The Roads Nobody Talks About: My Favourite Drives That Aren't the Ring Road

Last summer I drove Route 1 with a friend visiting from Denmark. He'd planned the whole trip around it — the Ring Road, obviously, because that's what you do. Somewhere around Egilsstaðir, staring at a convoy of campervans all doing exactly 90 km/h in a single file, he turned to me and said, "Is this it?"

No. This is not it.

The Ring Road is fine. It's a perfectly good road that connects perfectly good places. But it's also the only road most people will ever drive in Iceland, and that's a shame, because the country has about 13,000 kilometres of roads, and the best stretches are the ones nobody puts on their itinerary.

These are the drives I take when I have a free weekend. When I want to actually feel like I'm somewhere no one else is. Some are paved. Some are gravel. One requires a vehicle that costs more than your apartment. All of them are worth it.

The Westfjords Crawl: Route 61 and Everything Around It

The Westfjords are Iceland's answer to the question, "What if we made a place that was deliberately hard to reach?"

Getting there already filters out most tourists. The roads are narrow. The gravel is loose. The fjords go on forever — every time you think you're almost around one, another finger of ocean appears and you're driving another 40 minutes to cover what looks like 2 kilometres on the map.

And that's exactly the point.

Route 61 from Ísafjörður to Þingeyri is the one I'd start with. It hugs the coast of Djúpið, the deep fjord that gives Ísafjörður its name, and on a clear day the water is so still it looks fake. You'll pass through the single-lane Breiðadalsheið tunnel — one of the oldest in Iceland, hand-blasted through rock in the 1990s, and yes, there's an intersection inside the mountain. Don't panic. Just follow the signs.

From Þingeyri, push south toward Dynjandi. You've probably seen the photos. The waterfall really does look like that. What the photos don't tell you is that the road to get there (Route 63) is unpaved and runs along a cliff edge above Arnarfjörður with no guardrails. The wind will try to rip the car door off your hand. Let it. Then close it properly.

Pro Tip: Fuel up in Ísafjörður before heading anywhere in the Westfjords. The next reliable fuel stop could be 200 km away, and "reliable" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. The N1 in Ísafjörður is open late. Use it.

The Westfjords deserve three days minimum. Most people try to do them in one and end up exhausted, having seen nothing but the inside of their windscreen. If you want to explore this part of Iceland properly without the stress of navigating alone, our day trips and sightseeing tours can handle the logistics while you handle the staring-out-the-window part.

Öxi Pass: The Shortcut That Earns Its Name

Here's a road that saves you an hour on the drive between Egilsstaðir and Höfn — and makes you work for every minute of it.

Route 939, Öxi Pass, is a mountain road that cuts across the highlands instead of following the Ring Road's long coastal loop around Berufjörður. It's 50 kilometres of gravel. Steep. Exposed. In summer, it's dramatic. In early autumn, it's covered in fog so thick you're navigating by the reflector posts alone.

I love it.

The pass tops out at about 530 metres and the views from the summit stretch across Berufjörður and out to the ocean. On the way up you'll cross a landscape that looks lunar — no trees, no houses, just moss and rock and silence. On the way down, the road hairpins through a valley that turns green so suddenly it feels like someone flipped a switch.

Here's the honest part: if you're not comfortable on gravel roads, skip Öxi. The surface is rough, the gradients are steep, and in wet weather the road becomes genuinely tricky. Rental car companies have opinions about this road, and those opinions are "no." Check your contract. A standard compact won't enjoy this.

Pro Tip: Öxi is usually open from late May to early October, but check road.is (Vegagerðin) before you set out. Conditions change fast. If it's closed, take the coastal road via Djúpivogur instead — it's longer but the drive along Berufjörður is beautiful in its own right.

Route 862 to Dettifoss: The One People Get Wrong

Everyone wants to see Dettifoss. Fair enough — it's Europe's most powerful waterfall and the ground literally shakes under your feet. But almost everyone approaches from the east side, Route 864, because Google Maps tells them to.

Don't.

Route 864 is a washboard gravel road that will rattle your fillings loose over 30 kilometres. It takes forever, and by the time you arrive you're too irritated to appreciate anything.

Route 862, approaching from the west, is paved. Fully paved. Smooth tarmac all the way from the Ring Road junction near Húsavík to the Dettifoss car park. The drive takes about 25 minutes from the turnoff, and when you arrive, you're on the west bank — which is the better side anyway. The spray hits you. You feel the power. The east side is more distant, drier, less impressive.

The west bank viewing platforms are newer, better maintained, and from there you can walk south to Selfoss (a different waterfall, confusingly — Iceland reuses names like a family passing down sweaters) in about 20 minutes. Selfoss is quieter, wider, and in some ways more beautiful.

Pro Tip: While you're up in the northeast, the Diamond Circle drive is the obvious extension. It loops from Húsavík through Ásbyrgi, past Dettifoss, and down to Mývatn. Budget a full day. Húsavík's whale watching is legitimately excellent — I've seen blues there — and Mývatn is the geothermal area that puts all the others to shame. Námaskarð, the boiling mud area just east of the lake, smells like hell and looks like Mars.

Landmannaleið (F225): Highland Baptism

Now we're talking about F-roads. The "F" stands for fjall — mountain — and these roads are Iceland's way of saying, "You'd better mean it."

