Fortune smiled upon us (mostly) and allowed us to hit all the sites we had planned in this far North journey (and with one magnificent aurora night to boot).
I thought it would be appropriate to go back to a more ice-themed photo for Christmas — from the trip Nick and I took to Iceland, years back in December, when we had the good fortune to capture something of that frozen land in its purest light. We arrived in Reykjavík day after Christmas, the city hushed beneath a skin of ice, the air sharp enough to ring. You don’t walk there so much as slide — every step a quiet negotiation with the frozen pavements, every breath visible. The light barely rose, hovering low and spectral, as if the day itself were holding its breath. For this Christmas, I’ve gathered eight of those moments — images that still hold the chill, the light, and the wonder of that remarkable journey
Soul Seeking
Inside Hallgrímskirkja, silence feels deliberate, almost architectural. The church, named after the Icelandic poet and clergyman Hallgrímur Pétursson, was designed by Guðjón Samúelsson and took over four decades to complete, from 1945 to 1986. Its exterior, with its stepped concrete façade, was inspired by Iceland’s own basalt lava flows — columns of cooled rock translated into human scale. Inside, however, the effect changes. The arches rise like frozen waves, repeating until they seem less structural than eternal, as though they are carrying the eye upward into a space without end.
Nick and I stood beneath the vaulted ceiling on a cold December afternoon, our breath still tinged with outside air. Light poured through the tall windows, softened by grey winter skies. It washed the nave in a palette of grey shades, subdued and contemplative, until it reached the altar, where a warmth of gold appeared in the polished pipes of the organ. The contrast was striking: austerity against brilliance, stone against music.
The organ itself, with over 5,000 pipes, dominates the interior. When played, it fills the church not just with sound but with vibration, echoing up through arches and down into the bones. I imagined worshippers in past decades, and travellers like us now, all hearing the same resonance — a reminder that human time is brief, yet certain expressions endure.
Hallgrímskirkja is more than a landmark of Reykjavík. It is a lesson in perspective. To enter is to be reminded of scale: our lives set against the span of stone, sky, and faith. The photograph Soul Seeking captures this duality. In its grey tones and touches of gold lies both solemnity and aspiration, the sense that to stand here is to brush, briefly, against eternity.
A Brief History of Time
Standing in the canyon beneath walls of ice and rock, I felt the weight of centuries pressing down. The glaciers of Iceland are not simply frozen rivers — they are time made visible, layer upon layer of compacted snow that fell long before I was born and will likely outlast me. In the dark silence of winter, their presence is absolute. Each fracture line and smooth curve tells of advancing and retreating ages, of warmth and cold playing out across millennia.
Nick’s flashlight cut a pool of brightness onto the snow, but beyond its circle the night opened into eternity. The colours shifted with the eye: Midnight above, heavy with stars; Viridian where moss clung to stone faces hardened by frost; Peacock and Cerulean as the ice caught fragments of starlight; the pale Saltwater wash of frozen rivers beneath our feet; and faint edges of Mint along icicles crusted to the canyon walls. It was a palette born of extremes, painted not by human hand but by weather, pressure, and time.
You don’t walk in Iceland — you slide, you breathe frost, and you learn how silence can ring.
Between calm and storm, ice and fire, Iceland revealed its endurance — and the beauty that only cold can shape.
In the frozen land, warmth was not a season but a moment — a breath shared, a spark against the wind.
To stand here was to feel small, almost impossibly so. The glaciers had carved these valleys, scoured these cliffs, and reshaped the island again and again. And yet, against this vastness, people endured. Farmers still kept sheep on the lowlands. Fishermen still launched boats into unforgiving seas. And here we were, two travellers with a torch and borrowed courage, looking up at the northern sky as though it might offer answers.
The photograph titled A Brief History of Time captures not only the geology of Iceland but also the loneliness of survival, the resilience of life balanced on the edge of ice. In the stillness, it was easy to believe that this was the beginning of the world, and that somehow, humans had managed to hold on.
Sculpted
The ice cave was less a room than a cathedral of time, its ceiling curved and arched in ways that no hand could ever design. Wind, sun, and the endless churn of freeze and thaw had sculpted this chamber over hundreds of years. What had begun as runoff water working its way through the glacier had been pressed, polished, and transformed into walls smooth as glass. Every surface we touched was temporary; the same stream that carved the arch would, in another season, collapse it. For now, though, the ice held.
