Reykjavik's worth a detour, but I'm glad we didn't stay there

And finally, to the capital.

It might be the capital city of a European nation, but it feels more like a fishing village on the Northwest  coast of America.  It's charming, the views over the bay are striking and residents enliven the place by painting buildings in festive colours.  But I found that once I was in "civilisation" I was far more aware of how grey, oppressive and chilly the weather was ... whereas out in the country it just added to the dramatic backdrop.  If I returned I might stay here a night to explore a bit further, but I'd want to spend the bulk of my time in the great outdoors.

The tourist heart of Reykjavic is a few streets surrounding the main harbour and running up a hill above it.  The harbour is, unsurprisingly, full of signs for puffin and whale watching tours.  Most striking to my eye is the modern sculpture a few hundred yards down the tourist promenade that evokes the spirit of an early Viking ship.

There are government buildings, a theatre and a grand hotel, mostly in a late 19th century style.  The main shopping district ... just a couple of streets, really ... offers you a mix of cute cafes, shops selling traditional woollen goods, plenty of outdoor clothing/sporting goods purveyors, a few trendy clothing boutiques and a surprising number of silversmiths.

The most obvious thing to visit is the cathedral, looming prominently above a town where most

buildings are just two or three stories.  There are exceptions to every rule, and this building challenges the one that says brutalist concrete buildings are ugly.  This one is striking, with its concrete poured in thin spires pointing heavenwards.  Inside you'll find a clean, elegant nave of gothic arches and bright, modernist stained glass.  Outside, a far more traditional statue of Leif Ericson looking towards the American continent he visited long before Columbus got credit for discovering it.

But the visit that almost every tourist in Reykjavik makes, with good reason, is to the Baejarins Beztu Pylsur hot dog stand.  Now that I'm married to a half-Dane and have family in Copenhagen, I recognise the Icelandic hot dog thing as a carry-over from their Danish days.  The Danes are obsessed with this version of street food and you'll find a stand about every 200 yards in the capital.  Baejarins Beztu was the only stand I spotted in Reykjavik, but it's in every guidebook.  The queues testify to that!  The dog was very similar to the Danish variety.  Soft meat with a pleasing bite to the casing, served with both raw and those magnificent crunchy fried onions.  But the Icelanders do a trio of sauces ... sweet mustard, mayo and a tomato-based ... and their buns are much softer.  I have to give them the slight edge in the Scandi dog wars.  Given the relative expense of the country, a hot dog and a soda for £3 is also the best bargain you're going to get here.

After our brief wander around town, it was back to the airport for our late afternoon flight home.  Keflavic has come a long way since its early days.  Many Americans of my generation will know and remember it from the '80s, when Iceland Air offered the cheapest way to get to Europe, but you had to touch down in Iceland for a few hours.  Then, is was a tiny, bleak terminal building with a shed selling sweaters and Royal Copenhagen porcelain.  Now, it's a gleaming, modernist terminal with a high-end duty free mall ringing a restaurant and bar area with tables, chairs and leather armchairs to sink into.  Very civilised.

And that's a great metaphor for Iceland overall.  Civilisation carved out of dramatic, wild nature.  It's a truly unique place, and I hope I get back.

In closing, a few random travel tips.

• Do consider using a specialist.  We had a few problems with Discover the World, but we could have avoided those had we been a bit more diligent about chasing them and reviewing their work.  Overall, however, I think we got a much better experience going with people who knew the place, with a package price that was a bit better than we could have done on our own.
• Pack some lightweight clothes.  It seems counter-intuitive.  But the geothermal heating is so good that once you're inside, it's generally toasty.  The layered look is essential; make that last layer a thin one.
• From a London perspective, it's not as expensive as you'd think.  Lots of people are warned off Iceland because of the cost, but I found it not so different from home.  Dinner, if consumed a la carte, would have been about £40.  The wine list started at £25.  It cost just under £60 to refill tank of our rented 4WD (It was 3/4 empty.)  Not cheap, certainly.  But I didn't have the sticker shock here that we had in Copenhagen.
• If you stay in accommodation outside of Reykjavik with a kitchen, buy your groceries on the way through the capital.  Your chances of finding shops once you're beyond it are slim.
• I expected the woollens, but not the hand-crafted silver jewellery.  If that's your thing, be ready to shop.
• Iceland lets everyone shop duty free, even members of the European union.  Rather than avoiding it as an expensive location, it actually makes Reykjavik a credible Christmas shopping spot.

Iceland's Western "saga circle" combines literature with more stunning nature

Fact:  Mistakes on your travel provider's part can result in some of your best experiences.  The overbooked rental car agency in LA that upgrades you to the convertible.  The missed flight connection

that results in the bump to first class.  The uncleaned hotel room that sees you transferred to a suite.  These hiccoughs, after their initial stress, have ultimately given me some of my favourite trip memories.

So it was in Iceland.  We went with an Iceland specialist called Discover the World.  We usually plan our trips ourselves but as we're all phenomenally busy thought we'd try the package-by-experts deal.  We weren't that impressed by the pre-trip service.  There were a few issues and we never seemed to be talking to the same person twice.  But we booked, paid, and were able to get on with life.

One of the extras we purchased ... turns out it's very common in Iceland ... is a superjeep tour.  Scheduled for Friday, I consulted a map before dinner on Thursday to see where we had to meet the driver.  To learn that Discover the World had booked us on the other side of the country, 2.5 hours away from our hotel.  Not pleased.  Fortunately, they have an out of office emergency number.  Manned that night by one of the directors.  Who was mortified.  And immediately set about making things right.

By the time we got to dinner 40 minutes later, two bottles of apologetic wine were waiting for us.  The next morning at breakfast, they were on the phone informing us they'd booked us a private driver, who would spend the day only with us on Saturday.  (Superjeeps often carry 10 or 12.)  We would go wherever we wanted, to our schedule, and do a few things that were off the beaten track.  Result.

Thus it was we had our day with Halle, driver to the stars.  As a private driver he had ferried around oligarchs on fantasy tours and stars on film shoots.  His most recent tales included taking care of Tom Hiddleston who, after doing a 24-hour shoot on the new Thor film, wanted Halle to take him directly in to Reykjavic to sample the town's famous clubbing scene.  Respect.

Our day was far removed from anything so urban.

We started at the Deildartunguhver thermal spring (above), a gash in the earth of a gentle valley that pumps out 180 litres of water per second in angry, steaming bubbler fountains.  This is the largest output of any thermal spring in the world.  It hits the surface at 212F, then goes into a pipeline that circulates heat to the surrounding area.  The pipeline's insulation is so good that even when the water reaches its most distant point, 24 hours later, it's still 149F.  Clever Icelanders.

Not far from there is the tiny village of Reykholt, on the tourist map because it was the medieval manor of one Snorri Sturluson.  A literary giant of Shakespearean proportions and a political player with the heft of Warwick the Kingmaker, Snorri was a nobleman in the 13th century who was twice the country's lawspeaker, one of the biggest jobs in the Althing (parliament), and a poet in his spare time.  He penned some of the most famous of Iceland's famous sagas, including a history of the Norse kings and the Prose Edda.  These have influenced all of Western Literature, even if you've never heard of them.  In high school we started with Gilgamesh, the Illiad, Beowulf and the Edda ... the original super hero stories; I loved them all then and was excited to be at one of the sources.

There's a literary study centre here with a church, library and museum.  The last doesn't offer much by way of artefacts, but has a series of well-presented signs displays that tell the story of the Sagas, the Nordic World and Snorri's life.  And a fine gift shop with a great range of books (expected) and interesting silver jewelry (surprising).

On to the double waterfalls of Hraunfossar and Barnafoss.   The Hvita river flows across a lava field and narrows here.  Barnafoss is at the top, a traditional waterfall crashing over black rock to a churning pool below.  Beautiful, but a dime a dozen in Iceland.  What makes the site extraordinary is that the Hvita continues down a channel cut through the lava, and the erosion of the rock bluff on the north side has revealed scores of small springs releasing glacier melt that's been filtering through that lava for ages.   Thus we saw one big waterfall followed by nearly a kilometre of little ones, bordering on our first chance to walk on the barren moonscape of a lava field.  We didn't realise, at that point, that bleak lava fields would dominate our views for the rest of the afternoon.

Continue inland from the falls and you enter the highlands, a cold desert full of nothing but rock, snow, ice and big skies.  It took nearly half an hour driving down a bumpy gravel road to get to Vidgelmir lava tube.  We're all familiar with pictures of waves of molten lava sliding down hills.  But lava also flows underground, boring long wormholes through the stone.  Vidgelmir is a particularly big one, at its widest point almost 16 metres high and wide.  A sign takes you to a small car park (we were the only people) from which you hike about half a mile to get to the point at which the roof of the tube has collapsed.

