Iceland

If anyone asks me which is the best trip I’ve ever done, I say Iceland without thinking. July 2020, the first trip after lockdown: Francesco Lietti and me, eight days and a white rental Renault Kangoo decorated with mountains and trees. We’d booked only the flight, the car and the first night, as I always do; everything else we decided in the evening, looking at the map.

We left a half-empty Malpensa three and a half hours late. On arrival there was the mandatory COVID test (in my stories I called it “nose violence”; negative) and then off we went. There was hardly anyone around, and honestly that made it even better. But the real reason it’s my favourite trip is something else: the nature up there is spectacular.

Hot water and exploding water

The first proper day was geothermal overload. Boiling mud pots (we were tempted to throw in some spaghetti), the hot river at Reykjadalur where we had “a swim at 14°C”, the Kerið crater with its blue lake at the bottom, Strokkur at Geysir erupting every few minutes. We finished at Seljalandsfoss at 23:38, with the waterfall glowing orange in the midnight sun. In July it never really gets dark, and you end up doing normal things at absurd times.

Lunch was almost always on a folding table by the side of the road, among fields of purple lupins, with pasta cooked on the spot. Italian culture, after all, is this: pasta everywhere.

The south and the glaciers

Then the DC-3 wreck on the black sand plain, the Ring Road running beneath huge rock walls, a stony plain 130 km from the nearest town. Svartifoss with its basalt columns, the Fjallsjökull lagoon full of icebergs, the blocks of ice on the black sand of Diamond Beach. On one beach we lay down barefoot: ocean in front, glacier behind, 11 degrees. All inclusive.

Fjords, the north and a Kangoo stuck in the sand

Breakfast with a view in the Fáskrúðsfjörður fjord, then Dettifoss with a rainbow inside the canyon, and the Mývatn area, with its fumaroles and a fault line cutting across the lava field: tectonic plates on the move, live.

The Kangoo was our home and our pride, and we treated it like an off-roader. It wasn’t one. The first dirt track went perfectly; a few days later I posted that “the off-road Kangoo CAN have some problems”. It had got stuck in the sand. We got it out in the end, and from then on we looked at it with a bit more respect.

The last stretch took us west, to Kirkjufell and its little waterfalls, before heading back. On the flight home I did the maths: 2,825 km in 8 days.

Practical notes

• In July it’s light almost all night: you can see the most famous waterfalls at midnight, with very few people around.
• A small van like the Kangoo is perfectly fine on tarmac and on packed gravel tracks. Not on sand.
• Expect a lot of driving: the full loop of the island came to almost 3,000 km, and every stop was worth it.