Kjolur Route, Iceland

The only main road in Iceland goes around the outside. There's a very good reason for that – virtually all of the towns and villages in the country hunker down by the coast. To find out why that might be, you need to take a trip into the interior. The Interior : that is how all of the guide books describe the central region of the island. The very expression has a threatening and mystical feel to it, more normally used to describe the dark unexplored depths of jungle-swathed tracts of African or South American countries. It is not the kind of thing you associate with northern Europe. Even ... more

The Kjolur is a highland road in Iceland which goes from just after the hamlet of Varmalid some kilometres west of Akureyri to The Golden Circle close to Reykjavik. Although it is passable without a 4WD, it would have been ny on impossible when we went despite it being August. Puddles were so huge on the road that anything less than a tank struggled to plough through them. Rental cars don't allow you to take them offroad in Iceland and as we didn't have our own car with us (what am I talking about.. I can't even drive yet!), the amount of traffic looked extremely minimal and to ensure at least ... more