Where Langjokull Tours Start
No Langjökull tour starts at Langjökull. Every one of them begins at one of four named places that are not the glacier, and turning up at the wrong one is the single most expensive mistake available on this trip, because the next one is two hours away. Check yours before you set an alarm, then pick a Langjokull snowmobile tour that starts where you will actually be.
Your tour does not start at the glacier
The ice cap has no road on it, no car park and no building. What it has is two approaches, each ending at a base where the tour vehicle takes over, plus a city pickup network for the people who have no car. Everything below is one of those.
The practical consequence: your booking confirmation names a place, and that place is either an hour and forty minutes or two hours from Reykjavik on different roads in different directions. They are not interchangeable.
Gullfoss upper car park
- Drive time from Reykjavik: about two hours, paved the whole way on route 35 through Þingvellir and Geysir.
- What is there: a large free car park, a café and lavatories, and the waterfall itself a short walk below.
- Last fuel: Reykholt or Flúðir, both well before you arrive. There is none at the falls.
- Which tours start here: four, all of them snowmobile or monster-truck days, and every one asks you to be there fifteen minutes early.
This is the efficient choice if you are driving the Golden Circle anyway. You park once, ride the ice and come back to your own car, and you pay nothing for a transfer out of the city.
Húsafell
- Drive time from Reykjavik: about an hour and forty minutes, paved, north on route 1 then west into Borgarfjörður.
- What is there: a hotel, holiday houses, a campsite, a bistro, geothermal baths, a petrol station and the activity centre where the ice tunnel tours check in.
- Last fuel: Húsafell itself. Fill up before the mountain road.
- Which tours start here: the two Into the Glacier tunnel tours, including the combination that adds the snowmobile.
The address, if your satnav wants one, is Húsafell, 311 Borgarbyggð. Check in at the activity centre next to the bistro and the petrol station at least fifteen minutes before departure.
Klaki base camp
- Drive time from Húsafell: about forty minutes on mountain road 550, which is rough gravel and four-wheel-drive only.
- What is there: the tunnel entrance and the vehicles. It is a base, not a village.
- Season: the road is open 1 June to mid-October. Outside that, the shuttle from Húsafell at ISK 2,000 return is the only way up, and in practice most people take it in summer too.
- Which tours start here: none of the sixteen listed here start at Klaki. They start at Húsafell and bring you up.
Reykjavik hotel pickups and the numbered bus stops
- Drive time: none — the day starts where you are staying.
- What is there: two different arrangements. Most tours collect from your hotel door; one collects from any of eleven numbered city bus stops, which is the more useful of the two if you are in an apartment.
- Timing: pickup windows run 20 to 30 minutes and the vehicle will not wait. Be outside at the start of the window, not the end of it.
- Which tours start here: most of the ones on this list, running six to eleven hours door to door.
Not sure which side to approach from?
The tunnel is on the western side out of Húsafell; the snowmobiles are mostly on the southern side above Gullfoss. Both are day trips from the capital.
What "fifteen minutes early" is actually for
Every operator here asks you to arrive fifteen minutes before departure, and on a glacier day that is not a politeness. The transfer up to base camp leaves on the hour whatever happens, because the vehicle above it is already committed to a slot on the ice. Arrive late at Gullfoss and there is no second truck.
The fifteen minutes are spent on three things. Your booking is checked against the manifest. You are told which vehicle is yours, which matters when three operators are loading from the same car park. And on the snowmobile tours you are asked for the licence of whoever intends to drive, which is the point at which a party discovers it has nobody who can.
Where the last fuel is, and why it matters
Neither approach ends at a petrol station. On the southern side, fill up in Reykholt or Flúðir before you climb to Gullfoss; there is a café at the falls but no pump. On the western side, Húsafell has one, and it is the last for the whole of the mountain road beyond it.
If you are driving yourself in winter this is worth planning round rather than discovering. Both roads run through country with no settlement on them for an hour at a time, and in December there is very little daylight in which to find that out.
If you get the wrong one
The two bases are two and a half hours apart by road, so a mix-up is not something you recover from on the morning. What you can do is cancel: every tour here refunds in full up to 24 hours before departure, so a booking spotted the night before costs nothing to move.
The check takes ten seconds. Open your confirmation and read the meeting point, not the tour name — several of these tours have Gullfoss or Reykjavik in the title and start somewhere else entirely, because the title describes the glacier and the meeting point describes your morning.
Which of the tours starts where
The roads themselves are on location and how to get there; the seasons that close them are on Langjokull weather; and the full comparison sits on Langjokull Tours.