ICEFIRELAND

Why does someone choose to travel to “improbable” places? To confront the unknown, the strange, the uncanny — to be pushed out of their comfort zone and given the chance to wrestle with the dark fields of Nature’s and Humanity’s history. Wandering across glaciers and volcanic highlands, just like wandering through the desert, becomes an inward vortex, a trembling oscillation between the beautiful and the terrifying; an ecstasy, an exposure to the overwhelming knowledge of the universe’s eternal alternation between the beginning and the end of the world. If you can endure that “openness,” a journey to Iceland is not a visit but a return to what is essential, to all that is “worthy of being.”

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ICELAND, ICEFIRELAND

 

Why does someone choose to travel to “improbable” places? To confront the unknown, the strange, the uncanny — to be pushed out of their comfort zone and given the chance to wrestle with the dark fields of Nature’s and Humanity’s history. Wandering across glaciers and volcanic highlands, just like wandering through the desert, becomes an inward vortex, a trembling oscillation between the beautiful and the terrifying; an ecstasy, an exposure to the overwhelming knowledge of the universe’s eternal alternation between the beginning and the end of the world. If you can endure that “openness,” a journey to Iceland is not a visit but a return to what is essential, to all that is “worthy of being.”

If you cannot, then the trip to Iceland becomes like all others: tourist buses, the mechanical voice of a bored guide, selfie-hunters at crowded viewpoints — if you can even find space — local food in expensive restaurants, check-in, check-out…

To set out on an exploratory journey alone, one needs meticulous study and planning for both the expected and the unforeseen, strong physical and mental endurance, and one obsessive idea. For us, that idea came from a photograph by the renowned Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, which we had the chance to see at Fotografiska in Berlin. She had taken it inside the enormous, domed, blue-tinged ice cave within the Katla crater. The association was instantaneous: a return to the Earth’s archaic womb, with us as proto-organisms of the early zoological cycle.

We arrived in Reykjavík at the end of August 2025. A beautiful city on Iceland’s southwest coast — the northernmost capital in the world! Built by the bay, with a traditional center of brightly painted houses and neoclassical public buildings (the National Theatre, the National Gallery, etc.), and vast urban expansion with highways and modern architecture — like the asymmetrical glass Music Hall HARPA or the cylindrical City Hall — Reykjavík feels like a Scandinavian metropolis, though it has only around 240,000 of the country’s 385,000 inhabitants. We won’t dwell on Reykjavík, though we loved its museums, bookshops, cafés and bars, with almost daily live rock, punk and especially jazz — in the spirit of exceptional Scandinavian jazz. It was a perfect “anteroom” to Iceland, allowing us to organize the details of our journey, which we recorded on our handmade map.

Iceland resembles an egg. Only its coastal rim is inhabited. Along it runs the Ring Road (Route 1), a narrow two-lane paved road that circles the island for about 1,400 km. Easy to drive with a normal car like ours — except for the northeastern arc, which becomes gravel, climbs into the mountains and almost always dissolves into thick fog. Or clouds. We are among the very few travelers who have driven that segment.

Before entering the Ring Road, we “warmed up” with a day trip to the Golden Circle, a loop of about 250 km starting and ending in Reykjavík. We climbed the volcano Kerið, walked its rim and descended into its crater, down to the lake whose still water mirrors the sky. Down there, at the bottom, you stand so close to the heavens — a paradoxical reversal, surrounded by “burnt” rocks through whose cracks tiny wildflowers push through defiantly. This persistence of life — plant and animal — thriving in the harshest conditions, we witnessed everywhere in Iceland.

Next came the mighty Gullfoss waterfall, formed by a colossal river plunging with deafening force into a vast canyon. Even from a kilometer away, wind-carried droplets reached us, wetting and “intimidating” us with their power — our first real sense of Nature’s might, which Icelanders often perceived as haunted.

We then drove to Geysir, where the famous geyser erupts every eight minutes. The ground steams, hot rivulets flow, and two hundred people circle around with cameras raised, waiting. When the water column shoots 20 meters high, it reminds us of the fiery interior of the Earth — of Iceland’s birth itself. This is how the island was made: when the Eurasian and American plates tore apart, releasing gases and lava that solidified upon meeting ice. It should be called Icefireland.