From there, you climb down a sturdy metal ladder.  And then, the going gets rough.  You scramble into the depths of the Earth over piles of jagged boulders, offered a bit of balance by a rope strung between poles pounded into the rubble.  It's tough going.  At the bottom, a path evens out and walking gets a bit easier.  You continue on about 50 yards, losing all natural light, before you hit an iron gate.  The authorities have closed the caves off from this point to preserve some magnificent ice and mineral formations.  We saw tiny examples near the door.  But the greatest excitement was the bone tingling fear created when Halle turned off our head lamps and we stood in the most complete darkness and silence imaginable.

Turning on lights and scrambling back up, I kept thinking of Orpheus climbing out of the underworld.  Perhaps thinking too hard, as that's when I hit a wobbly stone and took a spill.  I was fine, but returned home with some exciting bruises.  It's certainly a firm warning that nobody should be out here without a guide.  Doing dangerous things in the middle of nowhere, in an invisible place, is a recipe for disaster.  (Unsurprisingly, Iceland has a disaster recovery service as famous as the Swiss one.)

Saving the best for last, we staggered back to the superjeep and headed for the glacier.  Up the northern ascent to Langjökull, the Long Glacier.  Another 40 minutes of driving through frozen lava desert.  Without sight of another human, climbing higher and higher, the road hardly discernible from the surrounding lava flow, the superjeep rocking with wind.  At last, we arrived at the top of the world.  There was a lonely wooden cabin for tourists, the first man made thing, with the exception of the road, a bridge and the lava tube sign, we'd seen for nearly two hours.  And in front of us:  ice.  Stretching from our last edge of lava to the horizon in front and on each side of us.  As deep as the valley behind us.  Radiating an eerie blue-grey from its depths, colours shifting as dark storm clouds raced across a

bright sun.  Raced because the wind was at gale force.

We stepped out of the superjeep only with Halle's firm assistance, to find we could hardly stand.  The wind drove off the glacier with the same punch as a water cannon, making it almost impossible to stand upright unless we leaned into it and braced hard with leg muscles.  There was real water, too.  Not yet in the cold of winter, the sun was melting the glacier top, sending streams skittering across the lava flow on which we stood, driven to high velocity by that crazy gale.  This was elemental, frightening nature.  Ice, water, wind.  All with the power to drive through stone, shaping the landscape and dwarfing the power of man.

And yet.

And yet that glacier is melting.  Despite its size and power, after millennia of unrivalled dominance, it's shrinking.  Global warming has never been as real to me as at that moment, standing in front of the biggest, most remarkable force of nature I've ever witnessed, and realising that even this is submitting to the force of man.  And not in a good way.  The saga circle, with its glacial climax, will bring out the "Green" in anyone.

Iceland's much-promoted "Golden Circle" lives up to its fame

If you're going to find a crowd anywhere in Iceland outside Reykjavic and the Blue Lagoon, it will be on a much-beaten tourist track called "The Golden Circle".

The furthest point in this loop of key sights in the southeast of the country is about 2.5 hours from the capital, where most visitors stay.  Thus they're the easiest things for most people to access in a country where 4-wheel drives are a necessity and motoring can be a real challenge.  Ease doesn't take away from the wonder, however.  The Golden Circle would be worth a much longer trek.

The essential points are the waterfall of Gulfoss, the geyser field at Haukadalur and the national park at Thingvellir.  We added the church at Skaholt.

Though our route was probably the same as the 300km circle most people cover from the capital, our starting point was our hotel on Whalefjord.

So instead of setting out through city and suburbs, we circumnavigated the fjord and then spent 30 minutes cutting across a broad lowland valley, empty but for the livestock, the rare farmhouse and the single gravel road.  We saw perhaps five other cars in the first hour of the trip. If you like being alone in wide-open spaces, Iceland is for you.

We emerged onto the main road near Thingvellir, to which we would return, but pushed on so we could reach the top of the circle before making our way back.  First stop: the geyser field.

Each of these geothermal blowholes has a name.  The biggest one is Geysir, giving us the name in English for all such features.  These days, Geysir just sits to one side and steams, while Strokkur is the one that blasts with enough regularity (every seven to 10 minutes) to make it likely you'll both see it spout, and get a decent picture.

