspersed with the odd river crossing and smaller snow patch. I made it back to the coast thinking I’d pretty much cracked it – I was expecting a straightforward 30km trundle along the coastal track to get home.

It was shortly after this point that things started to get more interesting. There were a couple of stream crossings that were a bit rougher, deeper and faster flowing than the earlier ones, and on the second of these I failed to keep the bike upright and the pannier out of the water. On reaching the other side, I noted that my shoes and socks were missing, presumed washed into the fjord. Bare feet on serrated metal pedals was clearly not going to work – however gloves over the pedals offered some marginal protection. I couldn’t apply any serious pressure, but could at least make forward progress.

Off I went, at no great pace, blithely sailing past the sign announcing that the road ahead was impassable. I was expecting a few washed out sections or landslides that I would have to tiptoe round. I certainly wasn’t expecting that the road would have entirely disappeared and been replaced by a beach.

Actually, the beach was not a bad surface for a spot of barefoot bike trundling: at least there were some nice rounded cobbles to walk on. Further on, when the road reappeared, the surface was too soft to ride on and littered with angular landslide debris that didn’t do my feet any favours.

After negotiating a couple of sections of beach, several landslides and stream crossings, the road surface gradually improved to the point were I was riding more than walking. Somewhere along this stretch my front brake cable snapped, which on any other day would have constituted a serious problem but didn’t really register on this occasion. Eventually, I rounded the end of the peninsular and found some phone signal for the first time in hours. This was half an hour after the cavalry (or Julia in a van) had set off to look for me, and she was just contemplating heading off to the police station to raise the alarm. A bit further on I got to the bit of road that was passable for two wheel drive vehicles, met up with my rescuer and headed off.

However, the main point is that, in the course of seven hours out in the hills, I didn’t see another soul. Mission accomplished.