Review about Best of South Iceland Tour by Anne Peterson

Nordic Saga Tours - Best of South Iceland Tour – September 2018 This might be a long review but well worth the read! My family and I just returned from a 10 day trip to Iceland. This included 1 day pre-tour, 6 day guided tour(Nordic Saga Tours), and 1 day post tour. After looking at photos on the @icelandicjourney page on Instagram I decided to book a tour for 4 family members including myself. We flew WOW airlines into Reykjavik and used our Flybus voucher(roundtrip included in tour package) to get to our pre-tour hotel, Hotel Cabin(tour hotel also). The rooms were small with no room to move around with luggage. The day staff at the hotel was wonderful; they answered all questions, gave us maps and helped us find our way. The evening staff was not so helpful. Our next hotel, Hella Hotel was clean, rooms were huge, had a supermarket, gas station, bakery and wine store all within 2 minutes of walking. There were only 3 restaurants to choose from for dinners. Our last hotel was in Vatnajokull National Park, Hotel Skaftafell, again clean comfortable with an amazing view of the glacier at the back of the hotel. Unfortunately the only place to eat was at their restaurant(did not open until 6:30pm) or across the street at the gas station/restaurant which had a small buffet. The restaurant at the hotel only had 4 items on the menu to choose from. All hotels had northern lights wakeup call if you were interested. Finally, we returned to Hotel Cabin for the last night of the tour and was presently surprised by the hotel room which was much bigger and had amenities not found in the earlier stay. Hotel Cabin did offer a lunch and dinner buffet of salad bar, some hot food, bread and drinks for $26.00USD. Breakfast’s at each hotel was the standard European breakfast of meat, cheese, bread, tomatoes, cucumber, cereal, pastries, oatmeal, coffee and tea. On our first day we met our tour guide Anna Lara, let me just say she was one amazing guide and driver. She is a native Icelander who has a vast knowledge of Iceland’s history, environment, and local customs. She has many personal stories of her family and herself growing up in Iceland. You can tell she is very passionate about showing people her beautiful country. My suggestion is see if you can have her as a guide! She always made sure everyone was having a great time and stayed safe. After reading that our tour could be up to 20 people we were pleasantly surprised to only have 7 people on the tour. I believe this made it a more pleasurable time at each destination and we really were able to connect with our other members of the tour group. I definitely think 20 would have been way too many. Our tour was jam packed everyday with waterfalls, beautiful landscapes, amazing mountain views, volcanos, craters, geothermal landscapes, icebergs, beaches, amazing hikes, glacier walk, glacier lagoon ride(unfortunately it was too windy for us, it was cancelled), and soak in the famous Blue Lagoon. Finally our tour ended with a great city tour. There was so much to take in and see I cannot even begin to describe the beauty and natural wonder that we were able to experience. I do not think we could have seen all of the natural wonders on our own. Many of the roads we took were inaccessible to the regular vehicle and even some 4-wheel trucks. Also, I don’t believe driving on our own we would have gained the knowledge and history of Iceland that we did with our guide. Our tour package was very reasonably priced and included roundtrip vouchers to and from the airport, all breakfasts, entrance fees to any national parks, tours, museums, etc.., we also added in a pre-tour and post-tour hotel stay which Nordic Saga arranged. I feel Nordic Saga Tours was an exceptional tour for the price and recommend highly if deciding to visit Iceland. Our tour was seamless.