Travel
From speeding over black sand beaches to walking behind waterfalls, descending into volcanoes, hiking on glaciers or driving across the wild Highlands: read about our Iceland travels within.
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Go East! A Trip To The Wild And Imaginative Eastfjords
Without fail, a drive across Iceland delivers a sharp shift in perspective from life in more populous places. In fact, one of the oft remarked-upon characteristics of a road trip through the Icelandic countryside is just how small it makes the visitor…
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Tips For Tourists: How To Make Everyone’s Experience Better
“We have an unceasing capacity to make ourselves nuisances, basically. Students of tourism science can and do construct elaborate theories from physics, of course, invoking such wizards as Heisenberg and the Hawthorne effect and the status of Schrödinger’s cat to explain the…
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12 Hours On The Snæfellsnes Peninsula
For the short-term visitor and overworked resident, deciding how to spend the limited free time you have available can be a real challenge, as there is no shortage of great destinations reachable from the capital. For those that want to see as…
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A Day In The Life Of Friðrik Dór Jónsson
As part of our Day In The Life series, we caught up with Friðrik Dór, local RnB artist and co-owner of the newly opened Reykjavík Chips. What’s up, Friðrik? These days most of my time goes into my new side project, Reykjavík Chips,…
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Video: The Colourful Houses of Reykjavík
Reykjavík’s colourful, quaint, iron-clad houses are a source of constant fascination to visitors. But as well as being decorative, the material has a very practical use. The iron was first imported from England in the late 1800s for use in roofing, but…
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Swimming On The Edge of Nowhere: Pools In Strandir
Swimming pools and hot tubs are always major attractions in Iceland, both to Icelanders and foreign tourists, and they can be found in the most unlikely places all over the country. Strandir is an area on the east side of the Westfjords,…
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OMG! #GVpics! The Week’s Best Iceland Instagrams
Wow! Can you believe that a week passed since the last #GVpics winner was announced? Time is FLYING round here. It’s terrifying! Where did this week go? We’re all gonna die! WTF! Aaaaaaa! But hey uh, in the meantime, Instagramming sure is…
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12 Hours In Akureyri: Swimming, Culture, Nature & Nightlife
Akureyri, the self styled “capital of the North,” is Iceland’s second-largest settlement. Often called Iceland’s ‘second city’, the 18,000-strong population falls slightly short of the international standard for a ‘large town,’ but as Iceland often proves, size isn’t everything. Akureyri’s imposing, austere…
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The Seven: Driving To Akureyri One Hot Dog At A Time
The people of Akureyri have been keeping a secret from us Capital Region folk. It’s called The Seven. For years now, while driving the four-and-a-half-to-six-hour road trip between the North and South, many northerners have made it common practice to eat one…
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WINTER IS COMING: A Road Trip To Djúpavík
“Hey Hannah, you can drive right? Do you want to drive John up north, to do an interview?” ‘Up North’—that’s what they told me. You’ll drive ‘up north’. In my naiveté, I assumed by ‘up north’ they meant something like Winterfell, the…
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Meeting The Shark Man
I had been stubbornly ploughing through mounds of snow overlaying a sheet of ice one Sunday morning when a blind turn greeted me with a wall of snow the height of my Grand Cherokee. Everything went white and the SUV licked the…
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Gone Skying: Helicopter Tours Are A High-Flying Treat
There’s something about the position of Reykjavík’s city centre—perched on a hill, with the sea and mountains on all sides—that invites daydreams about seeing it from above. Standing at the top of Skólavörðustígur, the flat top of Mount Esja seems just a…
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This Week’s Iceland Instagram Hitz: #GVpics Contest Round 2
After last week’s inaugural #GVpics Instagram contest, it’s time for round two. The first week had a joint winner featuring maximum sheep, with Grapevine t-shirts now on their way to @ingibjorgolafs and @hannes_nrm. This week, the prize is modeled by part-time comedian…
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Inside Langjökull’s Ice Cave: The Glacial Cavemen
Just outside of Reykjavík, past the snowy bulge of Úlfarsfell and the small satellite town of Mosfellsbær, lies the way to the northern reaches of Iceland. The road passes the hiking trails at the feet of mount Esja before arcing up past…
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This Week’s Instagram Contest – 177 Entries And TWO Winners!
Last week we launched the first #gvpics Instagram competition – asking you, dear readers, to use the #gvpics tag on your best Instagram photographs of Iceland. But not just the oft-seen aurora and landscapes shots – we asked for characters, towns, wilderness,…
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Twelve Hours In Reykjavík: Sunny Day Edition
So the sun is out, the sky is blue, and Reykjavík is your oyster. And while the downtown area is more than compact enough for you to wander the side streets, discover favourite spots, and wend your leisurely way across the city…
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Hashtag Your Way Into A Free Grapevine Shirt! #Wow
Everyone loves getting things for free, right? And photographing stuff, everyone loves that. And lately, it seems pretty much everyone loves Iceland, too. If you happen to love all of those things, maybe this is for you. We’re holding an ongoing weekly…
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5 Great Running Routes In Reykjavík
As a running city, Reykjavík has improved immensely over the past few years. Good running paths are never far away, and new ones are being made every year. The number of runners has also grown significantly, with over 70 running events being…
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Flashback: Tourism In Iceland Thirty Years Ago
I recently stumbled upon a Q/A in the New York Times that made me a bit nostalgic for my annual trips to Iceland in the nineties, long before this great post-crash tourism boom that we are experiencing today. The question, “I plan…
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In Photos: A Not So Summery Weekend In East Iceland
We flew to Egilsstaðir on Friday with grand plans of spending the weekend hiking and exploring the towns of East Iceland. As you can see in the below photos I took with my phone, weather conditions weren’t exactly ideal for either of those…
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Misbehaving Nuns, Ancient Ice: Five Seasonal South Iceland Sights
Ideally, all of your travels in Iceland would be accompanied by mild weather and cloudless skies, but waiting for perfect weather in this country is much like waiting for Godot. This shouldn’t faze you, though, because the shoulder seasons (September and October,…
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Bláfjöll: Below The Lava Field
We drove past the lava fields on a gloomy day. It had rained in the morning and the green moss gave a bright contrast to the black volcanic landscape. David, our tour guide, pointed at the mountains ahead of us and said:…
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Lumpfish Life: Growing Up In A Remote Fishing Village
An amusing interaction in a Facebook group caught my attention the other day. A small-town resident wanted to order pizza. Seeing a mass order as her only chance to get the pizzeria to deliver, she rallied her townsmen. Together they put in…