Iceland

Iceland was one of those trips where the landscape just keeps hitting you — not once, but over and over, every hour of the drive. We did the Ring Road section through the south coast and I still don't fully believe the things we saw. The black sand beaches, the waterfalls coming straight off mossy cliffs, the glaciers sitting there like they've been patient for ten thousand years. Coming from Kathmandu, where everything feels old and dense and layered, Iceland felt like the earth had just been switched on.

The Blue Lagoon was the first proper stop and it set the tone. That milky blue water surrounded by lava rock, steam rising off it, snow dusting the edges — it looked unreal from the air and felt even stranger to actually sit in. We ended up at the Lava Restaurant that evening and the food matched the setting: small, careful plates, a glass of something cold, and that same blue water glowing through the window behind us.

The thing I keep going back to is the light. Even on grey days the green on those volcanic hills was almost too saturated to be real. A double rainbow appeared over a completely empty road and we just stopped the car in the middle of it. The plane wreck on the black sand south of Vik is one of the strangest things I've seen — just sitting there in the open, slowly rusting, sky going orange behind it. Iceland doesn't try to be dramatic. It just is.