But you're not just here for a single jet of water.  The whole field has a mystical feel; it's a place that makes Norse gods, trolls and silversmithing dwarves perfectly plausible.  You're looking at a hillside gently sloping toward more ubiquitous black peaks.  Reforestation has placed a ring of small pines around the edge, but your focus is drawn first to the steam.  It rises from more than a score of points across the field, sometimes in plumes like a steady chimney, sometimes in great billows.  Streams of water run down the hill, their heat sending off more mist.  Only a very foolish visitor would need the signs that warn people not to touch; it's obviously scalding.

The whole area smells of sulphur, the stench that alternates with the perfume of pristine fresh air to define the aroma of Iceland.  Once you're walking in the landscape you come upon the pools.  Some the size of a child's bath, others as big as a small suburban swimming pool.  Some bubble, but most sit placidly.  The water is crystal clear and the minerals within each have encrusted the stone with accretions of white, green and red.  Gazing at this beauty would be worth the trip.   When Strokkur spits out its plume, it's icing on the sightseeing cake.

There's also a large visitor centre here with a cafe and the best gift shop we saw outside of Reykjavic airport.  If we had it to do again, we would have seen Gulfoss first and then come back here for shopping and lunch.

Two people on the promontory top left give a sense of scale

Gulfoss ... Golden Falls in English ... is just 20 minutes beyond Haukadalur.  Again, you're looking at the transforming power of water on a  landscape.  But this time, rather than the scalding geothermal liquid forcing its way from the underworld, it's icy glacial runoff.  We expected something cascading down one of those mountains, but Gulfoss is actually in a valley, completely hidden from the road.  Park at the visitor's centre and start walking across the volcanic plain and there's no view of river or falls; only a dull rumble in your ears tells you something's ahead.  And then, suddenly, you come upon a crevasse to look down upon falls just as impressive as Niagra or Victoria, if somewhat smaller.

There are actually two cascades here, a top falls and a lower one, and though your best photo is from above, you need to scramble down the 109 stairs to the viewing platform at the bottom to get the full effect.  (Turns out you can drive down there, too, but the road isn't signposted.  It's the turn just south of the visitor centre.)  From there, a well-maintained path takes you along the length of the falls.  You can get close enough to feel the spray, shake with the thunder and be more than a bit frightened by the water's destructive power. 

This being Iceland, I named him "Our Lord of the Blue Lagoon"

From this top point of the circle we turned south for Skaholt.  Iceland may operate on a giant scale in the natural world, but its human scale is much smaller.  Skaholt is, arguably, the Canterbury or Rome of Iceland.  It's technically a cathedral, the seat of Iceland's senior bishop and at the centre of much history.  Yet today it's a modern church, smaller than many a humble village parish in England, surrounded by a handful of buildings.  Of the thousands of people who once lived here, there is no sign.  You can see the appeal of the place, however, as this is a beautiful spot.  A broad, rolling, grass-covered valley with several lakes, ringed by mountains high enough to give some shelter but low enough to allow easy passage.  Once there was an enormous wooden cathedral here, shipped in from Norway and assembled on site.  Today's church is a testament to the Scandinavian ability to find beauty in simplicity, all white walls and sharp lines.  This makes the arresting modern mosaic of Christ, emerging from shifting tides of blues and greens, all the more striking.  (This being Iceland, I immediately thought of him as Our Lord of the Blue Lagoon.)

Of very recent construction ... so new you can still smell the cedar and it's not in any guidebooks, is a sod-roofed side church that evokes earliest Viking times.  It's as stirring, in its own way, as the official house of worship.

Our last stop of the day was Thingvellir.  We spent an hour there, which is about all you'll be able to do if you are circumnavigating the whole route.  This place, however, could easily take a day on its own.  It's a national park with miles of great views and hiking trails, sitting at the top end of a big lake in an enormous valley.  At its centre, however, lies what you're really here to see:  a site of both historic and geological impact.

The geology came first.  This is a rift valley.  It's here that the North American and Eurasian plates come together, and are spreading.  You can stand in between them, dwarfed by the ominous black basalt cliffs on the left of the photo ... America ... and the lower cliffs on your right ... Europe.  They rise straight, with jagged tops, and in between them is a mostly flat chasm, roughly 50 yards wide.  Parts of it are filled by a rushing river which turns and cascades over falls before breaking into the valley floor behind the European cliff wall.  The rest runs like a long, straight processional way.  And it's getting just a bit wider, every year, as the plates pull apart.

