Against all odds, Iceland is still absurdly peaceful

There were no gimmicks to Iceland. No tour guides in dress-up. No manufactured experience days leading into gift shops full of trinkets. The raw, restless forces that give ‘The Land of Fire and Ice’ its name simply can’t be staged.

I’d been trekking around the Reykjanes Peninsula all week. Hundreds of feet inside Thríhnúkagígur volcano, I witnessed the hollow, intimidating void of the world’s only accessible magma chamber.

At Gunnuhver, superheated steam billowed from vents and pools of boiling mud spat and hissed.

At Sandvík, I stood at a fissure that marks the divide between the two tectonic plates that stretch and tear the country apart and rode through fields of steaming lava that burst through the cracks.

It’s no surprise that Iceland, more restless than it had been in centuries, was the perfect place for my dopamine-depleted algorithm warped brain of the modern age to keep busy.

I have a concentration problem, wired for distraction and wise to even the most inventive ways I’d tried to trick myself into a false sense of peace and quiet.

And yet, somewhat paradoxically, Iceland offered the kind of stillness someone like me might spend a lifetime searching for.

A balance I’d failed to find at, say, the ‘beachside music festival sound bath yoga’ session I’d shamefully attempted in Albania a month prior.

I was hooked. In the evenings, I shivered out of ice pools and slipped into the hot, steaming waters of geothermically heated baths, surrounded by locals, soaking and unwinding in tradition that dates to settlement.

And in Reykjavík, after drinks at Freyja or dinner at Hjá Jóni, I’d walk along the quiet waterfront back to my hotel, thinking clearly about my schedule for what felt like the first time in years.

Framed by Mount Esja and home to just 140,000 people, it’s easy to find a minute of peace in an otherwise lively city.

It seemed every exciting spectacle Iceland offered was balanced by a relaxing counterpart it couldn’t do without — a rewarding ‘pat on the back’ that a distracted mind like mine so often needs.

Treks toward volcanoes required contemplative walks across vast, snowy landscapes, and ended with hot lamb soup at a cosy basecamp.

The silence of whale watching was broken by loud lunches and drinks with friends, where we’d discuss what we did (or didn’t) see jump out of the ocean, at the same lively harbour that was silent when we set sail in the freezing, early hours.

Harnessing a peaceful, balanced existence out of a largely inhospitable land had been the challenge of Iceland’s first settlers.

Today, over a thousand years later, approximately 85 percent of the country’s energy comes from renewable sources. Even modest luxuries like tap water, filtered through volcanic rock, puts bottled water to shame and showers are instantly scorching.

In recent years, however, Iceland’s latest challenge seemed to be showing the modern tourist that, unlike my expensive, useless mediation apps, the luxurious natural wonders that make a stay in Iceland so peaceful simply wouldn’t exist without the raw, unpredictable forces beneath its surface.

Since 2023, a series of intense earthquakes and eruptions have struck the small fishing town of Grindavík, near the iconic Blue Lagoon.

The Svartsengi volcanic system, awake after nearly 800 years, saw lava breach the town’s defensive barriers, destroying houses and forcing the evacuation of nearly 3,000 residents.

I was there to see for myself — buildings tilted into fissures, others lifted from their foundations.

Yawning fractures split through fields and main roads. Some houses were torn apart, others untouched but all are empty.

I stared at a mound of hardened lava halted just feet from another evacuated home.

And yet just 5km away, on my return to Grindavík, I’d once again be staring in awe at the northern lights in the healing waters of the Blue Lagoon — the pinnacle of Iceland’s natural wonders.

A local fisherman told me it doesn’t concern him, while the Icelandic Met Office, unsurprisingly, spoke with a lot more doubt.

A councillor for Grindavik assured me the town would recover, but they all agreed on one thing: ‘Its out of our control.’

Sure enough though, two years on, excavators have already rebuilt roads by laying tarmac directly over cooling lava, a faster, more efficient solution than digging it all up.

Tourism in the region dipped at the time, but Grindavík has long since been open to the public.

After a morning spent hurtling through lava fields on an ATV, I returned to Papas, a pizzeria at the dock of the town where I enjoyed a hot meal among a quiet crowd of regulars.

Against all odds, the people of Iceland appreciate peace and quiet more than anyone.

And now, for the first time in a long time, so do I.