F225, also called Landmannaleið, is the route into Landmannalaugar from the north. You need a proper 4x4 — not an SUV that looks tough, an actual high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle with river crossing capability. There are rivers. You will cross them. The water will be cold and the current will be stronger than it looks.

The drive in is about 40 kilometres from the turnoff at Route 26 near Hrauneyjar, and it takes roughly two hours because the road surface alternates between deep gravel, loose pumice, and lava fields that look like they cooled last week. Some of them nearly did.

But Landmannalaugar itself — the rhyolite mountains in pink and green and orange, the hot spring where you sit in a natural pool with steam rising around you while staring at mountains that look painted — is one of the few places in Iceland I'd use the word "magical" without embarrassment.

The first time I drove F225 I was nineteen. My father's old Land Cruiser. No GPS, no phone signal, just a paper map and the certain knowledge that if I broke down, nobody was coming for a while. It remains one of my favourite drives I've ever done anywhere. The landscape changes every five minutes — black sand, then green moss, then a river, then obsidian fields, then suddenly these candy-coloured mountains appear on the horizon and you understand why people lose their minds over this place.

Pro Tip: If you don't want to risk the F-roads yourself (and there's zero shame in that — river crossings go wrong every summer), book a super jeep tour. The drivers know every river crossing by heart, and you get to enjoy the scenery without white-knuckling the steering wheel. Honestly, it's how I'd recommend most people experience the highlands.

Seyðisfjörður Road: The Best 25 Kilometres in East Iceland

Route 93 from Egilsstaðir to Seyðisfjörður is short. Twenty-five kilometres. You can drive it in twenty minutes.

You won't, though, because you'll stop four times.

The road climbs up from Egilsstaðir over Fjarðarheiði pass — a high plateau where in June the snow still sits in patches next to wildflowers — and then descends into one of the most beautiful fjords in the country. The approach from the top, when Seyðisfjörður appears below you in its narrow valley with the blue church and the colourful houses and the cruise ship in the harbour, is the kind of view that makes you pull over and just sit for a while.

Seyðisfjörður itself is tiny. Maybe 700 people. It has an arts scene that punches absurdly above its weight, a fantastic fish restaurant called Norð Austur, and a sense of calm that Reykjavík lost somewhere around 2015. The town also happens to be where the Smyril Line ferry from Denmark docks, which means it's the first thing some visitors see of Iceland. Lucky them.

In winter, Route 93 over the pass closes regularly due to snow and avalanche risk. Even in summer, the weather up top can turn — I've driven it in July in near-zero visibility. Check conditions. Always check conditions.

Kjölur Route (F35): The Highland Highway

F35, the Kjölur route, is the highland road that scares people least, and for good reason — it's the only F-road with no river crossings. It runs north-south through the interior between Gullfoss and Blönduós, 200 kilometres of highland desert flanked by Hofsjökull and Langjökull glaciers on either side.

A 4x4 is still mandatory. The road is rough, the terrain is exposed, and there's nothing — genuinely nothing — between the trailheads at Hveravellir and the endpoints. No fuel. No phone signal for most of it. No buildings. Just the two of you: you and the hálendi (highlands).

The highlight is Hveravellir, roughly at the midpoint. It's a geothermal area with a natural hot pool that sits at about 700 metres elevation in the middle of Iceland. You park, you walk across a landscape of steaming vents and mineral deposits, and then you get into a hot pool surrounded by absolutely nothing but highland desert stretching to the horizon in every direction. It's the most Icelandic experience I can think of.

Kjölur is usually passable from late June to early September. The road opens when the snow melts enough, and it closes when it comes back. That window is your window.

Pro Tip: Kjölur makes an incredible alternative to the Ring Road for getting between south and north Iceland. If you're based in Reykjavík and want to combine the Golden Circle with a highland crossing, you can drive from Gullfoss onto F35 and emerge in the north near Blönduós. Our day trips from Reykjavík can help you plan the Golden Circle portion, then you continue into the highlands on your own.

Before You Go

A few things, because I'd feel guilty not mentioning them.

Safetravel.is — Bookmark it. Check it. It shows road conditions, weather warnings, and closures in real time. The Icelandic word for this is aðgát — caution, attention. Use some.

Fuel — Outside of the Ring Road, fuel stations get sparse fast. Never pass one with less than half a tank. Some stations in remote areas are unmanned and card-only (and occasionally, your foreign card won't work). Carry cash as backup.

Insurance — Standard rental car insurance in Iceland does not cover gravel damage, water damage, or sand/ash damage. If you're driving the roads in this article, you need the premium coverage. Yes, it costs more. So does a new windshield.

Time — Every drive in this article takes longer than Google says. Gravel roads, photo stops, sheep on the road, weather. Multiply Google's estimate by 1.5 for paved roads off the Ring Road, and by 2 for F-roads.

River crossings — If you've never crossed a glacial river in a vehicle, the first time will be genuinely frightening. Walk the crossing first. Check depth. Watch where the current pushes. Go slow, stay in low gear, and if the water reaches above your wheel hubs, back out. Every summer, cars get stuck in rivers. Don't be one of them.

These roads are the Iceland I know. Not the Iceland of tour bus windows and crowded viewpoints — though those have their place too — but the one where you drive for an hour without seeing another car, where the road turns to gravel and then to something worse, and where the landscape does something so unexpected that you forget you were ever stressed about the rental car insurance.

Come drive them. I'll be out there somewhere, probably stuck behind a sheep.