Below the rift lies a gentle valley of grasslands, bisected by rivers flowing into the lake.  The early Viking settlers found this to be both a verdant and convenient spot for summer meetings, and started coming together in the late 10th century to discuss how to run their colony.  These were fiercely independent people ... in many cases outcasts and rebels who struck out for Iceland for greater freedom and opportunity. Chieftans succeed on merit and could be voted out. Authority needed to be earned and rules required communal buy-in.

The settlers gathered here every summer from about 930AD to talk communal business, administer justice and make decisions on the rules and customs that guided their community. Those meetings became the world's oldest continuously operating parliament, now taking the form of the Althing in Reykjavik.  That puts Thingvellir up there with Athens or Runnymede (where Magna Carta sprang to life) as sacred sites in the history of representative government. Although the Vikings, as modern Scandinavians will quickly remind you, were far closer to our current ideas of democracy. Suffrage was broader than in either Ancient Greece or Medieval England, and Viking women enjoyed a fair amount of authority.

Of course, the people also came to this astonishingly beautiful valley to buy, sell, marry, gossip and simply enjoy their one crowd scene a year.  It must have been one hell of a party.

If you're driving yourself, do note that while in English it's Thingvellir, the Icelandic symbol for the "th" sound looks like a P.  We had a few perplexed moments unsure if we were following the right signs.  Also, note that while this site has greater historic interest, there are fewer tourist facilities here than at Gulfoss or Haukadalur.  Do your shopping and dining at one of those two and consider Thingvellir a wilderness site.

Blue Lagoon deserves the hype; great intro to Iceland

It was not the most obvious of girls' holidays.  Travelling together since 1999, the Northwestern Girls have done Tuscany, Berlin, Tunisia, the Cote d'Azure and a string of other locations that usually have these things in common:  wine, great food, high culture, shopping, and hopefully a bit of affordable luxury with the possibility of a spa treatment or two.

Iceland doesn't score highly on many of those factors.  But here we are.  And to ease ourselves into the more active, less food/culture/shopping itinerary, we started with the spa.

Iceland is a geologist's fantasy, with more than 200 active volcanoes and a continental rift creating one of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet.  The churning earth below also generates geisers and hot springs, channelling enough scaldingly hot water and steam to the surface to heat the whole country without the benefit of coal-fired power plants.

Ironically, in this most elemental of countries, the Blue Lagoon isn't a natural feature but a man-created result of the effluent from the nearby power plant.  As they pumped used cooling water into the lava field outside the plant, the silica and other minerals in the water turned the black rocks white, and grains of silica settled as a white sand at the base of the newly created lagoon.  The water radiated a gorgeous blue, and had now cooled enough for bathing.  Locals started sneaking onto the power plant's grounds to have a dip, and swore by the rejuvenating properties of the water.  About 20 years ago, the power company built a changing room for the public, and then started to develop the whole space for visitors.  The rest is (recent) history.

Today the lagoon is edged by a high-end spa building with sleek changing rooms, relaxation lounges, restaurants and a gift shop.  Where you can take some of that silica mud home with you for £60 a tube.   Admission starts at about £30 and heads up depending on your level of treatments and "experience".  Treatments are in the same general price range as spas around the world.  (I paid about £55 for a half-hour leg massage.)  The interior spaces are nice, but you won't see much of them because the whole point is outside.

It's open 365 days a year, no matter how cold or terrible the weather, because you can enter the water from indoors and push through a door into the lagoon beyond.  You never need to lift anything but your head above the steaming surface.  Unless you buy a drink from the waterside bar, where they'll scan your admission bracelet to charge you, then hand your drink down to water level.

On our day, the skies were leaden, the temperature hovered around freezing and sleet occasionally drove down with the steady wind.  (A warning to contact lens wearers:  they're best avoided here as the silica dust is hell once it's in your eyes.)  Mist billowed from the lagoon surface, reducing visibility to 20 yards, with glimpses further as the white fog shifted.  Thus we had to explore to discover that the lagoon is roughly the size of a football pitch, with different alcoves curving off from the edges.  There's a cave and a couple of bridges to shelter under if the precipitation is bothering you.  Most of the lagoon is kept at body temperature but there are hotter spots throughout and visitors tend to float in and out of them as they feel too hot or chilled.  At the far end from the spa building are vats of the silica mud, which you can slather with abandon since it's included with admission.

