Six am start, four hours sleep as per every trip I have ever done in my life. Destination Höfn—the first leg of my long overdue circumnavigation of the country.

The journey is off to an auspicious start. Breakfast at Grái Kötturinn derailed by late winter opening hours, lost for an hour on the cursed roads of Reykjavík. Finally, though, we manage to escape the capital and head for open country.

Not that we can see anything. The highlands before Hveragerdi are in whiteout. Enveloped in a pea-souper, visibility down to nothing. Wrapped in the foggy blanket it’s not panic that threatens but comfort.

Moments before sleep wins out and sends us over the edge of the twisting downside, the mist clears.

Past Hveragerdi and Selfoss is the first of the south coast lowlands. These vast expanses, the first farmland, later of lava fields and wasteland, are awe inspiring in their way. Western movie sense of scale and endless flats, rimmed with the distant promises of mountainous variety.

Awe inspiring and mindnumbing. Long straight harbingers of attention deficit.

But we make it through alive and into the promised land. Winding between mountains, cliffs and sea, the south coast is spectacular. Route 1 treads the thin strip of the country fit for human life, clinging on for dear life to the borders of an interior beyond comprehension. As terrifying as it is beautiful.

Most ominous of all is the great Vatnajökull. Its mere presence, the behemoth icecap, slumbering behind walls of razor rock, dominates the landscape. Glacial tongues intermittently pierce the barrier, bleeding out through the holes. Terrifying, jagged blue surfaces. Only madmen would think to step on her ice.

It is impossible not to be transfixed, hypnotized. Obsession takes hold instantly, my eyes—and the steering wheel—drift.

“What the ...?” exclaims my companion as we round the bend. The glacier has seemingly exploded, out of its cage, onto the road and into the sea. Last time I visited Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon it was almost empty, today it is anything but. Jammed tight with towering bergs of blue ice, the lake is more breathtaking than I could have imagined.

We bray to the seals for an hour until, the instant we turn away, a cataclysmic gunshot fires off, wresting our attenting back to the waters.

A legion of black heads bob back to the surface, a little shocked, a little confused. The great slab of ice that the colony had been bathing on has cracked and fallen into the lake.

We stand stock still, silent and nervous, as the whole colony glides past.

Simon Barker – frigno@gmail.com