Monday 13 October 2008

The Ring Road, and Highway 61

Unlike other countries, there are not many options for which road to take. So you cannot take into consideration how much time you have or the weather conditions. Traffic conditions are easy. Once we reached the Westfjords, I think we saw a maximum of 15 cars along the whole way.
The Ring Road is the road that travels all around Iceland. But to reach the fjords, we had to go onto highway 61.

There is a song by a Canadian artist that I downloaded many years ago. It's called "The Long Road to Ísafjorður by Sabola, an electronica artist. Back then, I thought the land was some fantasy place Sabola had made up. Many years passed and I forgot all about the artist and the song. It wasn't until this summer, when I had a shuffle list playing on my computer, that I saw the name. I had been reading lots of guidebooks by then and had recalled seeing the name somewhere. I decided that I must must must go to the Westfjords. It's a long way because although it's only ~325 kilometres from Reykjavík, it takes about 5-6 hours to get there. This is where perimeter versus distance factors in. The roads, as you can see in the map I provided, zigzag all along the perimeter of the northwest coast.

By the way, Ísafjorður is by far the largest settlement in the Westfjords with a population of about 3,000.

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