Over to one side, under a bridge, is the treatment area where spa therapists in wet suits work in all weathers.  This was my second outdoor treatment (the first being in a tent beside the Zambezi river in Zambia) and equally memorable.  But while the first was a standard massage with an amazing view, this was a unique treatment.  You start by laying across a spa table with a surface submerged about two inches below the water.  You're freezing as soon as the air hits your skin, of course, so they quickly wrap you in soaking, hot towels.  These cool off, and your therapist knows just when to whip them away, dip them into the water and then re-wrap you, giving the effect of a plunge into an icy pool in between sauna sessions.

For my treatment, I was atop the table for the first 10 minutes as my brawny, blonde therapist (classic Viking looks) used the silica mud to scrub down my limbs.  Then he pulled me off the table.  Turns out the base was a thin raft.  At this point 80% of my body was submerged, still wrapped in the hot towels. The therapist would push the rest down every few minutes to keep the heat envelope.  And then, for 20 minutes, I just floated in a cocoon of warmth while he did a deep massage on legs, calves and feet.  This was, without question, one of the most amazing physical sensations I've ever experienced.

We spent about 4.5 hours at the lagoon and, other than a short break for lunch at their cafe, sat

submerged in the water for all of it.  Time flies.  No wonder this is the No. 1 tourist attraction in Iceland.  Its status is no doubt boosted by a top notch marketing campaign and its close proximity to the airport.  Just 20 minutes, though you're not under the flight path and get no aircraft noise.  It's typical for tourists to spend their arrival day, departure day or just long layovers here.  (There's a luggage store next to the car park to assist.)

We flew in the night before, arriving just before midnight, and stayed at the adjacent Northern Lights Inn.  Basic and comfortable, it has the simplicity of an Econolodge, overlooks the power plant ringed by desolate lava fields and the surrounding air is heavy with the smell of sulphur.  Not a recipe for success, you'd think, or for charging premium rates.  (And they do.)  But as anywhere else in the world it's location, location, location.  There's no place better for the lagoon.  Settle in and you'll find the Inn is cozy with underfloor heating, has the most sumptuous duvets and pillows you've ever encountered and a good breakfast to prep you for your spa day.

I can't imagine any trip to Iceland without a repeat of the whole experience.

Jaw-dropping landscapes are the essence of our Icelandic experience

Iceland is all about the views.

It's a mythic landscape that makes you think of The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. It's vast, bleak, dramatic. And empty. Iceland is about the size of the American state of Kentucky but has a population of just over 300,000, mostly in and around Reykjavic. It's possible ... indeed, typical ... to drive half an hour between sightings of another car, and hours without seeing any more "civilisation" than a large farmstead or a scattering of holiday cottages.

Jagged black peaks loom over wide valleys scrubbed out by the advance and retreat of glaciers. On the coast, those valleys sink below sea level to form deep fjords, like the crazily picturesque Hvalfjörðinn (Whale fjord) on which our hotel sat. This one has a modern tunnel across its mouth. A good thing, considering that it takes nearly 45-minutes to drive down each side, on a road cut along the base of the mountains and sometimes dropping straight into the fjord, often buffeted by knuckle-whitening blasts of wind that shake your 4-wheel drive as if it were a mini.

Should you choose to circumnavigate Hvalfjörðinn you won't pass a single service station, shop or village. Lots of sheep and horses, a few pretty waterfalls, a few holiday cottages, a huddle of quonset huts that were an old British naval base and two factories. (Ironically, Iceland's abundant natural energy means it's cheaper to produce energy-intensive things like aluminium here, then ship them.) But for most of the drive, it's just dramatic wilderness. This was our introduction to the jaw-dropping scenes that would be filling our eyes, and an important lesson about driving times in Iceland. Going through that tunnel takes 15 minutes. Circumnavigating the fjord ... which anyone driving around the country would have had to do until just a few years ago ... at least 90. Iceland may not be a big place, but when volcanoes dictate the terrain, you're not going anywhere fast.

Charming as Reykjavic is (I'll describe it in a later blog), I was deeply relieved by our decision not to stay there. Sitting in our private hot tub one morning, I watched the sunrise trigger a pink and gold light show through gaps in racing storm clouds, enjoying the total silence. A single white church steeple was the only sign of human habitation as I looked down a hillside of beech and heather scrub clothed in autumnal reds, yellows and moss greens, leading to a few newly-mown hay fields before the wind-whipped water and the mountains on the other side. I felt sorry for anyone staying in the city. This splendid isolation was surely the point of Iceland.

