This coming Saturday a couple from California land at Keflavík at a quarter to nine in the morning. They have nine days. They are not basing themselves in one town and taking day trips out from it. They are going all the way around the island, the full Ring Road, with their own guide and vehicle the whole time, sleeping in a different bed almost every night. I know the plan down to the hour. I do not yet know how it goes.

Normally we write these stories the other way round. A tour finishes, we sit down, and we tell you what happened: the weather we got, and the slightly strange fact that you tend to end a week like this as friends with people who were strangers at the start. Most of those write-ups live on Lilja Tours‘ website under client stories. This one is different. The tour has not happened. So instead of the story, here is the raw thing underneath it, the actual program and the actual price. Yes, we have a stake in showing you this. We also think it is the most useful version to read.

The trip in one line

Nine days, two travellers, private the whole way. They start in Reykjavík and run counter-clockwise, down to the Golden Circle and the south coast first, then the glacier lagoons in the southeast, up the East Fjords, across to Mývatn and Akureyri in the north, home through Borgarfjörður. Call it eight days of actual touring, with the evening they land at one end and the morning they fly out at the other. What they asked for was not complicated. Good hotels. Real things to do, not just photo stops. And one guide who knows the island doing the driving and the explaining. Not the most expensive Iceland money can buy. A step under that, which, honestly, is where most people who have travelled a lot end up wanting to be.

The opening stretch: Golden Circle to the south coast

Day one is deliberately nothing much. We grab them at the airport, run them to the hotel, and then get out of the way. June does the rest. The light up here barely quits at that time of year, so a long bright evening more or less handles the welcome for us.

Then it gets going. Day two is the Golden Circle. Þingvellir first, where two continental plates are slowly pulling apart and you walk straight down into the gap between them. Geysir next, where Strokkur fires off every few minutes and people still flinch every single time. Then Gullfoss, which I have stopped trying to describe, it just hurls itself into the canyon and you stand there. The afternoon is snowmobiles on Langjökull, the second biggest glacier we have.

Day three, the south coast. This is the one people quote back to me months later. You walk behind Seljalandsfoss. You stand under Skógafoss until you give up and let it soak you. And Reynisfjara, the black sand beach. Basalt columns. Sea stacks out in the water. The Atlantic coming in a lot harder than first-timers expect, which is exactly why we keep people well back from the waterline there.

Into the southeast: glacier lagoons by boat

Day four, the photos lie to you, or at least they undersell it. Vatnajökull, the biggest ice cap in Europe, just sitting there over everything. At Fjallsárlón we put them in a zodiac and take them out among the icebergs, close enough that you hear the things shift and crack, which is an odd noise the first time you catch it. Then Jökulsárlón up the road, bigger, busier, the bergs drifting out toward the sea in slow motion. And Diamond Beach opposite, where chunks of that ice wash back up onto black sand and just sit there shining, like something a giant knocked off a table.

Day five we point north into the East Fjords. Hours of empty road. One fjord, then the next, then the one after that. A fishing village here and there with maybe forty people in it. And at the far end Vestrahorn, a great black sawtooth of a mountain standing over its tidal flats, which is the shot everyone is after. They sleep that night at a farm stay. It is the one night that is not a 4-star hotel, and it is also the place I would happily send my own family. Iceland’s highest working farm, properly remote, and a good deal better than its category suggests.

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The north, and a long soak in Mývatn

Day six is Mývatn, and Mývatn is where Iceland stops pretending to be Earth. Námaskarð first. Mud pots burping away. Steam coming straight up out of the ground, and a sulphur smell that, I am not exaggerating, stays in your jacket for the rest of the day. Dimmuborgir after that, a lava field so tangled the old name for it is the Dark Castles. We climb the rim of Hverfjall, a crater so round it looks drawn with a compass. We have a wander across the steaming ground at Leirhnjúkur. And then the bit everyone is quietly waiting for, the Mývatn Nature Baths in the evening, the north’s answer to the Blue Lagoon with a small fraction of the crowd, on the premium package, sitting in the warm water while the day goes cold around them.

So what does it actually cost?

Here is the part most articles dance around. The whole thing, for the two of them, comes to 2,503,000 ISK. That is roughly 19,700 US dollars at the current rate, give or take wherever the currency lands on the day.

Split across nine days and two people, that is somewhere near 1,100 dollars each, per day. Here is what that actually buys, line by line:

• A private guide and a Mercedes V-Class to themselves for the eight touring days, nobody else in the car
• Both airport transfers
• Eight nights, breakfast included, seven of them in 4-star hotels and one at the farm, the two of them in a double room
• The snowmobile run on Langjökull
• The zodiac ride out among the Fjallsárlón icebergs
• The Mývatn Nature Baths on the premium package
• The guided walk down into the Víðgelmir lava tube
• The guide’s own accommodation when outside of Reykjavík, the fuel, the kilometre road tax, the parking

What it does not cover is food beyond breakfast, and anything personal. Lunches and dinners are paid as you go, and most people prefer it that way. They want to choose where they eat, not have it decided for them three months out.

Why I call it semi-luxury

I used that word on purpose and I will defend it. This is not the top shelf. No helicopter, no five-star suite in town, no private chef trailing the car, no tasting menu built into the route. A couple of the rooms on this loop came out as superior or deluxe only because, in June, that was what availability left us. The farm night is a farm night, but in a wonderful location and offers similar comfort to a high standing hotel. What you are paying for is the version where everything works, the driving is done by someone who has run these roads a hundred times, and the day bends around the travelers rather than around a timetable. For people who have already done the five-star thing elsewhere, that trade tends to be the whole point.

Who books a tour like this

Usually people who could spend more and have decided more is not what they are after. They want a real slice of the country in a week. They do not want to drive it themselves, not in a place where the weather can rewrite your plan by lunchtime, and they would rather hand the whole thing to one person who knows the island. We have written here before about why so many of our guests choose not to drive Iceland themselves. This couple is a clean example of it. At Lilja Tours we only run private tours, so this is the whole of what we do, not a sideline. And we know how to avoid the crowds.

That is the program and that is the bill. What it does not tell you is what the trip will actually feel like, which is the part we like best and the part we cannot write yet. They board their flight in a few days. We pick them up, hand them into the car, and find out alongside them.

If you want that version, the one with the weather and the silences and whatever the island decides to throw at us, come back to our website a couple of weeks after they fly home. We will have written it down by then.

Quarter to nine, Keflavík, Saturday. The clock is already running.

Julien Achache

Julien Achache is Owner of Lilja Tours. Lilja Tours is a boutique private tour operator based in Reykjavík, Iceland, specializing in bespoke private tours with a perfect 5-star rating across platforms. If you would like to be a guest blogger on A Luxury Travel Blog in order to raise your profile, please contact us.

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