BA - The Club - Five epic Icelandic drives

The Golden Circle

Any number of tour companies can pour you into a bus in Reykjavík and whizz you round Iceland’s greatest hits package: the mile-wide waterfall at Gullfoss, the mother of all geysers at Geysir and Þingvellir National Park, where the American and Eurasian continental plates meet and divide as dramatically as a Love Island couple. But hire a car and drive the route yourself and you get to stop at the 200-mile loop’s less touristy beauties, too: echoingly atmospheric Skálholt Cathedral, for instance, or the eerie blue crater-lake of Kerið, which is like a portal to another world.

The Arctic Coast Way

Ready for an off-road road trip? The 600-odd miles of this recently put together route run as often on gravel tracks as paved roads, so you’re going nowhere without a 4x4. Cuddling the coastline of the far north, and delving in and out of the peninsulas that Route 1 zooms straight past, the road links all-but-forgotten fishing villages, bustling whale-watching towns and mystical saga sites (we predict you’ll love Skagaströnd’s Museum of Prophecies). Most of the roads are open all year, but – being within 30 miles of the Arctic Circle itself at times – you’ll see more in summer.

The Snaefellsnes Peninsula

If you want a great, grand, week-long road trip, but sadly don’t have a week, go west. Locals say the Snaefellsnes Peninsula (location of the entrance to the ‘centre of the Earth’ in Jules Verne’s famous novel) is Iceland in miniature. And, sure enough, this is the epic driving holiday you can do in a day (and still be back in time for cocktails at one of Reykavík’s urbane little bars). You’ll get volcanoes, villages, glaciers, gorges, lighthouses, lava fields, the winsome little port town (and sci-fi church) of Stykkishólmur, the golden sands of Skarðsvík and arguably the world’s most photogenic mountain, aloofly handsome Kirkjufell (Google it and weep) – all in one 60-mile stretch.

The South

When Odin and pals put Iceland together, they clearly did so with long-weekenders in mind. Rather than scatter its gems evenly across the country, they plonked a preponderance of them in a line along the island’s south coast. So on a single, seldom-crowded, 275-mile stretch of blacktop between Reykjavík and Höfn, you can take in the end-of-the-world black sands at Reynisfjara, walk-behind-it waterfall at Seljalandsfoss and vast, ethereally beautiful glacier of Vatnajökull. Which still leaves you stop-offs at iceberg-sprinkled Diamond Beach, Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon and Game of Thrones-y Svartifoss falls for the way back…

The Ring Road

It’s not the most evocatively named drive in the world (like most things, it sounds a bit more mythic in Icelandic: Hringvegur), but the Ring Road is among the world’s great spins. Encircling the whole country in its 800-mile embrace, it’s the main – often only – way to reach Iceland’s smaller towns and quieter beauty spots, but the driving is so fun you may not want to get out of the car. Swooping rises, sinuous curves, endless horizons… don’t be fooled by the name ‘Route 1’ into thinking this is some tediously straight, six-lane superhighway: most of the time it’s just one winningly winding lane in either direction. This is, after all, Iceland.