Iceland ATV, Buggy & Super Jeep Tours

The split matters more than the price does. On the ATV and buggy tours you are the driver: two and a half to three and a half hours on tracks across the lava fields and geothermal ground outside the city, with a briefing, overalls and a helmet at the operator's base beforehand. The appeal is the driving, and the scenery is the setting rather than the subject. Both of these are rated at the top of the page, 5.0 and 4.9, on small but consistent numbers.

On the super jeep tours somebody else drives and you look out of the window. The vehicle earns its keep only where an ordinary minibus cannot follow: unbridged glacial rivers, deep snow, loose highland tracks, the surface of a glacier. Everywhere else it is a comfortable seat in a tall car.

Here is the comparison nobody selling these tours puts in front of you. The Golden Circle by super jeep is 292.00 EUR. The same four stops by coach is 78.47 EUR, and by small-group minibus about 105. All three drive the same tarmac to the same car parks at Þingvellir, Geysir, Gullfoss and Kerið, because in summer that route needs no special vehicle at all.

So what does the extra 214 EUR buy? A group of six to eight instead of forty, a guide who is talking to you rather than to a microphone, and the ability to keep going in winter conditions that would turn a coach back. On a February day with drifting snow that last point is not nothing. In July it is a very expensive minibus.

The rule that holds across all six: pay for the super jeep when the destination has no road, and do not pay for it when the destination has one.

The two private listings at 1,560 and 1,899 EUR are the same logic taken further, and both are priced for the whole vehicle rather than per person. Split between four people the Range Rover day is about 475 each, which is a different proposition from the headline number. Worth noting that it is also the lowest rated listing on this page at 4.6, and the cheaper private super jeep sits at 5.0.

At 278.00 EUR this is within a few euros of the Golden Circle super jeep, and it is a completely different day. It leaves from Kirkjubæjarklaustur, a village 260 kilometres east of Reykjavík, runs into Vatnajökull National Park on unsurfaced highland tracks with river crossings, and takes you along the crater row left by the Laki eruption.

That eruption is the largest thing on this website by any measure. Between 8 June 1783 and 7 February 1784 a fissure 25 kilometres long opened with at least 130 vents and produced roughly 14 cubic kilometres of basalt, the greatest lava flow in recorded history. The lava was not what did the damage. Around eight million tonnes of fluorine settled on the grazing, killing about 80 per cent of Iceland's sheep and half its cattle and horses, and the famine that followed killed roughly a fifth of the country's population. A sulphurous haze crossed Europe that summer, Britain recorded an estimated 23,000 excess deaths, and the winter that followed was one of the coldest on record.

What you drive along today is a line of green mossy cones stretching to the horizon in both directions, in a landscape with no road, no buildings and almost no other vehicles. It is the least visited important place in Iceland, and the reason is the 260 kilometres and the track. This is the listing on this page where the 278 EUR is buying access rather than comfort.

Almost nothing else in Iceland shuts for winter. The lava caves are open every day, the Golden Circle road is ploughed, the Katla ice cave runs in August and the Lava Show is indoors. The highland network is the exception, and it is a hard one.

The F-roads that reach Lakagígar are closed by the Icelandic road authority from the first serious snow until the ground has dried out enough in early summer to take traffic without damage, which in practice means roughly late June to early September, varying by a few weeks each year. There is no way around it: the tracks are legally closed, the rivers are unfordable, and no operator will run it. If Laki is the reason you are reading this page, the trip has a window of about ten weeks.

The Reykjavík buggy and ATV tours run through the winter on lower ground, and the super jeep Golden Circle is arguably at its best in February, when the extra capability is the point rather than the packaging.

For the ATV and buggy tours the operator supplies overalls, a helmet and gloves, and runs a safety briefing at its base before anyone touches a machine. What it cannot supply is a licence. Anyone driving needs a valid full driving licence and has to bring the physical card, not a photograph of it, and this is checked. Passengers riding on the back need nothing, which is the usual arrangement for couples where only one person wants to drive.

Minimum ages are set by the operator and differ between driving and riding, so read the listing you are buying rather than assuming. Both Reykjavík operators on this page include hotel-area pickup in the price, which is unusual and worth counting when comparing.

Dress for standing still in wind rather than for exercise. You are outdoors, moving, at speed, on an exposed lava plain, and the overalls are windproof rather than warm. On the super jeep days you are in a heated vehicle for most of the day, so the calculation is the opposite: layers you can take off.