The first of the Iceland posts! This was originally a kind of summary of what I did, before the individual activity/location posts started. The trouble was, when I came to write the Real Itinerary post, I began to feel a lot of deju vu. It was exactly the same post as the one that was supposed to be here! So I re-thought it.
Ok, so I had a solo female summer Iceland adventure! I don’t talk much about the solo female travel thing – I mean, everything I do and everywhere I go is basically solo female travel but I don’t emphasise it enough, which is partly why I started the A-Z of Solo Female Travel series, to really hammer home the point that this is something I do and something I know about and, in fact, something I live.
Iceland is a very easy place to travel as a solo female. Tourists outnumber Icelanders hugely and tourists come in all shapes and sizes. This time I joined the ranks of those who hire a car and drive around the Ring Road (that wasn’t the original plan but it’s what ended up happening). Most people who do that either stay in bricks-and-mortar hotels/guesthouses etc or they hire campervans. Honestly, even last summer, I’d have said full-size campervans are a rarity in Iceland. Icelandic campervans are usually little panel vans like I had in 2017. Not anymore! I swear we tripled the size of Vik on the Friday night. Last time I looked up the population statistics, Vik, the one and only “big” town on the south coast, is home to just 300 souls. Definitely more than 300 people crammed into what has become basically a car park for enormous white square vans. Tents are definitely a minority these days.
Yes, I camped. I did hire a panel campervan in 2017 but generally it’s so much more expensive than a small car and your own tent that it’s not worth it. I bought that tent in 2013 for precisely this reason; to travel around Iceland on a budget. In 2013, I used RE’s network of long-distance buses. That’s no longer a practical option because there isn’t really a network of well-connected long-distance buses but I also like the spontaneity of my own car. Don’t particularly relish driving the thing. Driving it is itself an adventure. I passed my driving test more than twenty years ago now – in a right-hand-drive car! If you watched my vlog series last summer, I complain quite a bit about the “backwards car”. This year it was a bit better but the car had lane keep assist, which meant it spent the entire week trying to pull the steering out of my hands. More than once I was tempted to sit back, fold my arms and snap “Well, where do you want to go??”.
I spent seven nights under canvas at six different campsites. Two of them were campsites I stayed at in 2013, so that kind of felt like I was recreating that summer – other than those two sites, one right up in the north, one right down in the south, there was actually very little else to compare the two trips. I did the Askja tour on both. That’s about the only thing. I tried to spend my evenings in geothermal pools because the weather was nice and I had two books on the go but the fact remains that a one-man tent isn’t a delightful place to spend an evening. Too small. It’s just too small.
Anyway, a few paragraphs back I was talking about Iceland being an easy place to be a solo female tourist or traveller and I was suggesting that’s because there are lots of other tourists to get lost among. Iceland is a pretty progressive place to be a woman anyway, so if anything, tourists are perhaps the thing to be afraid of. Certainly whenever you hear about crime in Iceland, it always starts with “nah, there’s no crime in Iceland” and finishes with “except maybe be careful of tourists, especially the drunk ones”. I think my point is that I don’t stand out in Iceland. Everyone’s a tourist! I’m not sure how many solo ones I saw but I can’t be the only person doing this on my own. Ah, there was one lady on her own on the Askja tour. We left her at the Dreki huts – “on purpose, we didn’t just forget her”, to quote the tour guide. It’s not the kind of terrain where tourists and hire cars should be going and certainly not on their own but neither are there many public buses, so you have to attach yourself to a tour bus to get there and back. Now, making your way into the Highlands and doing whatever she did, that’s a solo female travel adventure!
I come back, yet again, to the concept that “adventure is in the eye of the beholder”. Real-life people, whose biggest adventure is going to a different supermarket, will absolutely agree that driving the entire Ring Road, camping, kayaking, roaming lava fields, is an adventure. But “real adventurers”, who risk life and limb in inhospitable places, would look down their noses at my little holiday. I don’t think it’s the most adventurous trip I’ve ever had but there are enough characteristics in there for me to decide I’ve had an adventure.
But what I’ve definitely had is a solo female travel experience. Iceland is a great place for it (she says for the third time). It’s got wide open spaces, campsites everywhere, a single road where all you need for navigation is to know where to stop, an open and progressive attitude to women and whatever you’re into on a trip, you’ll find it here.
So, what did I find? Oh, you’ll see on Monday. I have at least nine posts to come and we’re starting with my kayaking trip on Jökulsárlón.
