Visit Iceland’s north page calls the region a land of contrasts: long valleys and peninsulas, mountains, lava, and hills cut by rivers, a coast that is sometimes green and sometimes bare. Toward the Arctic Circle, it says, the midnight sun is the point. The Ring Road crosses this region. It does not exhaust it.
Akureyri and the fjord
The same page says Akureyri is Iceland’s second-largest urban area, in Eyjafjörður, which it calls the country’s longest fjord, and that the weather there is milder. It describes a downtown of late-nineteenth-century wooden houses. The Ring Road article calls Akureyri the largest town on the loop. Visit Iceland’s getting-around article says the bus from Reykjavík to Akureyri takes seven hours and, on summer weekdays, departs twice, and that the flight from the domestic airport is around 45 minutes, with several flights a day. Those are that article’s figures, not a live departure board.
The Diamond Circle and Mývatn
Visit Iceland describes the Diamond Circle as a circuit of about 250 kilometers in the northeast, and a related line says the loop is fully paved and can be driven year-round. The destinations it lists are Goðafoss, Lake Mývatn, Dettifoss (which the Vatnajökull article calls Europe’s most powerful waterfall), the canyon Ásbyrgi, and Húsavík. Ásbyrgi and Dettifoss are in the northern part of Vatnajökull National Park, in Jökulsárgljúfur, which the park article says was carved by enormous glacial floods on the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum. Mývatn is the geothermal lake district the Ring Road article names for hot springs. “Year-round” and “paved” do not cancel a storm closure. The Ring Road article says the passes of Holtavörðuheiði, Öxnadalsheiði, and Möðrudalsöræfi can shut in storms or high wind from September through May, and sometimes in summer.
The Arctic Coast Way
The Arctic Coast Way is a touring route Visit Iceland says opened in 2019. One description gives it as 900 kilometers of coastal roads near the Arctic Circle, off the usual routes. Another card on the Ring Road page calls it Iceland’s northernmost tourist route. It is a choice to leave Route 1, not a spur of a few minutes. Whale museums at Húsavík are part of how the north page talks about marine towns. Hvammstangi’s seal center is also named on that north page even though the town sits toward the northwest; the attribution is the tourism page’s, and this guide does not “correct” it with a different map.
Winter in the north is the heavy-snow winter Visit Iceland contrasts with the south. Summer is the midnight sun and the time when a paved circle is simply easier. Either way, the forecast is the plan.
Sources
- Visit Iceland, North Iceland
- Visit Iceland, The Ring Road
- Visit Iceland, Vatnajökull National Park
- Visit Iceland, Getting around
- Visit Iceland, Weather and climate