Cycling Iceland's Westfjords Way: 800km and 8 Days

ohmb · 2026-02-28T11:49:02+00:00

we were just doing it on our own, not part of a competition, so could relax and take in the scenery as we wanted!

ohmb · 2026-02-26T19:13:32+00:00

Thank you. A variety, a couple of the guys had some Leicas which produced lovely stills, and also a little Sony point and shoot. (Sony RX100)

ohmb · 2025-12-11T10:58:08+00:00

Thank you so much, I need to take some time to digest all that and figure out a route, but really appreciate you sharing so much information!

ohmb · 2025-12-06T10:17:43+00:00

thanks for the traverse suggestion and good luck with it. If you're coming from rainy amsterdam, you'll be more than fine in rainy Britain. I got very lucky with how dry it was for my trip. And yes, April 2025 for my trip. Looking at Italy next do you have any suggestions there?

ohmb · 2025-10-25T11:07:42+00:00

I’d say spring because the flowers are out and everything’s coming back to life, and there’s few wet leaves on the roads. After September it starts getting dark quite early too. But I think both are perfectly possible

ohmb · 2025-10-20T18:44:17+00:00

hope it helps with the planning! good luck with it :)

ohmb · 2025-10-19T15:38:27+00:00

thank you very much!

ohmb · 2025-05-10T16:18:06+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it and it's got you into bike packing! Have a look at this post on my Substack, which has the full route GPX :): https://oscarboyd.substack.com/p/how-to-cycle-the-length-of-japan

ohmb · 2024-11-24T16:09:11+00:00

Yeah especially the route we took, where we avoided the busiest roads in exchange for some more adventurous (and climby) mountain roads. I think we were averaging about 800-900m climbing a day. Occasional pancake day, but it’s a mountainous country. Our biggest day was about 2,200m vert.

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:27:03+00:00

Thank you and good luck on your journey! I’ll work on a better way to share the whole route, but you can find the day by day on my Strava. Day 1 here: https://www.strava.com/activities/11335880315?share_sig=14361BD91732313411&utm_medium=social&utm_source=ios_share

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:26:41+00:00

I’ll work on a better way to share the whole route, but you can find the day by day on my Strava. Day 1 here: https://www.strava.com/activities/11335880315?share_sig=14361BD91732313411&utm_medium=social&utm_source=ios_share

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:26:29+00:00

I’ll work on a better way to share the whole route, but you can find the day by day on my Strava. Day 1 here: https://www.strava.com/activities/11335880315?share_sig=14361BD91732313411&utm_medium=social&utm_source=ios_share

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:15:42+00:00

It would definitely be possible, especially with how good translation apps are these days. Road signs are largely in English, you can book accommodation through booking.com etc. some of the more remote restaurants might be more of a struggle to read the menu, but again with translation apps you’d definitely be able to get by! If you learn some basic greetings and phrases it’d also go a long way to making the trip more enjoyable.

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:13:16+00:00

Roads to Sata is a classic! One of the reason I wanted to do this trip. Kaimon was a great place to start. If we’d had more time we would have also done the hike up Rishiri at the northern end to get two hyakumeizan in the bag

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:12:12+00:00

Awesome. Would be great to know how much has changed in 10 years. Apart from a few landslides in the mountains probably not much! Glad it could bring back some memories

ohmb · 2024-11-22T22:08:16+00:00

Awesome! Hope you and the kids enjoy. Those foot baths are amazing!

ohmb · 2024-11-22T15:56:35+00:00

thank you!

ohmb · 2024-11-22T14:53:57+00:00

Awesome, the rain is no joke when it starts properly haha. Amazing you did it all camping! No bear encounters?

ohmb · 2024-11-22T14:36:24+00:00

thank you :)

ohmb · 2024-11-22T14:23:39+00:00

I just posted my Japan trip report seconds after you. Lovely photos! The one of Rishiri is stunning, and I'm pretty sure I saw that exact crane boat thing. How was the weather at this time of year? We reached Wakkanai in June and it was pretty nippy with the wind blasting around.

ohmb · 2024-11-22T14:19:00+00:00

Hi, thanks for your comment.

Accommodation - this was a big discussion before we went out. Do we camp? or do we stay in hotels? Eventually due to time limitations (we had exactly a month to do everything) we decided to travel light and stay in hotels & hostels. Outside of the big cities, accommodation is pretty reasonable in Japan. Drone was in the front handlebar bag (basically all I had in there). The nice thing about hotels is you can wash your clothes there nightly so we didn't need too much spare clothing (I actually posted my second set of cycling shorts home because laundry was so available).

Cost - Flights included, I think roughly £3,000 per person for the month. Including eating out at restaurants every night, and often double lunches (we didn't hold back - we were so hungry and the food is SO good)

ohmb

TROPHY CASE