10 Days on the Ring Road in Iceland

So we're here in Iceland. The island of fire and ice. Or is it ice and fire? Regardless, we're here in Iceland tackling the ring road in about 10 days. Trying to explore and experience as much as possible. I'm very excited. First time I've ever done a road trip of this kind. It's going to be quite a journey and I can't wait to see what's going to happen. This is the Karin crater. Lovely sort of dark color to the crater. I don't know how craters form. I'm not caught up with the history at all. But yeah, it should definitely be something to visit when you're doing a golden circle. All right, so we just checked out the geysir. And yeah, we've seen Strokkur, which is still a famous one. So it erupts every five or six minutes. The first morning here in our little camping site, our only morning here in the camping site, I just spent the night here somewhere like west of Gullfoss. If you've never been here in Iceland during the spring season, or even the summer season, like you know, it never gets completely dark. So it took a little getting used to. So we woke up early because we're heading to a like a secret hot spring location. Well, not so secret anymore, I guess. But yeah, looking forward to seeing how it is and hope it's not crowded. Hope we woke up early enough. But yeah, so far our first night in Iceland. Pretty good. It was a little bit cold, but we managed. Didn't we, Lisa? Wasn't a little bit cold? Andy. And there it is. Look at this. Looks so cool. Oh, it's warm. If it is slippery. It's very, very nice. Not bad hot spring. And it comes with a view. So we just visit the Broerfoss, one of many waterfalls here in Iceland. If you're a waterfall fanatic, definitely just go to Iceland. A lot of fossils, a lot of fossils everywhere. I'm not going to visit every single one. There's just, yeah, as I said, way too many. But this is sort of the main ones, at least the ones that interest me. So now we're a little bit hungry. We're a little bit famished. And what better way to deal with that than visit a tomato farm. Thank you. Guess where we are? Another day. All right, we're onwards and upwards. We're heading to the plane wreck. Not even going to try to pronounce the name of it, but it's a little short walk from the parking place to the plane wreck site. You can, however, if you want to, pay for a round-trip bus that starts from 10 in the morning to like, I guess, like 9 or 10 in the evening. I'm not quite sure. Obviously, if you have any issues physically or anything, there's the option to do that if you don't want to walk that far. Like right now, walking here, it's like there's nothing. It seems like you're on the moon or something like that, which is pretty cool. I've never been on the moon. All right, we are at Vestahorn. Yet again, sad that the weather is a little bit grey, but we're contemplating on coming back here, like, if we got the time to do so. And just after we've done the whole ring road and spend the last few days coming around just to see if we get better weather to take some other shots. But we'll see. It is what it is. You are at the mercy of the weather gods. And yeah, you just gotta work with it. All right, hiking upwards and onwards. The weather is just great. It's not really golden hour. You can't really rely on the sun here in Iceland, especially with the time, because obviously sunrise and sunset is a lot later here during the warmer months. I believe sunset is around midnight and it doesn't even really get that dark. But that means a lot of light, a lot of time for activities, so you can do a lot in a day in Iceland. But you probably have to pay for the next day if you do end up being active for like the whole entire day, like for like 12-15 hours. You're gonna pay for that. We definitely did. All right, so we're done with the waterfall circle hike. But it was an amazing hike. Really beautiful views, beautiful waterfalls, and now we just need to get some food. So we're in the middle of somewhere in the northern part of Iceland. We just set up camp and we're gonna obviously stay here for the night. But just look at where we are. This is in the middle of nowhere. This is a nice little campsite here. It's a little bit cold right now, but I think in the summer this is probably very nice. No city, nothing around us, just pure nature surrounding this campsite. It's beautiful. And right now it's almost midnight. The sun is setting. It's turned into blue hour now. So I'm just running around trying to get some shots. But yeah, I'm pretty tired as well. I've been driving all day. Pretty knackered. So nothing more to report. Geothermal area, but holy smokes the smell. So we're somewhere still in north Iceland. We're heading towards the west fjords now. But we just came by this little church called, I think it's called the Grafja Church near the town of Hossos. A little bit of a drive up here, but it's definitely worth it. Look at this. We're just in that sunset-ish golden hour and everything just looks absolutely gorgeous. Still really cold though. You might not be able to see that, but it's really cold even though with the sunny landscapes and stuff. This has to be said that just from the south to the east to the north and probably also towards the west, totally different landscapes, totally different scenery. Amazing. And I really think if you really want to come and see this place for the first time, go with like a ring road trip like what we are doing right now. Just seeing most of the attractions nearby and sort of hand-picking out some other finer key attractions that may be a little bit outside of the route, kind of like this one. But when the weather is like this and there's no tourists around, it's all worth it in the end. All right, back in the car. So just visited the Kirkjofell mountain here in the western region of Iceland and what a perfect timing. Golden hour, a little bit windy, but golden hour. Yeah, it doesn't get much better than that. But yeah, we're almost at the end of the Iceland road trip and it's been immense. It's been amazing. It's been everything I expected and even more. There's been a few surprises, especially the hike in Laugavell. If I pronounce that right. If I don't, I apologize. But yeah, so far it's been quite a journey and I'm glad I've shared it with Lisa. We've been talking about doing this trip for a while and finally being able to do it and experience Iceland. Probably one of my all-time favorite travels up there with Bali and Japan, I would say. And it just seems like all those travels I've done throughout the years, years now actually think about it, throughout the years, has really led up to this point of experiencing Iceland, this amazing country, through a lens. And I feel that, like, I guess it sounds sad as well in a weird way because it's like I don't think I can ever truly enjoy a place without looking at the place through a lens. I know it sounds really weird, but I think it's equally important to me to not only experience it, experience the place, experience the culture, experience the beauty of the landscape, etc., but also to capture it, you know, document it, record it. For me, it's extremely important to do that, not only from a personal point of view, just me looking back and to be able to share these memories with friends and close ones, but also from a creative standpoint to use the footage to create art, or at least what I believe is my personal art. It's been a journey and, yeah, sadly it's coming to an end soon, but there's a few more things to do before that, so let's just enjoy it while it lasts. So yeah, that was my 10 days on the ring road in Iceland, and what an amazing trip that was. I loved every minute, even the cold nights when we couldn't figure out the heating system or the mini fridge and ended up with, like, less than edible food. But this was by far the longest travel vlog film I made so far, and I'm kind of digging the longer format. It's a lot more flexible when it comes to storytelling, but of course there will still be more informative travel videos coming up about Iceland, so if you're planning a trip to Iceland, look out for those. What else? I've really, really gotten into exploring sort of the more nature side of traveling, specifically hiking trips and backpacking, so I'm looking to create more content about that in the future. As for travel plans, updates, I'm looking to explore the Dolomites here in a month or so, and I'm also trying to sneak a trip back to Japan sometime soon. I really miss Japan so, so much. Yeah, nothing else to say than thank you for watching this video. Thank you for sticking around and listening to me babbling about stuff. I hope you enjoyed the video, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.