UK vs. Iceland
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Rob Fairhead cast aside holiday brochures for warmer climates when he went to book his honeymoon. Not the beaten track to Tenerife or the packed holiday villages of Jamaica for him! Instead, he whisked his bride away to Iceland - and then to her consternation proceeded to take the opportunity to photograph road signs. He produced this page about his findings.
"Iceland - no motorways, no railways, but some of the most amazing driving - and other - experiences anywhere in Europe. A place where driving is a real pleasure, and you can have the open road to yourself for mile after mile. A place where driving needs to be an art form; where you realise that what you call "driving" at home is usually nothing of the sort. A place where you realise the value of things that you take for granted at home (like metalled roads and crash barriers!). Less is definitely more.
To get an idea of size, Iceland is slightly bigger than the island of Ireland. These pictures were taken in June 2003 - on honeymoon!"
This is a typical Icelandic gravel road. Outside the south-west many roads are still unmetalled, including a suprisingly large part of the country's circular ring road - route 1. Note the ubiquitous yellow markers: one white stripe on the facing (right-hand) side, with two white stripes on the opposite side. Roads like this one have markers on both sides; some have them only on one side of the road. This is route 87 between Lake Mývatn and Húsavik; in the distance is the fjörd Skjálfandi. (Icelanders refer to things in that manner, e.g. the waterfall Gulfoss).
Gravelled roads often remain on difficult terrain, such as mountain passes or this cliffside road on route 96 in the eastern fjörds. Although the government are injecting massive investment on conversions, it will take many years as work can often only take place in the summer months. Maps show the metalled and gravelled sections.
Crash barriers are only provided when you would definitely get killed if you come off. The cliffs here were steeper than the photo suggests, and in a two-wheel drive car like our hired Skoda Octavia (they'd run out of Golfs!) a great deal of care needed to be taken.
This picture shows the car after a combination of road works and gravel roads, parked on the "lay-by" shown above. Many of the roadworks we drove through were just that - you wait for the digger to get out of the way and you drive through at a snail's pace. No diversions, no temporary surface, just straight through and take your chances! Most of the mud on the car came from roadworks on a gravelled section of route 96 east of Reyðarfjörður.
This is a typical example of Icelandic road signage at junctions, here at the junction of route 1 and route 864. The dotted outline, e.g. route 85, is the equivalent of our brackets. The 'four-leaf clover' type symbol denotes 'tourist attraction.' We'd just driven along route 864 via Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Europe. The gravel road (open in summer only) was rutted, potholed, riddled with stones, etc. It took over 3 hours (excluding stops) to drive the 56km!
Taken from the same junction, there are lay-bys like this all over the country with information boards, especially near significant junctions. The boards have excellent maps, distances, tourist information, bits of local history, etc. As well as Icelandic, most of them are in English and one or two other European languages.
The dreaded Malbik Endar sign, meaning the metalled road is coming to an end. Time to keep your eyes peeled. Some gravel roads were graded very well with the 80kmh speed limit quite easy to maintain (10kmh less than metalled roads), some were horrendous, but most were somewhere in the middle. The variety made for interesting driving; usually I was yearning for the opposite sort of road to the one I was on!
This bridge caught my eye because of it's design. It's on route 1 north-west of Egilsstaðir, taking the road over the glacial river (a river fed from a glacier) Jökulsá á daí.
Another typical cliff-edge gravel road, typically taking the route round the sea-end of fjörds. This is on route 1 in south-east Iceland.
Many bridges in Iceland are built narrowly with only one lane. Advance warning signs let you know in good time, though normally you can see them from miles away.
Visibility at these bridges was always good. Some were narrower than others, but I think only once or twice we ended up stopping to give way (even then I could have risked it, but was too polite!). This is a typical example in southern Iceland.
Yep, it's a TOTSO! This one's a few kilometres north of Höfn, in south-east Iceland.
A typical Icelandic route confirmatory sign, with the furthest distanced place-name at the top. This one is on route 1 just east of the TOTSO with route 99. Note the ferry symbol for Seyðisfjörður, where the ferries from the Faroes, Shetland, Norway, and Denmark land.
This 4WD bus is just starting the 16km descent down route F985 from the glacier Skalafellsjukull back to route 1, where we'd been snowmobiling. Great fun, and F985 is an amazing road.
This is the suspension bridge on route 1 at Jõkulsárlón. A glacier feeds into the lake behind the picture, which then feeds the small river you can see leading to the sea past the bridge. The lake is full of icebergs, and you can take a boat trip amongst them. The glacier is receding and the lake expanding. This bridge is said to be the most at risk of any in Iceland; a glance at a map will show there's nowhere else it can go.
This is the bridge over the glacial river Skeilará on the huge glacial outwash plain Skeilarorsandur. The bridge is 972m long and was the last link in the circular route 1 when it opened in 1974. During floods in 1934 this river reached a width of 9km. Glacial flooding places the whole area at risk, although channels encourage the waters to flood the roads rather than the bridges. An incredibly stunning area.
The bridge has a number of passing places, of which this is one. An indicator of the level of traffic is that I was on the bridge at one point or another (around 0900 in the morning) taking photos, etc. for about 15 minutes, during which no other vehicle passed in either direction.
A close-up of the bridge's road surface, longitudinal beams with a metal grid on top.
There are two of these signs, one at each end of the 700 km-square desert Mýrdalssandur, this one is at the western end. The signs (in both Icelandic and English) says: Danger Sandstorm - flashing lights indicate danger of sandstorm on Mýrdalssandur. All insurance is invalid if you ignore the lights, and you're likely to get your vehicle sandblasted if you do. Sometimes the road is shut for days: the choice is to sit it out, or go around the long way!
This is the only End of Priority Road sign I saw in Iceland. Note that the dotted line around F35 means we are still on a different route, route 35 in this case. Route 35 merges into route F35 (a mountain route) at the junction you can see in the distance, where the road to the lower car park at the waterfall Gullfoss branches off to the right. However, to get to the upper car park you continue around the left-hand bend along route F35 for a couple of hundred metres or so, making it one of the few metalled mountain roads in Iceland! (The 'malbik' 'endars' at the next junction.) Gullfoss is easily reached on a day trip from the capital.
This is quite the most bizarre road sign we saw, on route 427 east of Grindavík. The sign warns of birds in flight ahead. Sure enough, as you drive along hundreds of birds in the adjacent nesting grounds take to the air in fright at your car. Amusingly, the acutes, etc. on the word varpland are actually cunningly shaped birds!
In summary, Iceland is a unique place. Go there once in your life and you'll never regret it. And all the better if you like roads too!