Colours lived in the walls like layers of history. Where the ice thickened, the shade turned to Oxford blue, heavy and solemn, as if night itself had been sealed inside. Nearer the surface, light teased out brighter tones, shifting from deep marine to clear sky, so that the ceiling seemed painted in gradations of blue. Pools gathered at the cave’s base, not reflective illusions but true water resting in pockets, their stillness adding another layer of depth to the space. Standing there, it felt as though we were inside the memory of a river, a place that kept its own time far slower than ours.
Nick and I trailed behind the group, not wanting to leave too quickly. Even the silence seemed sculpted here, thick and soft, muffling our footsteps. It was hard to imagine that just outside, the wind could rage across the glacier at seventy kilometres an hour, threatening to erase our path. Inside, under the carved vault of ice, the world was reduced to colour, texture, and a cold so pure it became almost beautiful.
Harsh
The Highlands looked nothing like the postcard image of Iceland, and that was their power. When Nick and I drove inland on a day when the skies stayed low and heavy, we found ourselves in a landscape stripped down to its bones. Snow lay in thin drifts along the ridges, but the ground was mostly black — volcanic rock and ash spread across wide valleys, a frozen desert built not by time’s slow hand but by fire and eruption.
The wind was sharper here than near the coast, carrying with it fine grit that scratched across our jackets and stung our faces. It felt raw, unforgiving, the kind of terrain that reminded you how fragile comfort really was. Yet there was a strange beauty in the severity. The rocks, jagged and scattered, bore the memory of eruptions that had reshaped the island again and again. Against the pale sky, their edges stood stark, as though the land had only just cooled. In some places, the snow softened them, laying a white cloth over black stone, but more often the contrast was absolute — ash on one side, ice on the other, like two elements locked in stalemate.
We stopped the car and stepped out, silence swallowing us as soon as the doors shut. No birds, no trees, only the hiss of wind across lava fields. For a moment, it felt like walking on another planet, one where life had not yet claimed its place. That harshness was part of the wonder, a reminder that Iceland was still forming, still alive beneath the crust. Back in Reykjavík for New Year’s Eve, the bonfires would bring people together, but here, in the Highlands, the land itself was fire remembered and ash enduring.
Icelandic Beauteousness
We first met the Icelandic horses on a roadside in the south, a day when the snow had lifted just enough to reveal long stretches of black tarmac cutting across white fields. Nick had pulled the car over because a small group had gathered by the fence, their thick coats ruffled by the wind. These were not tall, imposing animals but sturdy and compact, their manes wild, their eyes curious. They are among the purest breeds in the world, unchanged for centuries, never crossed with outside stock since the first settlers brought them here.
What struck me most was how unbothered they were by the cold. Frost clung to their whiskers, but they stamped the snow and leaned into the gale as though it were nothing more than a game. Their colours seemed part of the landscape itself: chestnut-like volcanic soil, pale cream like ash, deep black like the basalt ridges behind them. When one came close, pressing its muzzle against Nick’s sleeve, it felt like a quiet introduction — as if the land itself had sent an ambassador.
We lingered longer than we meant to, watching them move together in short bursts across the frozen ground. There was a playfulness in their gait, especially in the tölt, that distinctive smooth stride Icelandic horses are known for. It looked as though they were gliding rather than trotting, the motion carrying them easily across terrain that would have slowed any other animal. For a moment, the road trip itself paused. The horses, gathered there in the snow at the turn of the year, reminded us that beauty in Iceland was not always vast or remote. Sometimes it was right by the roadside, warm breath rising against the cold air, steady and timeless.
The Ritual
On the road through the Golden Circle, Nick and I joined the steady stream of cars pulling into the geothermal field at Haukadalur. Snow lay in patches over the ground, but the earth here was restless, warm beneath the surface, hissing and steaming through vents. We had come to see Strokkur, the geyser that erupts like clockwork every five to ten minutes, shooting a column of boiling water and vapour into the air. Its larger neighbour, Geysir, gave its name to all the others but now sleeps, stirring only rarely. Strokkur, by contrast, is alive and tireless, drawing people in like moths to a flame.
