An Icelandic cruise that takes in the country's wild and dramatic beauty

Frédéric Lagrange

When we stopped at a pedestrian crossing, Eveline our guide said, ‘Oh look, that’s my friend Edda crossing the road.’ Everyone knows each other on tiny Heimaey in Iceland’s remote Westman Islands. We drive on through spectacular scenery of honeycombed cliffs teaming with multitudes of puffins, fulmars and guillemots, as Eveline recounts how the town’s 5,000 inhabitants had to flee to the mainland in the middle of a winter night in 1973 when the Eldfell volcano above us erupted with such extreme violence that rivers of molten lava consumed the entire settlement. Her conversation is punctuated with less dramatic anecdotes of daily life on Heimaey. She points out the petrol station, which also happens to make the best chips in town, and tells us how every night the local children rescue disoriented puffin chicks or ‘pufflings’ who are attracted by lights and mistakenly fly into town and get lost. 

The Westman Islands were my last port of call on an eight-day circumnavigation of Iceland that began when I boarded Viking Jupiter in Reykjavik. The island’s diminutive capital is a tapestry of colourful painted houses, health food stores, organic juice bars, galleries, street art, live music venues and cool café society. From the bell tower of the modernist Hallgrimskirkja Lutheran cathedral I could see the whole city. 

After a night in port, a tour of Iceland’s most famous tourist trail, the Golden Circle, began with a stroll through the hissing lava fields of bubbling mud at Hellisheioi, where cold swirling morning mists created a surreal atmosphere. At our next stop, Haukadalur, the Strokkur geyser erupted with balletic bursts of boiling water high into a cloudless blue sky. In the Almannagjá fault rift valley of Thingvellir Park, I stood in summer sunshine with one foot on the American continental plate and the other on the Eurasian before trekking down to watch the mighty Gullfoss ‘Golden Falls’ plunging like thunder into the Hvítá Canyon. By the time Viking Jupiter set sail that evening through a thick autumnal fog, I had already experienced Iceland’s ability to deliver four seasons in one day. 

We sailed into Ísafjördur on Iceland’s Westfjords peninsular the next morning. Here I joined a Zodiac whale-watching trip to Djupfjord with a salty sea dog called Sigurour and enjoyed the sight of a pod of humpback whales we found around Vigur Island thrusting their giant tails skyward before plunging into the depths.