Vanlife in ICELAND -

Considering touring Iceland with your motorhome, campervan, caravan or even a car, whether you're taking your own vehicle or you're going to be hiring one in country, here are 10 things you need to know before you go. Firstly, campsites. Now campsites work more like airs than they do campsites you might be used to elsewhere. So you can check in any time that you want. I checked at like 11 p.m. Sometimes. Don't forget in the summer in Iceland it's pretty much like all night. So they don't have closing times or final check-in times or anything like that, which is great. So like I say, you can check in really late at night. You don't have to book in advance. I didn't book any of them in advance apart from the one the night before I was getting the ferry back. So that was the one in Sidisfjordur. I booked that because obviously I knew I was getting the ferry first thing the next morning. I wanted to make sure I had a space. But everything else I literally turned up at 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, whatever time it was and I booked there. Now sometimes you pay on a little app. They've got a little app thing. If you've got a smartphone, you'll find that so much easier because you can hold the smartphone over the reader and then it'll take you straight to the website and you can pay there. Sometimes there are people there. Now admittedly, they might not be awake at 11 o'clock at night, but you can park up and then they'll come around and collect payment. You can pay with cards. I paid in cards with all of them, but I will talk about bank cards and money shortly. But like I say, you don't need to book in advance. I was there June and July. So right in the middle of peak season and I didn't have a problem getting a spot in any of them. And I wanted electric hookup. So I used electric hookup on most of the campsites I stayed at. And even with that, obviously there are limited spaces with electric hookup points. I didn't have an issue. If you don't need electric hookup, then you'll find it even easier because even if all of the pitches are full, I've seen them put fans on like the car park or other appropriate spots if you don't need to be plugged in. So you'll have it not an issue at all. Whilst we're on the subject of campsites, there is a thing in called the camping card. And this in 2023 cost you €179 and it gives you access. I think it's 28 nights or maximum of 28 nights for selected campsites around the country. Now that might sound like a good deal, but I did the maths and most campsites in Iceland, they charge you per person. So they charge you an initial pitch fee, extra if you want to hook up and then they'll charge you based on the number of people, which does include children at most of them. So my advice to you is this, if you are two people or less in your van and you want the freedom to go stay at some of the most incredible campsites, which aren't in the camping card scheme, I don't recommend you buy it. €179. I averaged around €20 a night. And I will do a video breaking down all my actual costs when I've had the nerve to look at it, but I have to pay off my credit card bill shortly. So I will sit down and do all that. And I'll make a video about that for you. But I average, I reckon around €20 a night. Now that was for me, just me and the van with electric hookup. Now that I was there for three weeks, 21 nights, that gives you an idea. So there's £179 for the camping card. It will be cheaper. It will be cheaper, but not every site that I stayed at, and certainly not some of the ones in the most incredible locations, are part of the camping card scheme. So if you're two people or less, I would strongly recommend you don't do it purely because it gives you the freedom to go wherever you want to. You can explore Iceland, and especially if you're there for like two weeks or less, I don't think it's worth it personally. If you are there for three or more weeks or up to 28 days, then it might well be worth it for you. That's something for you to consider, but you will not get it at every single campsite. If you are three people or more, including children, then you have to decide whether the flexibility and the freedom is worth more than the budget. You will absolutely save money if you get a camping card, but you will be restricted to the sites that accept the camping card, and obviously those are going to be busier. So in peak season, like in the high summer, you might find it slightly harder to get spots. So that's something for you to weigh up, whether budget or flexibility and freedom is more important to you. But they have got a camping card scheme in Iceland. I was able to buy it on the ferry. They did sell it there. I chose not to in the end, but it is available to buy on the ferry if you're coming across with your own vehicle, or you can buy it in advance. I'll leave the link to their website below for you. For bank cards and money, you can use cards pretty much everywhere in Iceland. Contactless works just fine. I use my watch to pay for stuff all over the place. Now, I use Starling when I'm traveling in Europe because they don't charge you overseas currency fees if you're based in the UK. They work brilliantly for me, highly recommend them, not paid to endorse them. I just think it's a really good bank and they don't charge you any fees. I saw Visa was accepted very widely. MasterCard was as well, but a couple of the campsites, I was parked up next to one where the guy was trying to pay with his MasterCard on the payment app and it wouldn't accept it. Now, that could have just been his one-off card, but I highly recommend you have a couple of different types of cards