Well before we got married, Nigel had been nursing a desire to go to Iceland. He'd just never quite got round to it. Two years into our marriage, having already well and truly infected him with my travel bug, I said: "If you still want to go to Iceland, why don't we just go?"

This is a good travel philosophy. Obviously, you can't go everywhere you want to go, even in normal times, but it's always better to identify a much-desired goal, and work to make it happen, than just to have vague ideas that never come to fruition.

Iceland came back onto my radar recently for two reasons. I used a photo from this trip for the Facebook challenge I got roped into, and that got me thinking about that long-ago experience. And we recently watched an Icelandic TV series, whose stunning scenery seemed very familiar. Time to revisit those memories, I thought.

We weren't massive on the travel research in those days. Well, to be fair on ourselves, we both had full-time jobs, and were about to move to different full-time jobs in a different part of the UK, so time for anything seemed to be in very short supply. But we had researched enough to know that Iceland was going to be completely different from anything we'd experienced in our travels up to then, and given that we had a limited amount of time at our disposal, we opted to join a small group on a tour that involved plenty of walking, an activity we've always liked.

I wasn't writing a diary back then. So I have just my memory and our photographs to go on. But from these a few clear themes emerge.

Iceland was our first exposure to the Nordic countries, and it was a nasty surprise to realize how high the cost of living was. A few months before our arrival, Iceland had unbanned beer. But I remember drinking no alcohol, beer or otherwise. It was just too expensive. Even coffee and cake in Reykjavik made our wallets shudder.

It was also the first time we'd done a group trip, and the reality of ALWAYS being with others took a bit of adjusting to. This was especially the case as the accommodation was often highly communal. Because Iceland has a very short summer tourism season, there is (or was -- I can't speak to the present-day situation) a lot of pressure on holiday lodgings. So we rarely stayed in regular hotels/guesthouses. We bunked down in schools a couple of times. There was at least one youth hostel, where we all occupied a large room (on whose two long "sleeping shelves" we rowed ourselves out side by side). At some of the farmhouse accommodation, two couples might share a room. Snorers were a major pain...    

The other thing that took a bit of adjusting to was the cold. It was August, but it was distinctly chilly. And we were pretty ill equipped at that point. I had old walking boots, a cheap and ineffective cagoule, and a selection of cotton trousers... The next time we embarked on a major walking holiday was 1992, when we first went to New Zealand. We'd learned our lesson by then, and kitted ourselves up properly before we went.

Nevertheless, Iceland was immensely rewarding. Our tough little bus took us on grit roads through awe-inspiring scenery:

















And our feet took us to lots more of Iceland's seemingly inexhaustible supply of beautiful places:

















It was the first time we'd been anywhere with such an interesting geothermal profile.

One of our first destinations was Heimaey, the main island in the Vestmannaeyjar group. In 1963, a huge underground eruption created a new island, Surtsey:



Ten years later, the eruption of Eldfell covered Heimaey with lava and ash.





That was a salutary introduction. But Iceland carried on offering opportunities to view volcanoes, lava flows, geysers, mud pools, fumaroles, basalt columns...

























The reason for all this, of course, is that Iceland sits slap bang on the Mid-Atlantic Rift. Some of it is on the North American tectonic plate; some on the Eurasian plate. At Thingvellir you can see the edges of both plates:







Krafla is another such visibly splitting place, where you can clearly see the different colours of the differently aged lava (we were visiting only five years after the end of the "Krafla fires", a nine-year period of intense geological activity):







Natural hot water was one of the great compensations for the cold. I remember floating in hot-water swimming pools at night, warm and cozy, with the air cold on my face and oceans of crystalline stars above. Or sitting at the confluence of a hot river and a cold one, just moving a little one way or the other whenever I wanted to adjust my temperature.

Alongside all the hot stuff, Iceland -- unsurprisingly, given its name -- also has plenty of ice. There are glaciers; there are snow patches on the mountains even in summer; there is an iceberg lake:















It was a trip that emphasized nature rather than history, but Thingvellir has notable historical as well as geothermal claims to fame. Its name means Assembly Field: "In 930 AD, over thirty ruling chiefs met for the first time to discuss law on the island and to create a commonwealth." I can't really judge the validity of the next observation, but it offers food for thought: "In hindsight, we can see that what these early Icelanders did was create a crude version of a modern-day representative parliament in response to absolute monarchy, about 800 years before such ideas came into play in the USA and France."

(And, of course, we find this "thing", this assembly, in the land of my birth: the Isle of Man has its Tynwald, the world's oldest continuously existing parliament.)

We also visited the Skoga Folk Museum, where you can see the sort of houses -- half-underground, grass-roofed -- that most Icelanders would traditionally have lived in.



I remember our guide taking us to an example of such a house, now abandoned. She'd grown up in one like this, she explained. Recalling her young self -- sheltered by earth and sod, clad in wool, and drinking ewe's milk, she added, "We lived like little sheep." She also told us that many Icelanders didn't like to be reminded of this comparatively recent past.

I don't think we heard the phrase "thetta reddast" while we were there, but it was surely spawned by the tough life that was the lot of Icelanders up until a relatively short time ago. Thetta reddast means "it'll all work out in the end": "The phrase near-perfectly sums up the way Icelanders seem to approach life: with a laid-back, easy-going attitude and a great sense of humour." It's not naive optimism -- it's more a belief in your own resilience and ingenuity, gained over the course of many generations that have not had life easy.

I don't recall the phrase, but I remember demonstrations of it: like the way we recovered (via messages and bus rendezvous) the set of flasks we'd left behind, or the way our driver's small son accompanied us on several stretches of the journey, causing absolutely no trouble (Icelandic children, we were told, often accompany their parents to work for a spell, to make them aware of what work is all about).

I have no photos of the food (this was before the days when travellers habitually photographed their meals), but lunch was taken picnic-style out on the road, and for dinner we alternated between fish and lamb. The quality of both was excellent (one farmhouse fish pie particularly stands out in our memory), and we were also regularly served capsicums, cucumbers, tomatoes, and the like from Iceland's numerous greenhouses.

Our other abiding food memory is the dried fish. While we were up on the coast, our guide bought some for us to try. She broke chunks off, slathered them with butter, and handed them out. I think she'd done this with other groups before, and hadn't received a particularly enthusiastic response, because when she asked if we wanted more, and we all chorused "yes", she was visibly surprised.

OK, I'm done. I'll just leave you with some more photos of this truly magical land: