It was raining when I headed out of town, driving a silly little white rutabaga of a car that looked as if one good squall would knock it off a mountain. Since this was Iceland, the chances of that seemed excellent. I'd spent several days in Reykjavik, but having picked up my rental vehicle, I planned to drive around the south coast of the island. Naturally, I turned northeast.
Icelandic friends had warned me about the island's climate, in which they take a sort of amused, contrarian pride. They prepared me for the rain, snow, high winds and unpredictable outbreaks of sun — all of which sometimes scudded by in an afternoon. But I hadn't quite expected the beauty of the place. The landscape of the largely treeless volcanic island is thrilling; the persistence of its small towns and wildflowers deeply touching. It's easy to drive around Iceland, and hard to forget it once you're back.
My ultimate destination was a movie shoot near the town of Vik, where Icelandic-Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson was filming his epic Beowulf and Grendel. But I wanted to get an idea of Iceland first, and headed off in the wrong direction so I could start my trip at popular Thingvellir, site of one of the world's first parliaments, established in 930. On the way, I rounded corners to pass veils of geothermal steam rising straight out of hillsides, and sheep, meadows as green as Ireland, and sheep, natural black volcanic detritus thrown aside like broken asphalt, and even more sodden, obdurate-looking sheep.
The Thingvellir plain was empty as I parked, and nearly liquid. The rain kept falling, thick fog boiled over the hills, and the crumbled black basalt seemed to foam with mint-green moss. Jagged formations marked the edges of the rift between the European and North American tectonic plates; the two continents grumbled against each other underfoot. The site seemed so far from modernity that the Vikings who first settled Iceland in the ninth century might have been hiding in the next crick of land. Not a pleasant thought. They were tough raiders whose sanguinary exploits are detailed in Iceland's famous sagas.
But given the frequent eruptions of its 200 active volcanoes, a surprising amount of Iceland is so new that the ground beneath your feet postdates settlement. That being said, the country's long history of tourism means that William Morris, a founder of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of English artists, famous for their use of medieval motifs, once fished for his dinner in the Oxara River still winding across the Thingvellir plain.
When the rain hit harder, I hunched back to my car and took off for Iceland's famous geysers, turning onto a potholed shortcut where I felt absurdly out of context in my little white car. Most Icelanders live in a circle of settlement around the coast. Not far beyond my shortcut was the country's uninhabited interior, a moonscape of mineral-coloured mountains and glacial rivers scratched by only a few seasonal roads. Tourists get stranded in the interior every year because they're unprepared for the off-road driving. Some die, like the Brazilian tourist whose body was found on a glacier in May, a month after he went missing. Some simply disappear.
But my mild shortcut soon brought me and the car's underpinnings safely back onto the highway near a red-mud hillside. There, a plume of white-hot water burst from the ground and subsided. This was Strokkur, a geyser that erupts four or five times an hour in a geothermically active area speckled with steaming creeks and turquoise mineral pools. The nearby Geysir, a geyser that gave its name to the phenomenon, hasn't erupted since the 1960s, but now whirls inside a carbuncle of hardened mineral salts.
