Just a few months ago I took a short holiday to Iceland. As I stood and took this photo below, I had no idea that in just three weeks, the spot I stood upon would be covered in fresh molten rock. On the 20th November 2024, a volcano began to erupt in the South West of Iceland, spewing its lava across the land for 18 days. It prompted evacuations of the region and threatening some of the country’s most popular tourist attractions.
The unpredictability, matched with the might of nature is just one of the really cool and interesting things about Iceland. When I got home from my visit to Iceland, I was delighted to be asked by the lovely Tina of TravelMeAnywhere to write a little piece about my trip for her one-day award-winning blog. Everyone asks “Iceland- what made you want to go there?”.
Where else can you snorkel between two intercontinental plates in two-degree water? (Spoiler: it’s amazing but cold and crystal clear!).
Where else can you stand behind the most spectacular waterfalls and look out at entirely unspoiled countryside?
Where can you drive through rain, sleet, snow, and sunshine, all in the space of two hours? Ok, maybe England. But in England, you can’t walk among geysers as they fire water canons 30 feet into the air.
Iceland really is a place unlike anywhere else. As a land where fire and ice exist alongside each other, it’s easy to see why it’s so popular among students, academics, scientists and tourists alike.
It was a short flight, and not long after we landed, we made our first exciting discovery. A film set just meters from the hotel. Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris were filming a new Netflix series about the signing of the 1987 INF Treaty. We watched in interest as the cars, the actors and the lighting technicians worked in 0-degree temperatures.
On the first night, our Northern Lights Tour was cancelled due to low cloud. Apparently, not uncommon. It seems, seeing the Northern Lights, even when they are extremely active, isn’t as easy as you might think. They move and change constantly, so organised tours, which are your best way to see them, tend to run into the wee hours. Sceptical that we’d have another chance to see them, we took advantage of an early night.
The next morning, we grabbed our backpacks, thermals and coats and headed to The Blue Lagoon. Quite honestly, I could write a whole piece on that alone. Leaving the capital, we headed South. We drove through countryside that quickly gave way to lava fields from the 2023 eruption at the Sundhnúksgígar crater chain. At one point, the lava, now rock, had clearly swept across the road. The Icelanders, in typical Icelandic fashion simply built a new road at a right angle to the original road, bypassing the new lava field, to their geothermal-fed spa resort. The Blue Lagoon Spa itself was magical – my favourite part being the little-known quiet area at the very back of the resort – not to say that the rest is particularly busy or noisy – it wasn’t. But in the quiet area, you could hear a pin drop, and watch the sun come out as the steam evaporated off the pools into the ice-cold air above.
Another highlight for me was Geysir – a park of sorts with maybe 30-50 geysers that would shoot boiling water into the air, some up to 30 feet high. Others were simply pools that gurgled away, as the planet belched its acrid gasses.
While there, we were told that just 5 days earlier, 10 geysers had all gone up at the same time – unheard of – and an event that prompted much speculation, with scientists from around the world descending on the area. Of course, just weeks later, that area of Iceland saw its most recent volcanic eruption – one which threatened the existence of the Blue Lagoon altogether. Disaster only avoided by diggers working through the night to extend the manmade barriers and redirect lava away from, what is arguably, the country’s most popular tourist resort.
Travelling around Iceland was super easy and convenient. Many people choose to drive themselves, but with adverse weather conditions and unknown roads, we chose to book tours on Tripadvisor and Viator. By booking online before we travelled, we paid about half of the price we were quoted for identical tours by leading travel companies. We were also able to get small minibuses that only took around 15 people at a time, instead of large coaches offered by the big travel companies that would take around 30-40 people to a site at any one time.
The buses picked us up from outside of Foss Hotel in the business district of Reykjavik, where we were staying and took us to that day’s planned destination. We did the Golden Circle Tour, the South Coast Tour, and the Northern Lights Tour. This enabled us to see all the main sites of Iceland. We saw the Black Sand beach with its ‘snatcher’ waves that sneak up on you unsuspectingly – not the sort of wave you want to be caught out by!
Iceland is famous for its waterfalls so visiting a few of the 10,000 they have, was a must. We visited Skogafoss, Gullfoss and Seljalandsfoss and Dettifoss, we swam at the Secret Lagoon and saw a glacier up close. Some tours offer glacier walking compete with crampons and hard hats but, with all our adventuring, we found ourselves running out of time.
We did, you’ll be pleased to hear, catch a glimpse of the elusive Northern Lights. And it wasn’t like recent sightings here in the UK. The greens swept and swirled in bands across the inky sky and danced for us among the stars. They whirled and flowed and twisted, for probably about 45 minutes – enough time for our tour guide to get photos of us with Lady Aurora Borealis herself, and to try and capture our own amateur photographs.
Every day on our visit to Iceland was an adventure. Something new and exciting. Full of myths and legends about trolls and vikings, a land where fire meets ice and evidence of the power of nature is never out of sight. It was invigorating and spectacular and fascinating, all at the same time, and a trip that really is unforgettable.