The next day we entered our “main course,” which had eight “dishes.” Driving around 200 km daily, stopping for the night near the points from which we would penetrate the interior. For these incursions we relied on local guides. Massive 4×4 jeeps with huge tires, helmets, waterproof suits, thermals, and strong backs for the constant jolts along rocky roads — and thus we reached Landmannalaugar, Iceland’s volcanic highlands. We were not surprised; we had seen photographs like these from planet Mars. The shock was that we were actually there: a metallic land where nothing grows. We remembered with nostalgia our ascent of Mount Etna, where volcanic soil — still rich in minerals — under a Mediterranean climate becomes one of the most fertile orchards in the world.

The next day: a play of light. We visited the waterfalls Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss, in the southern, milder part of the island. They fall gracefully from mossy cliffs, refract the light and create rainbows that adults chase with cameras and children with their hands. The joy continues all along the southern coastal route, enriched by the countless sheep and horses grazing freely all summer, observing us with their timeless, calm eyes — we, prisoners of time. Night in Vík, with its terrifying sneaker waves and the myth of the petrified ship. The following morning we ascended the glacier Mýrdalsjökull, aiming for Katla’s ice cave. Here we first confronted the glacier’s terrifying beauty — and began to understand Iceland’s anxiety, which should be humanity’s anxiety as well. Katla is one of Iceland’s largest and most active volcanoes. Its eruptions formed mountains later covered by a glacier up to 700 meters thick. The glacier is streaked by winds and darkened by volcanic ash. As the wind shifts the ash, the glacier seems to breathe — a supernatural dragon with underground rivers and caves. We asked to enter the cave photographed by Kawauchi, only to learn, with deep disappointment, that it had melted. The glacier is retreating at the dreadful rate of 100 meters per year. What remained was a narrow tunnel we entered holding ropes. Our fantasy of an archaic womb turned into a descent into Hades — yet unbelievably beautiful. The ice isn’t white; it shimmers in shades of blue, like a frozen sky.

The apotheosis of blue came at the glacier Vatnajökull. We spent two nights at Jökulsárlón. On the first day we entered the glacial lagoon by zodiac. Wearing special survival suits with a harness loop at the waist, we asked about its purpose. “If someone falls into water near 0°C,” they said, “the only chance to avoid cardiac arrest is to be hooked by the loop and pulled out within minutes.” We drifted among colossal blocks of ice, white with blue undertones. Ice absorbs all colors except cyan. Thunderous cracks echoed from giant masses breaking off the glacier and falling 100 meters into the lagoon. Fear and beauty intertwined — and we wanted to absorb it, knowing we might never return, and if we did, it would never be the same. Like flowers, glaciers possess the charm of the ephemeral.

Waves kept the ice from escaping to the ocean that week. They pushed the blocks onto the black-pebble shore where they gleamed in the sun like enormous diamonds — the famous Diamond Beach. That day the icebergs were so huge that people walking among them looked like penguins, playing like children who found treasure.

The next morning we ascended Vatnajökull, the largest of Iceland’s four main glaciers. We walked in single file, stepping in the guide’s footprints because melted ice could open into hidden cavities. In places we held on to ropes. The cold cut our breath. In our small group of ten strangers, solidarity began to form — people making sure no one was left behind, offering a hand. We began to understand Icelandic society: in extreme survival conditions, the instinct of self-preservation becomes collective; the other becomes “neighbor.”

And from hardship, good can emerge. Iceland proves this. The violent rivers and waterfalls enabled hydroelectric power. The boiling earth, as we saw in the sulfur-yellow desert near Lake Mývatn, made geothermal energy cheap. And the boiling earth that gives hot springs everywhere in Iceland — these are blessings for body and mind.

Iceland may be the memory of the world: a living example of how solid land was formed. Scientists study it for that reason. It may also be a model for the world’s end. Human-driven planetary warming is melting the glaciers. It is estimated that in 100 years Iceland’s glaciers will be gone. The catastrophic scenario: the massive influx of freshwater into the Atlantic could disrupt the Gulf Stream, the current that warms Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. These lands could freeze. Even if humans found ways to heat their homes, the higher-order flora and fauna would perish.

For the Ancient Greeks, hybris was the insult of humans toward the gods — and toward the deified Nature. Xerxes committed hybris when he tried to chain the Hellespont with a floating bridge; when the sea destroyed it, he ordered it whipped. His fate, the Ancients believed, was sealed. Let us escape the foolish illusion of total control over Nature, as that barbarian attempted then, and as climate-change deniers attempt now — for Nature is stronger than us. In a head-on collision, Nature will continue without us, easily filling the void we leave behind.