Iceland

I landed at Keflavik International Airport in early October, an hour before midnight, in the middle of a horizontal rain that the airport's signage described, without irony, as "typical conditions." Iceland in October: the days are short, the weather is unpredictable, the Northern Lights are possible on any clear night, and the landscape looks like the planet before humanity started smoothing things out. I was on an Icelandair flight from London Heathrow — three hours, perfectly timed to arrive in dramatic fashion.

I hired a campervan from Kuku Campers in Reykjavik for the first two weeks. A converted VW Transporter with a bed, a cooker, a heater (crucial), and a hook for my jacket. This was the right decision. The Ring Road — Route 1, which circumnavigates the entire island, 1,332km — is doable in 7-10 days if you drive hard, but I gave it two weeks and stopped wherever I wanted, which turned out to be almost everywhere.

Reykjavik first: two days. The city is small — population 130,000 — and entirely walkable. Hallgrímskirkja, the great concrete church that looks like a volcanic lava flow frozen mid-eruption, dominated by a statue of Leif Eriksson out front. The Harpa concert hall on the harbour, all green glass facets, catching the grey sky in a thousand angles. The Laugardalslaug geothermal swimming pool — hot pots at 44°C where I sat alongside Reykjavik residents having conversations in Icelandic I couldn't follow, submerged to the neck in thermal water while rain fell on my head. The best hot dog in the world is sold from Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, a cart on the harbour, and I ate two.

Golden Circle day three: Þingvellir National Park, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are visibly pulling apart (I walked between them in a rift valley, technically between two continents), the Geysir geothermal area where Strokkur erupts every five minutes to 30 metres without fail, and Gullfoss waterfall where the Hvítá river thunders into a two-stage canyon in a permanent rainbow mist. Then south to Skógar, where I parked the van at the foot of Skógafoss waterfall and climbed the 527 steps to the top and was immediately soaked by the spray and entirely happy about it.

The South Coast took three days. Seljalandsfoss, which you can walk behind — the path curves around behind the curtain of water, you get completely drenched, it is extraordinary. The black sand beach at Reynisfjara with its basalt column formations (Reynisdrangar, the offshore stacks) and waves that have killed people because they arrive fast and without warning — I kept the regulation 30 metres back. Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon in the east: icebergs calved from the Vatnajökull glacier floating in a lake before drifting through a narrow channel to the sea, blue and white and ancient, photographed by every camera in Iceland simultaneously. I camped at the lagoon overnight and woke at 2am to complete silence and stepped outside and the Northern Lights were doing their thing across the entire sky.

The Northern Lights. I need to write this properly. Green curtains of light moving across the sky in waves, tinged with pink at the edges, the Milky Way behind them, no sound at all except my own breathing. I stood in a field at Jökulsárlón at 2am in a down jacket and watched them for 90 minutes and wept twice and took three hundred photographs none of which capture it. The camera cannot do it. The eye barely does. Go.

Week three I based myself back in Reykjavik and day-tripped. The Blue Lagoon, yes, the famous one, which is expensive and crowded and genuinely magnificent — the milky blue silica water at 39°C, the steam, the face masks, the swim-up bar. The Snæfellsnes Peninsula to the west, which Jules Verne used as the entrance to the earth's interior in Journey to the Centre of the Earth — a glacier-capped volcano at the tip, seal colonies on the beach at Ytri Tunga, tiny fishing villages smelling of salt cod. An evening whale watching boat from Reykjavik harbour — humpbacks feeding close in, a minke whale passing directly under the bow, my whole body shaking with cold and excitement.

I flew home from Keflavik on an Icelandair evening flight, ate skyr and an Icelandic lamb hotdog at the airport, and slept the whole way back. Iceland will rearrange your sense of what the natural world can do.