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.