just in case one isn't working. If you've got American Express, they weren't widely accepted, so make sure you've got another type as well. I didn't use any actual physical Icelandic money. I didn't bother taking any out and I didn't get any when I was over there. And there wasn't much call for it. Obviously, if you want to give some tips, you might need it for that. But the other place that I did see that would be useful is if you are on the campsites, you want to choose the showers. A lot of them use coins as tokens. Now, you can buy those from the campsite if they have a reception, but if it's a remote campsite, you might want to just take out a few coins so that you've got those to pay for the showers because most of the showers were payment meters. So, you had to pay for that on top of your campsite fees. And I think it normally took two or three coins. I can't remember the exact currency. I think a shower was around 800 kroner. Obviously, it varied from campsite to campsite and it gave you like five minutes of warm water or whatever. So, that's well worth doing. You didn't need them anywhere that I stayed at to get things like for fill up for fresh water. That was all included and to dispose of your waste. So, in Europe, some of the airs, you'll need the payment machines. You didn't need that in Iceland as far as I could see. Talking of fuel, really important, make sure that you fill up when your tank is around half empty or half full. If you're feeling optimistic, there aren't as many fuel stations as you might be used to if you're touring elsewhere in the western world. Certainly, going around the ring road, all of the big cities had fuel stations and most of the towns did as well. But there are big gaps between the towns. Certainly, around the sort of north eastern side, it's very bleak. Not a lot up there. So, I recommend that you fill up when you're around the halfway mark or passing a fuel station when you are near that. The pink stations, I can't remember the name off the top of my head, they were a little bit cheaper. But the N1 stations had way better shops and if you want snacks or to fill up on provisions, they were the place to stop. You could also get really good hot dogs. They're quite cheap for Iceland from there. So, they are definitely worth stopping at. Coming back to campsites, if you're touring Iceland with your own vehicle, then the hookup points are the same as what we use in the UK and in most of Europe. And you can just plug straight in. Most campsites have the exact same hookup connections. We did no adapter necessary. A couple of them needed the slightly larger size and the campsites did have a couple of spare adapters. I'm guessing if you're hiring a van out there, your van will come with the appropriate adapters that you need. But if you are bringing your own vehicle, you might want to purchase one of those larger adapters. The campsite, like I say, did have a couple of spares which I was able to borrow. But I'm guessing if they've used them up, you wouldn't be able to get electricity. I also didn't have any issues with things like reverse polarity. It was a straight plug-in and it all worked. So, although electric was quite expensive on the campsite, it was really easy to use. One thing to note is Iceland is really environmentally friendly. There's loads of recycling spots all over the place. The campsites are really hot on recycling and being environmentally friendly and not having a massive carbon footprint. Some of the campsites used FOSS systems, which means you have to have appropriate toilet chemicals or non-chemicals, as the case may be. Not every campsite had these, so there were spots that you could use with whatever toilet chemicals you have, especially if you're bringing your own vehicle with you. But I was really glad I brought my Solbio over. So, if you've not heard of Solbio before, it is an all-natural toilet fluid. It's made of four ingredients. There we go. It's something like water, botanical extracts, herbs. I could probably read the back of the pack and it will tell me. Natural soaps, essential oils and botanical extracts. I've done an entire video all about Solbio. Basically, no harmful chemicals. Now, I've been using this for about 18 months, as have several of my friends and we all love it. But for some reason, this stuff is like marmite. You either really like it or you really don't. And unfortunately, it's one of those things that until you try it, you don't know. If you do want to try it and you haven't so far, you can get a discount code with my link. I'll leave it in the notes for you. But if you are going to be touring a lot in Europe or places which are quite environmentally conscious and you want to be able to empty your toilet everywhere, not everywhere, I'm talking about an approved, appropriate facility, please, not behind a bush. But if you want to be able to empty that in FOSS systems, certainly France are getting more and more of those in. And it can be quite restrictive on where you can empty your toilet. So if you use this, you're safe in pretty much everywhere because it hasn't got any chemicals in there to cause issues with the FOSS system. So it's definitely worth trying if you're going to be doing a lot of touring and seeing if it works for you. Right. Thank you very much, Solbio, for sponsoring this section. And let's get on with the rest of it. So the roads in Iceland, how are the roads in Iceland? They can best be described as changeable. Parts of them are fantastic. They're really well paved. They've obviously been fairly newly done. There are no potholes. It's beautiful to drive on. And I believe they are working on paving the entirety of the ring