Iceland for Birders & Whale-Watchers

Getting from Látrabjarg to Hornstrandir means driving roughly 180 kilometres along Westfjords roads to Ísafjörður, then taking a boat into the reserve. The drive traces the fjords rather than running straight across them, and the final crossing is by water. Hornstrandir is a roadless reserve at the northern tip of the region, so provision properly in Ísafjörður because there is no shop or road after the crossing. The effort buys the best fox-watching in the country. Hunting is prohibited, and Arctic foxes may pass remarkably close. The seabird cliffs at Hornvík and Hælavík rise above 500 metres. Most groups spend about six hours ashore. Plan the boat, weather, river crossings and an independent exit carefully because rescue is slow in this remote terrain.

Coming back off Hornstrandir means the whole Westfjords in reverse and then the long run east across the top of the country, about six hundred kilometres altogether, the kind of day where the odometer stops feeling connected to anything you can see. Break it in Akureyri, the north's one proper town and the last real meal for a good while, then push on to the coast. Húsavík is the payoff and the pivot: a small fishing town on Skjálfandi bay that is, flatly, Iceland's whale-watching capital, where humpbacks, minkes and a rotating supporting cast turn up reliably enough that the entire harbour has quietly rebuilt itself around going out to look at them. The boats head straight out of the harbour and into the bay, trading the working-port reek of diesel and fish for open, cold water; four hours is the standard sailing, and the town's Whale Museum makes a genuinely good primer, so do that first. For the historically inclined, the Book of Settlements names this exact spot as Iceland's first Norse habitation, wintered in by Garðar Svavarsson around 870, a lot of history for a harbour that now runs mostly on whales. This is the anchor of any whale trip north, full stop.

East from Húsavík is a gentler leg, a bit over four hours down to the eastern fjords, with Egilsstaðir as the last supply stop before the road climbs over to Borgarfjörður eystri. Puffin Adventures runs fast RIB safaris from the little harbour at Hafnarhólmi, one of the country's most accessible puffin colonies, to sea cliffs and coves no footpath reaches. Seals, dolphins and whales also appear regularly during the ninety-minute trip. The operator provides a flotation suit and safety briefing. Dress for cold spray because the boat rides close to the swell.

Then comes the loop's hard middle: better than five hundred kilometres down the east coast and along the south, the best part of a driving day, the fjords slowly flattening into black-sand plains under the great flat-topped south-coast volcanoes. Roll into Vík near the end of it, take a proper meal and a bed, and keep Dyrhólaey for the morning. After the extremes of the Westfjords this stop is almost a holiday: a 120-metre tuff promontory whose cliffs fill with nesting puffins right through the summer, protected as a bird site since 1978, reached by a short flat walk from the car park to the viewpoints by the lighthouse. You can work the whole colony and be back at the car inside an hour, and it is the one puffin stop on this trip you could bring a six-year-old to without spending it white-knuckled, the most family-friendly puffin colony on the south coast, by a wide margin. Some of the cliff-edge sections shut seasonally to protect the nests, so check before you drive out, and keep well back from the unfenced parts regardless. Photographers will be here for the sea arch; you came for the puffins.

From Dyrhólaey the road runs back west past the capital and out onto the Snæfellsnes peninsula, a shade over five hours, and Ólafsvík is where you stop and where you sleep. This is the orca stop. Láki Tours sails out of the harbour into the water off Snæfellsnes, which in the right season is one of the better places in the country to see orcas and sperm whales, with humpbacks, minkes, pilot whales and dolphins filling in around them. Even on a dead day for cetaceans the backdrop earns its keep, Snæfellsjökull at your back and the perfect cone of Kirkjufell across the water, both of them in frame from the deck. The sailing runs about three hours and lives entirely at the mercy of the weather, so bake a spare day into the plan here rather than pinning the whole peninsula on one crossing the wind can cancel out from under you.

Two hundred kilometres and about three hours east and the loop all but closes itself, setting you back down in Reykjavík, more or less where you first started thinking about any of this. Elding's classic trip is the no-driving option, and after a week of gravel and fjord passes that is no small mercy: it sails straight out of the Old Harbour into Faxaflói bay after whales, dolphins, porpoises and seabirds, and unlike nearly everything else on this route it runs year-round rather than only through high summer. It is a three-hour trip whose sightings still ride on the season and the sea state, but for anyone parked in the capital with a single free morning, it is the whole experience minus the long haul north. It asks nothing at all of your legs. The open deck and the Faxaflói swell will still hand you a cold, wet couple of hours, so dress like you mean it. Technically you are in the city; the North Atlantic did not get the memo.

One last hour of driving, barely seventy kilometres down onto the Reykjanes tip, and you finish where the flights home leave from anyway, Keflavík is right there, which makes this a final easy detour rather than a pilgrimage. Reykjanesviti closes the loop the way it opened, on a bird cliff at the edge of the country. The Valahnúkamöl sea cliffs below Iceland's oldest lighthouse hold their own nesting seabirds, but the gut-punch is offshore. That low islet on the horizon is Eldey, a gannet colony, and also the exact place where the last known pair of great auks on Earth was killed in 1844, you opened this trip lying above 40% of the world's living razorbills and you close it staring at the spot where a whole species was finished off. The ground refuses to sit still out here: geothermal vents steam straight up among the cliffs, and the whole tip is planted directly on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the seam where two continents pull apart. You can take in the cliffs, the steam and the long view to Eldey in about three-quarters of an hour, which is all the standing the wind will grant you anyway. Mind the unfenced cliffs, the wave-battered boulders and the strong wind, none of which have the faintest interest in the fact that you came for the birds.