Why Iceland needs to be your next travel destination

Iceland lures visitors with its mix of fire and ice. Both elements greet us almost straight on arrival: the temperature outside the airport feels like winter. “I’ve been living in this ice box now for 12 years” our Iraqi taxi driver tells us when we ask him about his stay. Then comes the fire: an erupting volcano, right next to the highway, spews its hot insides out into the ice-cold air above. The volcano erupted just two weeks earlier, and caused large parts of the nearby town Grindavik and the world-famous Blue Lagoon to evacuate — the lava ‘ate’ part of the main access road.

“Welcome to Iceland,” my seat neighbour says to me, a knowing smile on his weathered face. The first days are spent in Reykjavik: not necessarily a city to write home about, but quirky enough to spend a day or two. 

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Our first trip outside the country’s capital takes us to the place where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. They drift in opposite directions by roughly 1 to 2 centimetres every year, torn apart by the boiling magma inside the earth’s mantle — in other words, Iceland is growing like a baby. Iceland is a baby, in planetary terms.

We continue to the geyser — in fact, the one geyser that gave all others its name. You kind of expect dinosaurs to emerge in between the steaming mud baths and boiling water ponds, so prehistoric does the landscape look. Then you remind yourself that dinosaurs had long been extinct when Iceland was born.

We begin to circle all of the country on The Ring Road — which takes us right through that damaged access road. A recently paved road had already been built, taking us along still steaming piles of volcano ashes left and right.

We are headed to Vestmannaeyjar Islands — an archipelago off the south coast boasting a large puffin colony. We sleep in converted whiskey barrels in front of a dormant volcano, and head out on a puffin hike along the picturesque coastline. We spot hundreds of those colourful birds with their oversized orange feet. They are so cute that even the adults are tempted to buy the stuffed toy version to take home (Psst: baby puffins are called “pufflings”).

While TLC’s famous song title is a metaphor and advice to not embark on risky journeys, it assumes a different, totally metaphor-free meaning in Iceland: As you drive on the ring road, it almost seems as if the waterfalls are chasing you. There are so many of them, that the rest of the family annoyingly declares themselves “waterfalled-out” when I suggest that we visit yet another spectacular one (I don’t think there’s any other kind in Iceland) on our last day.

Iceland’s beaches are pitch black — and not any less picturesque than their snow-white tropical siblings — except that the ocean here is 100 percent ‘unswimmable.’ The so-called Sneaker Waves come and — you guessed right — sneak up on you, to pull you in… forever.

We continue our journey towards the icier parts of the country. We hike a glacier and watch icy giants float on the turquoise lagoons and onto the iconic Diamond Beach (the icy boulders doubling as diamonds) in the very south of the country — some of those icy “diamonds” take 25 years to make their way from the glacier to the ocean. The ring road is over 1300 kilometers long — but driving never feels like a chore. Every turn reveals a different kind of landscape: moss-covered volcano fields and volcanos, raging rivers and icy lagoons, velvety mountains and white glaciers fly by outside. Scotland, Ireland, Norway and even South Africa come to mind. As well as occasionally Mars or any setting in a sci-fi film!

Over two million visitors come to this fairly tiny country every year — however, once you leave the sights, you wonder where they’ve all headed. The narrow road is mostly empty. Even more so when you leave the ring road, as we did several times to avoid the often annoying masses of tourists (which we of course are a part of): we camped (a wise decision in Iceland) at the foot of glaciers, in stunning bays and…you guessed it, below waterfalls.

We head as far north as 43 kilometers away from the Arctic Circle — ironically, this is also the one day that we are able to wear T-shirts all day.

A visit to a geothermal bath or two should also be on your itinerary — Iceland’s abundant geothermal energy is used to heat luxurious spas as well as most of Iceland’s public swimming pools (the latter also carry a much smaller price tag). While Ice and Fire are plentiful here, trees are not — one of the reasons being the Vikings, who felled every tree they could find to stay warm. Today, it’s that geothermal energy along with hydropower that generates almost all of the country’s electricity.

We visit the largest cave in Europe — a lava tunnel — before heading back to where we started. The wind has picked up, so did the rain and the cold. Our weather app tells us that the 11 degrees would feel like -1. We decide to book a hotel instead — in Grindavik, close to the active volcano we had seen from the bus. As we pass other active volcanoes on our way there I get a message from the hotel: ‘Thank you for booking with us. As you should know Grindavik is on an erupting area and those who stay with us are here at their own risk.’

We freeze as we bring in the luggage  — and watch the erupting volcano in the distance, from the window of our geothermally-heated room.  

wknd@khaleejtimes.com