Ask me to name my top 5 travel destinations and Iceland will feature every time. For photographers, or anyone appreciative of nature at its craziest, you’ll be pressed to find many better adventures than embarking on a 7-10 day jaunt along Route 1, which encircles the island.
The landscape is on a mammoth scale – it’s diverse, colourful and owing to its remote geographical isolation, beautifully desolate. Some of my favourite spots in Iceland were at its farthest reaches, either in the extreme, empty east, or while performing a lap of the wild Snæfellsnes peninsula to the west. Weather-wise, it can be pretty grim at times, but even then it’s easy to re-frame as alluringly windswept. For the best light, at least a week is required to guarantee a few sunny spells. Then there’s the Aurora borealis, which is only realistically possible to see on clear nights between October-March.
I’d love to return. For most of my life, I’ve resided within just 800 miles of this wondrous country, yet the images you see are from my one and only visit in 2015.
