The South Coast Dash

Half an hour east, Skógafoss is the textbook curtain: a clean 60-metre drop over a rim 25 metres wide, hung on the same old sea cliff that marked Iceland's coast before the water pulled back about 5 kilometres inland. On a bright day the spray kicks up a reliable single or double rainbow across the base, and a steel staircase climbs the cliff to a platform looking straight down the drop (and marking the start of the Fimmvörðuháls trail, in case two days of this didn't feel ambitious enough). There is folklore baked in too: the Viking settler Þrasi is said to have hidden a treasure chest in a cave behind the falls, and the ring later recovered from it now sits in the Skógar Museum just down the road. Climb up and back in about three-quarters of an hour, then shoot the rainbow head-on and accept a thorough soaking as the cost of the frame.

Another half-hour on, and before you drop into Vík, turn up onto Dyrhólaey, a 120-metre promontory of volcanic tuff named for the giant sea arch punched clean through its base, big enough that a small plane once flew through it, which is the sort of fact you just file under 'of course it did'. A 1927 lighthouse caps the headland, puffins nest along the cliffs through summer, and the view opens both ways at once, east to the Reynisdrangar stacks and west down the whole black-sand coast. The loop up top, lighthouse to cliff edge and back, runs about an hour. Everything up here is exposed: the access road is steep (repaved in 2022), the cliff edges are unfenced and permanently wind-blasted, and some stretches close in nesting season so the birds can get on with it. Easy walk, real edge, in the entirely literal sense.

Twenty-odd minutes on is the beach everyone photographs and a handful of people never leave. Reynisfjara is a black volcanic beach in the Katla UNESCO Global Geopark, backed by a wall of hexagonal basalt columns, the Hálsanefshellir sea cave and the Reynisdrangar stacks, which folklore files as two trolls caught by daylight while hauling a three-masted ship to shore. It is also, in cold statistics, deadly: sneaker waves off a submerged offshore ledge killed at least five people between 2007 and 2024 and dragged a dozen more out on rescues, which is why there is now a real-time warning-light system and closures on red-alert days. The wind and the sea rarely let you linger past forty-five minutes regardless. The rule here is not negotiable: stay well back, never turn your back on the sea, and obey the lights, however good the shot looks. No photograph is worth the other outcome. Then it is the short hop into Vík for the night; the second day is where the real distances begin.

Day two opens with the long stretches. The first runs about seventy minutes and eighty kilometres east out of Vík, past the last farms and across the sandur (the flat glacial outwash the rivers spread along this coast) toward Kirkjubæjarklaustur, the one real service town on this whole eastern run and the place to top up fuel and coffee before the emptiness sets in properly. Just short of it is Fjaðrárgljúfur, the sinuous, moss-walled canyon the Fjaðrá river has spent roughly two million years cutting down through soft palagonite, now as much as 100 metres deep. A rim trail runs to protected viewpoints out over the twists and a waterfall near the far end, and this is the one whose overnight internet fame very nearly loved it to death, closed off for a spell in 2019 to let the trampled ground knit back together. Keep to the marked route: the edges drop away fast, the path is often wet and greasy underfoot, and the roped-off ground is roped off for the moss as much as for you. You can walk the full rim, linger at the far waterfall, and still be back at the car inside an hour and a half.

Another hour or so on, roughly the same eighty kilometres again, the drive-by finally stops and you get out and walk. Skaftafell is a reserve tucked under the Öræfajökull ice cap and framed by Vatnajökull outlet glaciers like Skaftafellsjökull and Svínafellsjökull, a genuine hiking and glacier-tour hub inside Vatnajökull National Park (UNESCO-listed in 2019). Base trails climb to the black basalt-column waterfall Svartifoss and open long sightlines toward Hvannadalshnjúkur, Iceland's highest peak. The district's name, Öræfi, means 'wasteland', a title earned the hard way in 1362 when Öræfajökull produced the largest pumice eruption in Iceland's recorded history and wiped out the farms beneath it. The cold comes off the ice at you even in summer, and the sheer scale under that much rock and glacier does something honest to your sense of proportion. The base trails to Svartifoss and back fill a comfortable couple of hours; the ice itself needs a proper operator and real crevasse sense, not a hunch, and it will happily swallow a whole day if you let it.

The last hour of driving, about sixty kilometres on toward Höfn, drops you at the lagoon, and nothing else on this road tops it. Jökulsárlón is a deep glacial lagoon fed by the retreating Breiðamerkurjökull, calving icebergs up to 30 metres high that drift slowly toward the sea; cross the road and the same ice washes back up to glitter on the black sand of Diamond Beach. The numbers carry the real story here: the lagoon has grown roughly fourfold since the 1970s and reaches 284 metres deep, which makes it Iceland's deepest lake and the single clearest marker of how fast the country's glaciers are pulling back. Hollywood noticed a while ago, standing it in for other planets across two Bond films and Batman Begins, but the live version, ice cracking and rolling in front of you, beats all of them. Work the lagoon and then the beach across the road, an easy hour and a half all told, and mind the cold deep water, the unstable ice, the surf and the road everyone forgets while crossing between the two. From this far east, home is a long, long way back the way you came.