We stood with dozens of others around the roped-off circle, boots crunching in snow, the cold wind tugging at jackets. Everyone seemed prepared: cameras, phones, tripods balanced precariously on ice. The moment before each eruption was almost comic in its suspense. The pool began to quiver, a dome of water swelling like a bubble of glass. People gasped, lenses rose in unison, and then the geyser broke free — a surge of scalding blue and white water launched skyward, turning instantly to vapour against the winter air. Shutters clicked, voices rose, and then silence fell again as the column dissipated.
Yet as we watched, we realised that the spectacle was not only Strokkur itself but the crowd around it, repeating the ritual over and over. Watch, gasp, photograph, share. Each burst was not just a geological event but a performance of nature turned into digital memory, destined for feeds and stories across the world. Nick and I laughed, falling into the rhythm ourselves, raising cameras, cheering at the steam. In Iceland, even boiling water becomes part of the frozen land’s theatre, where ancient forces erupt on schedule, and travellers mark their attendance with a glowing screen.
Silfra Fissure: America versus Europe
Of all the places we visited over New Year, nothing felt more like leaving the ordinary world than slipping into the water at Silfra. Between the plates of North America and Europe, the earth has pulled apart just enough to create a passage filled with meltwater filtered through volcanic rock for decades until it emerges, pure and cold, into this rift. Our guide told us that this was some of the clearest water on the planet, visibility stretching more than a hundred meters, as though distance itself had been polished away.
The first sensation was shock. Even with the drysuit, the glacial water pressed cold against the face, forcing a gasp before the rhythm of breathing settled. Nick and I floated forward, carried by the slow current, the walls of stone on either side like continents leaning over us. The colours deepened the further we let ourselves drift down. At depth, the fissure was midnight, a blue so heavy it seemed to swallow sound. As we moved upward, light fractured through the surface, and the palette changed. Capri shimmered where sunlight cut across stone, peacock green and cerulean bled into one another in ribbons, and at the shallows, the water was so clear it turned nearly invisible, leaving only the pale moss on nutmeg-colored rocks below.
The swim through Silfra felt like passing along a painted seam, stitched in colour between two worlds. Other divers hung in the water ahead, their bubbles rising in silver chains, their fins breaking the stillness. Above, tourists leaned over the wooden platforms with cameras, but here in the rift, it was silent, just the glide of bodies through water so pure it felt unreal. Iceland is full of thresholds, but this was the only one where you could drift from America to Europe in a single breath.
Am I Viking
On New Year’s Eve in Reykjavík, fire returned to the frozen land. We followed the flow of people through neighbourhoods until we reached the open ground where a tower of wood had already been lit. The flames rose high, taller than the houses behind, sparks drifting upward into the black December sky. Around us, families pressed close, children balanced on shoulders, friends passed thermoses back and forth. Nick and I stood at the edge for a while, feeling the heat on our faces while snow lay hard underfoot.
These bonfires are not accidents of celebration but tradition, rooted in an older sense of community. Centuries ago, when winters were long and isolating, fire meant survival, and gathering around it meant belonging. Tonight, in the heart of Reykjavík, that echo of Viking culture was unmistakable. People circled the blaze not as tourists but as participants, the ritual as essential as countdowns or champagne in other cities. The Icelanders laughed, sang, waved sparklers, their voices lifting against the crack of burning wood.
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What struck me most was the contrast: the cold pressing in from all sides, the snow crunching beneath boots, and at the centre, this living pillar of heat. It felt both modern and ancient. The fire was photographed, filmed, shared online within seconds, yet the act itself — gathering around flames at the turning of the year — could have happened a thousand years ago. Standing beside Nick, I wondered, “Am I Viking?” It wasn’t about swords or sagas but about the simple strength of being together, facing the dark winter night with fire and voices raised. When the countdown to midnight came, the city already glowed as if the past and present had joined hands.
When I think back to that week between Christmas and New Year, the frozen land returns in fragments of sound and light. The wind across the glacier, the sting of Silfra water, the grey vaults of Hallgrímskirkja — all cold, still, and immense. Yet I also remember the glow of bonfires on Reykjavík streets, sparks carried upward while locals and visitors stood close in their coats, the warmth of laughter carrying further than the flames. To travel to Iceland at this time of year is to live inside both silence and celebration, the storm and the calm, the dark and the fire. And whenever those days come back to mind — not only at Christmas but at any turn of memory — I return to that frozen land and know that one day, I will go back.
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