Iceland: the Golden Circle, the waterfalls and the aurora

Iceland is the only place I've been where the ground itself feels like it's still making up its mind. Steam drifts off bare hillsides for no reason you can see. A river you crossed yesterday is a different colour today. They call it the land of fire and ice, which sounds like a brochure until you're standing between a glacier and a geyser and realise the brochure was, if anything, underselling it.

I came in winter, chasing two things at once: the daylight loop of the Golden Circle and the night-time gamble of the aurora. I based myself in Reykjavik — small, colourful, far more relaxed than a capital this far north has any right to be — and let Route 1, the famous Ring Road, pull me east along the south coast a little more each day.

The Golden Circle, where the planet shows its workings

The Golden Circle is the easy, unmissable triangle out of Reykjavik, and it earns the hype. At Þingvellir — Thingvellir, a UNESCO site and the cradle of Iceland's old parliament — you walk down a rift where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are literally pulling apart; you can stand with a continent on each side. Then Geysir, whose neighbour Strokkur fires a column of boiling water skyward every few minutes, so you stand around with a crowd of strangers all pointing phones at a hole in the earth, waiting, and cheering when it goes. And Gullfoss, a two-tiered waterfall so wide and loud it throws spray over the path and rainbows into the gorge. Three stops, one short loop, and the island has already shown you its tectonics, its plumbing and its temper.

« You don't visit Iceland's landscape so much as catch it mid-sentence. »

Here's the honest connectivity picture, and it's the good kind of surprise. Iceland sits in the EEA but not the EU — same quirk as Norway — and the practical upshot is that the «roam-like-at-home» rule still applies, so a European plan works here exactly as it does in Paris or Madrid. Along Route 1 and around the towns the coverage genuinely impressed me; it's the interior — the highlands and the F-roads — where the bars simply give up. I treated the Ring Road signal as reliable and the highlands as off-grid, and that mental line served me well.

The south coast: waterfalls you walk through, sand the colour of coal

East of the Golden Circle, the south coast strings its greatest hits along a single road. Seljalandsfoss is the one you can walk behind — a full circle around the back of the falling water, soaked and laughing, the world turned silver through the curtain. A few minutes on, Skógafoss drops in one thunderous sheet with a rainbow more or less permanently parked at its foot. Then Reynisfjara, the black-sand beach near Vík, with its basalt columns and the kind of sneaker waves the warning signs are deadly serious about — beautiful, and not to be turned your back on. Keep going and the coast delivers its closing act: Jökulsárlón, a glacier lagoon where icebergs calved off the vast Vatnajökull glacier drift in slow silence, and the Diamond Beach beside it, where they wash up on black sand and glitter like, well, exactly what the name says.

The night the sky finally caught fire

Auroras keep their own diary. Two clear nights I drove out from the lights of town, stared at a dark sky and got nothing but stars and cold feet. The third, parked off the Ring Road with the heater ticking, a pale grey-green smudge appeared low on the horizon — easy to mistake for cloud — and then, slowly, it woke up. A ribbon, a curtain, the whole northern sky breathing green and folding over itself. I'd glanced at the forecast and the cloud cover one last time to pick the spot; after that the phone went in my pocket and stayed there. As for the Blue Lagoon — the famous milky-blue geothermal bath near the airport — I'll be straight with you: the Reykjanes peninsula has had repeated eruptions since 2021, with activity near Grindavík through 2023–2025 that has at times closed the lagoon and nearby roads. It's worth checking the official status before you build a day around it. The rest of the island carries on entirely unbothered.

What I take away

Iceland gave me a circle of impossible things in a handful of days: a continent splitting open, water that falls and water that flies, a beach of black glass and a sky that finally remembered how to glow. It asks only that you stay flexible — let the weather rewrite the plan, respect the moss and the waves, and keep enough signal to know which way the road and the forecast have decided to go. I drove back to Reykjavik with cold hands, a memory card full of green, and the strange certainty that I'd watched the planet at work.

— Hugo, still half-expecting the ground to move.