Höfn í Hornafirði: the glacier base

If you want Vatnajökull properly — a cave inside it, a walk on it, a kayak under it — sleep in Höfn. It is the only town of any size between Vík and the east fjords, and everything worth doing on the south side of the ice cap is within an hour of it.

The price of that position is the drive. Höfn is 460 kilometres from Reykjavík, about six hours without stopping, and nobody sensible does it as a day return.

The town

Seventeen hundred people on a flat spit of land between a lagoon and the sea, with Vatnajökull filling the horizon inland whenever the cloud lifts. The name just means harbour, which tells you what it is for.

It is a working fishing town rather than a pretty one. The draw is langoustine — humar, the small clawed kind — and the restaurants here take it seriously enough that people drive from Egilsstaðir for dinner. The town holds a langoustine festival in summer. If you eat one meal in south-east Iceland, eat it here.

For an hour indoors, Glaciers of Höfn at €22 is a small exhibition on how the ice shaped the district. It is not a grand museum and does not pretend to be.

What you are actually here for

Ice caves. The blue caves under Vatnajökull are a winter product — they form as meltwater drains in autumn and are unsafe once the melt starts again, so the season runs roughly November to March and the exact dates move every year with the weather. Ice Explorers’ ice cave tour is three and a half hours from €170. Heading North run an extra small group version from €216, which is the one to take if you want photographs without eleven other people’s elbows in them.

Glacier walks, by contrast, run all year. Blue Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier walk is three and a half hours from €119 — the cheapest honest way onto the ice from this side. Marina Travel’s glacier hike with blue ice is five hours from €289 and goes further in.

Something different: North Tides run glacier packrafting from €166, paddling a small inflatable among the bergs on a glacial lagoon. It is calmer than it sounds and it puts you at water level, which changes the scale of the ice completely.

The two things people miss

Stokksnes. Ten minutes east of town, under Vestrahorn — a black beach with dunes and a mountain rising straight out of it. It is the most photographed landscape in Iceland that most visitors drive past, because the turn-off is unmarked and the land is private. You pay a small fee at the café by the gate. Go at low tide and the wet sand mirrors the whole mountain.

Jökulsárlón is an hour west, not here. People book Höfn thinking they are at the glacier lagoon. They are not, and the drive is beautiful but it is still an hour each way. The advantage is real all the same: from Höfn you reach the lagoon before the Reykjavík coaches arrive at eleven, and the difference between Jökulsárlón at nine and Jökulsárlón at noon is the difference between a place and a car park.

When not to come

November to February the daylight here is short and the road in from the west crosses several exposed sand plains that close in high wind. If your plan depends on reaching Höfn on a particular evening in January, have a second plan. The road east over the fjords is worse.

Summer solves the weather and creates the other problem: the town has limited beds and they go early.

Our honest take

Two nights, not one. One night means you arrive at six, eat, sleep and leave — and the cave tours start in the morning, so you will have driven six hours for a dinner.

With two, do the ice on the first full day and Stokksnes plus Jökulsárlón early on the second. Book the small-group ice cave in winter or the Vatnajökull walk in summer, and eat the langoustine on the night you arrive, when you are too tired to do anything else anyway.