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Hello!
I am hoping to travel throughout Iceland from late December through late January. Does anyone have any month long itinerary suggestions or must sees. I like cities and bustle but I also like to stray away from tourism and want to be more with the locals. Thank you! I am so excited for this trip!!!!

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The only city with something going on is Reykjavik. Also most of the locals will be there on winter months. The rest of the country is quite sleepy villages with snow and wind. There is Akureyri of course but it's also really sleepy on winter.

I'm not sure Iceland is the place to go if you like cities and bustle... It's quite the opposite.

I spent last December and most of January in North Iceland and it was extremely peaceful. The only bustle was on New Years Eve and on Epiphany.

So maybe one month in Reykjavik?

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I´m a bit curious as well why would you want to go to Iceland if you like cities? As mentioned above, the only real city in Iceland is Reykjavik and you can easily see it in a day. I wouldn´t spend more time there simply because you will spend a lot of money for seeing the same things you can see in any European town and you will miss out on the unique experiences Icelandic wilderness can offer you. Akureyri is nice, but small as well, all the rest of Iceland is nature, nature and again, nature. Smaller villages and towns are very quiet, basically just places where to sleep.

Edited by amscams
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Does anyone have any month long itinerary suggestions

At that time of year it is hard to see a month's worth of sights in 30 days because the days are so short. So the usual itineraries won't work for you. And your travel will also be disrupted from time to time by the weather. And nearly all of the things to see in Iceland are natural wonders, not human settlements. There is winter tourism, and you can google and find the things the winter tourists like to see and do. There are special things at this time of year.

to stray away from tourism and want to be more with the locals

Well if you leave Reykjavik and the standard day tour area, and a couple of other smaller winter tourism areas, you won't see many tourists outside the summer high season. But do you think the locals want to interact with you? Most of them seem to see the very numerous tourists in Iceland (in other times/places) as something between a resource to be exploited and a nuisance. Outside Reykjavik, there are not many bars and places where people hang about. Beer was illegal in Iceland until about 25 years ago, and alcohol has to be bought from a small number of state-run shops, so there isn't much of a public drinking culture. Even in small villages, most people in Iceland live in a modern house in a modern housing estate and hide from the horrible weather and watch the television and eat pizza. Thinking that you will find local people living in old houses and carrying on traditional local ways of living, well it hardly happens. When you see the old houses in a museum, that most people lived in until really rather recently, you can understand why no one lives in a house like that any more, and you can't even find them except in a museum.

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