The hotel at my back was the Glymur, and the only tourist accommodation we saw on the fjord. It offers comfortable lodging, a fine restaurant and genial staff. The main building, with traditional hotel rooms and several big lounges, all overlooking that breathtaking view, sits near the top of the hill. Dotted on the slope below it are a cluster of free-standing holiday cottages. A great solution for four of us, with two in each twin bedded room on either side of a good-sized sitting room with galley kitchen. A deck ran the length of the building, where the hot tub took centre stage. Ours was the house lowest on the slope so, when looking out the fjord-facing glass walls, we had no sense of any neighbours or of the hotel above us. All that lounging space meant we had plenty of room to relax in the afternoon between touring and dinner, and again after our meal. Which also helped keep the cost down, as we catered happy hours from the duty free purchases we'd brought with us.

The Hotel Glymur sits in splendid isolation

The look, both in our house and throughout the main rooms of the hotel, was comfortable and streamlined Scandinavian design. No appearance of luxury. In fact, on the website the place looks awfully simple for the price. Once there it comes across as a good deal more sleek and elegant than the photos suggest, and it all pales in comparison to the view, in any case. Pointless to compete with the magnificence out those windows.

All that wilderness, of course, means no restaurants, so we booked a dinner, bed and breakfast package. Other than stocking up on groceries when coming through Reykjavic and cooking for ourselves, there would have been no other practical option. Fortunately, the restaurant is considered one of the best in Iceland and mixes local specialties with traditional European. We had three excellent dinners, with enough menu variety not to repeat anything.

Highlights included fish soup, cod with strawberry sauce and foal carpaccio with dried figs and marinated fennel. Yes, foal. They have a lot of horses in Iceland and some of the excess young ones go into the food chain. After you get over the typical Anglo-American aversion to eating man's 2nd best friend, and embrace the local tradition, you have to admit it's very tasty. Somewhere between beef and venison.

The breakfast at Glymur is remarkable, and very much in the Scandinavian tradition. Cold cuts, cheeses, salmon (smoked and gravlax), pickled herrings and sardines, rye bread as black as the mountains. On the sweet side there's yogurt, cereals, pastries and platters of fruit. The last imported as any fruit and veg grown here needs a hothouse to ripen. The Icelander's dedication to coffee is similar to the Danes, who ruled them for several centuries. The serve-yourself vats waiting for us every morning made the argument for my (absent) husband's preference of filter over espresso. If our drip maker produced something this good at home, I'd agree with him. Maybe it's the water. All glacial, either run off or filtered through volcanic stone, it's some of the purest in the world and tastes divine. I am puzzled as to why Iceland doesn't export it more widely; they could run rings round Evian.

One valley back from the coastal fjords like the one that hosts Glymur, a thin layer of topsoil, the wind-sheltering ring of mountains, regular rains, lakes and glacial rivers mean there is an agricultural area. It's mostly hay fields, harvested as winter feed for the sheep and horses grazing wherever you look. (I'd guess there are more sheep than people; we learned the horse to human ratio is 1-to-3). It's a mostly treeless landscape, though in some places there are stretches of aspen and beech thicket, and regular plantations of young pines. (There's a movement to try to re-forest some of what the original Viking settlers destroyed.) These were the gentlest landscapes we saw, and the ones most likely to feature farms or small hamlets. We saw nothing in two solid days of driving I'd even call a village, though some spots were marked as such on the map. But even these gentler places are still vast and impressive, with memorable views wherever you look.


It's in the highlands beyond where things really get jaw dropping. There's no rain up high, so it's a desert. A volcanic desert, with miles of barren lava flow spread over the valley floor as if a cosmic chef had dumped a vat of caramelised sugar, let it harden into fantastical shapes and then bashed away at it with a hammer. Most of the valleys we saw were black stone, dotted with white algae, but some were an iron ore red. It's no wonder Nasa trained crews here; it's a dead ringer for all the moon pictures you've ever seen. And again, hanging over it all, the mountains. But here topped by the awesome spectacle of glaciers.

Views like this quickly validated our somewhat unusual choice of Iceland for the annual girls' trip. We were clearly in for something spectacular.