The Complete Iceland Travel Guide
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Jul 14
- 2 min read
Iceland organized itself into three words before I'd even started writing about it: nature, nurture, and nourish. Waterfalls and volcanoes for the first. Geothermal spas and a church built to echo the country's own basalt cliffs for the second. And a food scene that turned out to be one of the most quietly excellent I've encountered anywhere, ending in a meal I still think about years later. This is where I went, organized the same way I experienced it.
Nature
Thingvellir's tectonic rift and the world's oldest parliament, Gullfoss and Strokkur, two of the country's great waterfalls, a glacier shrinking by an Olympic pool's length every year, and a few minutes of Northern Lights after three hours of waiting in the cold.
Nurture
A cliffside spa built around a seven-step ritual, a church forty-one years in the making, and a lagoon heated by lava a mile underground. Iceland turned out to be as good at slowing down as it is at everything else.
Nourish
Lamb raised on wild grass and berries, fish pulled straight from the harbor, bread baked underground in geothermal heat, and a sushi restaurant with origami birds hanging from the ceiling. Everywhere I ate in Iceland turned out to be worth the stop.
One of the finest meals I've had anywhere, and the restaurant most responsible for putting Icelandic cuisine on the world's radar in the first place. It's also a Greatest Hits entry in its own right, for anyone browsing that series instead.
Fire and ice gave this country its name. What actually stayed with me was everything in between: a spa built into a cliff, bread baked in volcanic sand, a chef who cures lamb with seaweed because nothing here goes to waste. Iceland earns its nickname. It just turns out there's a great deal more to it than the two words on the label.
Planning Your Trip
Iceland requires a Golden Circle day trip (Thingvellir, Gullfoss, and Strokkur, all reachable in a single loop from Reykjavik) paired with time in the capital itself for the spas, the church, and the restaurants. Book Dill well in advance; reservations here run out faster than the food. Pack for genuine cold even in summer, and don't count on seeing the Northern Lights on a tight schedule. Patience is part of the itinerary, not a footnote to it.
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