road, which would make sense as it grows in popularity. Parts of them are not. And they are gravel. Now, gravel roads, they can come on you quite quickly with very little warning. So do be careful with your speed. I'll talk about speed cameras very shortly. Don't be scared of all gravel roads. I drove lots of them in a two-wheel drive motorhome. No special tires, no massive, enormous winter tires. They were just basic motorhome tires. And the two-wheel drive on the most gravel roads are fine. Avoid the F roads. The F roads are the ones that are 4x4 only. So if you have a 4x4 vehicle, if you're hiring a car or something like that, then absolutely you can go and drive some crazy roads if you want to. But you do not need a 4x4 vehicle or 4x4 tires or anything crazy like that in order to drive around Iceland. I didn't have it. Just be really careful on the gravel if it's been raining. It can get really slippery. And there are certain roads that are just, they just weren't fun in a motorhome. They really weren't fun. There's a fantastic website, I will leave the link to it below, where it shows you where the paved roads are, where the gravel roads are. And although you can't avoid the gravel roads completely if you want to go do a whole tour, especially if you want to go up and do the Westfjords, there were lots of gravel roads up there. But if you want to go and do a whole sort of circumnavigation of Iceland, you will get to some gravel roads. But it will show you exactly where they are. And you can also see there were some cameras, which is quite useful to see what the road conditions were like. A couple of other things while we're talking about the roads, they drive on the right like most of Europe do. So the opposite of what we do in the UK. I said I mentioned speed cameras. I didn't see any speed cameras apart from in the main towns. So once the actual, you got out onto the main ring road, I didn't see any speed cameras at all. Talking about roads, the question I got is, do you need a proper dedicated sat-nav for Iceland? If you've got one, absolutely use it. But I didn't see any low bridges or roads that were crazy small that a motorhome or tour bus couldn't have got down. Now, I didn't spend a lot of time driving around places like Reykjavik. Obviously, there will be some roads in Reykjavik that are too small or not suitable for a motorhome. So if you're going to do a lot of exploring around there, you might want to get a dedicated sat-nav, which will tell you which roads aren't suitable. But I use my phone for most of this trip without any issues whatsoever. One thing I will say is that whether you're using a sat-nav or whether you're using your phone, it doesn't understand where the gravel road sections are. So you might tell you it's going to take you two and a half hours to get somewhere, but because you're driving at 10, 15 miles an hour, that's how slow you're going on the gravel road. It will take you a heck of a lot longer. So bear that in mind when you come to checking how far you're going to go each day. It might take you a lot longer than you think it will. English. English is spoken widely and they speak it very, very well. Bless them. I always try and learn a couple of words of the local language just to be polite. And I'm afraid in Iceland, a bit like in Norway, it escaped me apart from the word tak, which means thank you. And I just said that a lot and felt like I was a pathetic human being because I just couldn't get please or yes or whatever in my head. It just didn't stick. So tak did. That was fine. But they speak English very well and was very friendly, very welcoming and more than happy to help if you needed any. Another question I got is what is Iceland like as a solo female traveler? And in a word, awesome. It's probably now one of my top three places that I would recommend you come if you're a solo traveler, solo female traveler, and you want to come and have a bit of an adventure. You're sort of toying with the idea of traveling solo, but you don't want to go anywhere too scary. Iceland is really safe and it has a massive culture of solo travelers, loads of hitchhikers, loads of backpackers, and you'll see them all hitchhiking around the ring road. I picked up a couple and took them on to the next stop or whatever. And it was great because I was traveling on my own. It gave me a chance to chat to people and whatever. But it was fun. You know, there's this whole culture of people. Nobody bats an eye if you go on an excursion on your own. I went whale watching on my own and the glacier lagoon and a couple of the other ones and all the spas. I went to the spas on my own. Nobody bats an eye. It's not weird. Don't get me wrong. The first time you do it, it's a bit intimidating. But after that, you just get used to it and people are absolutely used to people traveling on their own. It's a really, really good country to try out solo travel if you are thinking about it. If you want more information on the Iceland road trip, where I went, where I stayed, my itinerary, all of that stuff, the Iceland road trip planner is now live. It's suitable for you whether you are hiring a vehicle there, whether you're bringing your vehicle over with you, whether you're there for a week, a couple of weeks, or like I was for three weeks or more. I've got all different itinerary ideas for you in there. Places to stay, things you have to see, things that aren't that great, and all the other bits that you might need for your Iceland trip. So I will leave the link below for you. I hope you found this video useful. Thank you very much to Bailey and Red Pendant for sponsoring the trip. I'll see you on the next one. Take care. Bye.