Planning a trip to Iceland was a strange business. Everyone who has been raves about the place and about the ring road, but when you drill down, none of them seems to have completed the entire circuit around the island.

It seemed logical to plan a round trip by looking at the ring road and any detours, setting aside 2-3 nights at each stop, and trying not to end up with too many all-day drives. It helps to focus on what you regard as the highlights of a visit, which for me is always about the photography, which roughly translates as landscape, animals and city scenes.

Hiring a car in Iceland seems ridiculously expensive, especially if you plan to include any gravel roads or a trip to the Highlands interior which requires a four wheel drive vehicle. We end up paying around £3,000 for 20 days.

The Summer weather isn’t great even by UK standards so I expected rain and around 15-20C but it could be worse: it was worse.

Iceland is obviously said to be a landscape photographer’s dream. There are glaciers, ice flows breaking up in the bay, moon-like lava fields, beaches with black, red and pink sand, geysers and hot springs, and an over-abundance of waterfalls almost everywhere.

When it comes to animals they have puffins and whales. There’s only one city, Reykjavik, but I was hoping for some wonderful modern architecture combined with some more traditional buildings.

It’s also worth remembering how expensive food can be in Iceland. A simple bowl of soup for lunch (or sandwiches) with tap water to drink, ends up costing around £15 per head. A rather unimpressive pizza would cost around £30 in a pizzeria in Akureyri. Whenever we sat down in a cafe (we decided restaurants were just too much) we spent at least £100.

So around half of the accommodation is self-catering. A quick look through receipts suggests a block of cheddar would cost £7, a loaf of bread £3 etc – so also not cheap.

At this stage of totting up the extraordinary costs, I realised that cheaper shortfall flights (around £1,000 for four of us) were not going to offset enough of the living costs – it’s an expensive trip with car hire and hotel bills adding up to around £12,000 for four people. for three weeks. Cut it down to two weeks and you’re looking at around £9,000. To cut it down even further, you could use airbnb accommodation throughout, or even hostels.

Food is taxed quite heavily in Iceland, plus it starts expensive because much of it has to be imported whilst for home grown or made food, labour costs are typically high making production costs high.

So the itinerary ended up looking something like this in my head, amended with strike throughs and italics for what actually happened:

• Arrive Reykavik:  Reykavik Residences £1,600: 2nights, self catering arriving late so really only 1 full day
  • Whale Watching Didn’t happen on a rainy blustery day
  • Modern architecture, cathedral & Harpa Concert Hall & Civic Centre, Old Harbour, basically an excuse to mooch about;
• Transfer to Hotel Egilsen, Snaefellsnes PeninsulaWest Iceland £1,000: 2 nights bed and breakfast;
  • On the way there are some landscape sights to see views of  Vogelmir etc.
  • Saxholl Crator, Gerduberg Basalt Columns (Snaefellsjokull National Park) Stykkisholmir Harbour (ferry)
• Transfer to Hotel Latrabjarg £1,400 bed, breakfast and supper: Westfjords by ferry and car: 3 nights
  • Puffins on the Latrabjarg Cliffs, the most westerly point of Europe. Raudasandyr beach for a walk and seal hunt.
  •  Dynjandi waterfall
• Transfer to Akureyi Apartment, for a full day (7 hour) drive: 3 nights, £550 self catering:
  • Whale watching from Husavik Akureyri, which basically has a family of three humpbacks living in its huge fjord £250 (3 people).
  • Dettifoss  – just had enough of gravel roads by this stage so Dettifoss was out but Goðafoss Waterfall was in, on the route through to the Eastfjords..
  • Lava castles at Myvatn
  • Trollskagi drive & views
• Transfer to Fosshotel, Eastfjords £1,300 3 nights bed and breakfast;
  • Puffins at Borgarfjorddur – just too long a drive on gravel tracks, so abandoned this in favour of a smaller route closer to home
  • Seydisfjordur – which turned out to be a very pretty town on a sunny day.
• Transfer to Fosshotel Glacier, South East Iceland £1,100 2 nights, bed ad breakfast;
  • Stopping at Hofn for lunch –  note that food in Iceland is not one of its selling points but soup and bread for lunch became a mainstay of our trip.
  • Jokulsarlon lagoon & glaciers, Fjallsorlan
  • Lakagigar Laki Visitor trail
  • Fagrifoss waterfall
• Transfer to Hotel Skogar, South Iceland: 2 nights self catering £1,000;
  • Vik beach & puffins
  • Skogarfoss, Seljalandsfoss – no gravel roads, but after this number of days, who needed another waterfall.
• Transfer to Hotel Stracta, South West iceland £1,300 : 3 nights bed and breakfast ;
  • Gullfoss, Geysir & other bits and pieces within distance of Reykavik including possibly the Blue Lagoon –  by this stage of the holiday, we’re all basically retreating into our wifi and trying to do as little as possible.
  • Brief trip into highlands Kjolur Route – just not going to happen at the end of the holiday 
  • Anything left over from the initial day in Reykavik e.g. Arbaer Open Air Museum which turned out to be a perfect, very undemanding visit, just right for the last day.
• Transfer to Reykavik Airport and fly home.

And quite a few of the people who have been to Iceland and loved it, still add up the number of days and shake their heads at three weeks worth of holiday there. I just can’t see how to cut it down further without skimping on something.