To the west, the sun is setting, low and red. To the east, a heavy orange moon inches above the shattered volcanoes on the horizon. We're driving in north Iceland past a darkening lake, and from now on the landscape is only going to get weirder.
Dalvik, Iceland
If you're a geologist, you'll know all about what happens when a volcano erupts into a glacial flood, about how the lava gets piled up into jagged black pinnacles, crazily unbalanced abstracts and clusters of what look like roofed hamlets and turrets that spin by us as we drive. If you're a geologist you'll also know all about why Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trained for their Apollo moon mission by a similar lake 50 miles to the south of us, about what makes it such an oddly lunar landscape.
But that's nothing. Not when the driver swings the minibus away from the lake and into the rounded, treeless, red hills.
Because this isn't the Moon. This is Mars.
The Earth's crust is at its thinnest around here. Beneath your feet, the tectonic plates of Europe and America are grinding away, as they have done for millennia. The rocks of Iceland try to hold the planet together, though the gap between them widens by up to 2cm a year. This geological friction isn't always good news for safety. But, because it also produces hot, mineral-rich, water to bathe in, it is for health.
On the rounded Mars-like hills near Mount Kafla, you notice occasional vents of steam. Close up, you can hear them roaring as they burst up from the earth. Tentatively, you stick your hand, at first near the steam, then through it. You smell the sulphur. Small ponds nearby bubble with sulphurous mud like a chorus of toads. Near one – hard by a sign warning about how the rocks are being eaten away by sulphuric acid – someone has parked a camper van for the night.
To the south, in the outlaw land near pretend-moonwalk country, is a crater called Hell. Further south-west on the same geological fault line lies Mount Hekla, which erupts every ten years. The Big One, which happened in 1787, is blamed by some historians for wrecking Europe's weather, and hence the harvests, unsettling the rural French economy and setting the stage for the French Revolution. Mount Hekla is where, medieval Icelanders believed, the entrance to Hell lay.
Back in the minibus and ten minutes later you can find a watery heaven. Iceland abounds in geothermally heated pools – at Reykjavik they've even built an artificially sandy beach and heated up a small patch of the ocean to Mediterranean levels. There's probably a book about the Viking discovery of hot ponds – which ones they could comfortably bathe in and which ones scalded them. But the Vikings never bathed at Myvatn.
In terms of clinics, restaurants, treatment areas, and above all visitor numbers – Myvatn can't begin to compete with the Blue Lagoon, Iceland's main geothermal spa. But its silky waters are warmer – as hot as the hottest bath you could comfortably take – with occasional underwater currents even just a couple of degrees hotter still. Yet as I floated there under a by now fully risen moon, the last vestiges of stress drained from my body. If you're going to live in an earthquake zone, there are at least some compensations.
Most foreign visitors to Iceland never get this far north. Because the country, in the days before the Kreppa – Iceland's economic meltdown – was so expensive, they contented themselves with short stays in Reykjavik. As early as the 1980s, Icelandair lured visitors there with adverts of blatant sexism: so beautiful and friendly were the local women, they hinted, that this was the ideal place for a dirty weekend.
Reykjavik is an unpretentious city – imagine a cross between Lerwick and Inverness – that doesn't feel like a capital. It feels as though it has grown organically, without the attentions of a town planner or architects. This can be a good thing (I'm all for having a parliament that looks like a Victorian branch library), even if the city seems to lack focus.
A quick trawl round the national museum, the culture centre and a quite brilliant archaeological exhibition on the site of the city's first Viking building gives you the basics, with less nationalistic bombast than I have ever seen. In fact, I don't think I've ever been in a modest country before. The first true democracy, a country that's never had an army, whose first exports were poets (the writers of the sagas), a country that's produced astonishing numbers of world-class writers, film-makers and musicians … most other countries would bang on endlessly about such things. In Iceland – one of the reasons I love the place – you almost have to work it out for yourself.
The other reason? North Iceland. When you fly over the flattened mountains of the central massif to Akureyri, you're entering a different world – a region at once remote and with a palpable sense of community. Take Dalvik, a small town of 1,500 souls just 30 miles up the coast: its fish festival begins with all the townspeople linking arms and singing songs about togetherness before proceeding to dole out tons of free food. That opening ceremony would feel fake in most places. In Dalvik it doesn't.
I visited Dalvik with a group of British food journalists who were on a gourmet tour and who came away hugely impressed by the quality and freshness of what they were being served. I was too. But we've got good food in Scotland too, and spectacular scenery as well. What we haven't got is a land that looks like Mars, where you can look up at the moon and stars while your cares float away. You can do all of that at Myvatn, and that's all the hot Icelandic night life you'll ever need.
THE FACTS Icelandair offers a service four times a week to Iceland from Glasgow starting from £196 return (see www.icelandair.is), and Air Iceland flights to Akureyri start from around £42 one way (see www.icelandair.co.uk).
UK tour operators with holidays in north Iceland include Discover the World, Regent Holidays and Scantours. In the summer some state boarding schools (see www.keahotels.is/Home) open up as hotels (a double room at one such, Hotel Edda at Akureyri, costs from £65 per night) and double rooms at the minimalist Hotel Plaza, in the centre of Reykjavik, from £58 per night (www.pla-za.is). Elsewhere, expect to pay around £10 for entrance to the Myvatn Nature Baths (www.jardbodin.is/english) and marginally more to the Blue Lagoon.
For a fuller guide to gourmet restaurants, www.icelandgourmetguide.com is an excellent interactive website covering all regions of the country, including recipes, restaurants and menu prices.
This article was first published in The Scotsman on October 31, 2009
