I have always wanted to visit Iceland. A country that is famous for it’s unique and breathtaking landscape. The Martian looking scarce plains together with beautiful mountains, volcanoes and glaciers, strikingly coloured rocks geysers and beautiful lonely roads are something that in my book sets this little island far apart from the rest of the world on the “wow!”- scale.

Two friends of mine luckily saw this the same way so together we made plans to visit this little patch of land that sits right on the imaginary border line between the Atlantic and the Arctic ocean.

 

The size of Iceland on the map is deceiving. Google maps like most other maps are distorted to show a spherical shape flat without any gaps thus stretching everything on the map a little more the farther it’s distance to the equator is. As a result Iceland is actually smaller than it looks on the map. Circling the country along its coast doesn’t even equal 2000 miles on the road. Yet at the same time it’s a country where you could spend a week on 100 miles alone it’s that breathtaking. As a matter of fact that’s what most visitor do. Most of the individual dramatic sights in Iceland can be found in the south. The farther you go North the clearer it becomes why the northern coast of the country is where the Arctic Ocean begins. For this trip however we decided to stick to the south as there was already so much to cover there that we weren’t even sure we were going to be able to see everything. The three of us were all into photography and videography and we wanted to take all the time we needed to get the footage each of us had in mind.

It was difficult to decide on a particular rout due to the long list of places we wanted to cover but we knew our trip was going to start at the capital Reykjavik and we would go at least to about the middle of the country in the east.

Iceland is know for its rugged terrain and for a little while I played with the thought of accompanying my friends who would travel by car on my motorcycle. That would have meant that I would either have had to ship my bike to Iceland or renting one there. But ultimately it would have made the trip more expensive for all of us and it would not have been the same group experience. So this time the bike had to stay at home. However there was going to be a decent replacement to my half-jeep.

We had read that it was recommended and sometimes even mandatory to have all-wheel-drive vehicles on many roads. After a little research we quickly were convinced that it was no joke. The conclusion was simple and didn’t take us long to decide that it had to be a Jeep. More specifically a Jeep Grand Cherokee. To us one of the most iconic 4×4 vehicles. If a Jeep wasn’t going to get us to where we wanted to go then no other car would.

So we made a reservation for a Jeep Grand Cherokee at the cheapest dealer we could find online. The fuel for this beast was not going to be cheap but we figured it was worth it for this trip and the types of different insurance packages offered on the website reassured us that we had made the right choice getting a 4×4. Beside regular accident protection we could chose gravel and ash (!) protection. Also there was an explicit warning that river crossings were not covered by any insurance.

With all our photography gear packed we just about caught the plane from London to Reykjavik early in the morning, setting foot on Iceland early in the afternoon.