In January, Iceland has four hours of daylight and an entire sky of stars. We drove empty roads through volcanic landscapes waiting for the aurora to ignite — and when it finally did, standing in a field at midnight, the green curtains overhead, we forgot to breathe.
Iceland in January is a country operating under a different agreement with the sun. By 11am the horizon is beginning to lighten. By 2pm it is already dusk. By 4pm you are driving with headlights on roads that pass through landscapes so alien they seem borrowed from another planet: black lava fields, steaming vents, frozen waterfalls locked mid-cascade.
And at night, if you are lucky, the sky becomes something you cannot describe to anyone who has not seen it.
The aurora borealis is caused by charged solar particles interacting with the Earth's atmosphere. The science is clear. The experience is irrational. When the green light appeared above us — a faint smear at first, dismissed, then undeniable — it moved. Curtains and ribbons of light folding across the sky like a living thing, shifting from green to violet where it thickened, occasionally flaring to white at the edges.
We stood in a field outside Vík, up to our ankles in snow, necks craned, for the better part of an hour. Nobody wanted to get back in the car. When the display faded and the ordinary stars returned, there was a shared silence that I can only describe as grief.
Chasing the lights: Darkness and clear skies are both required. The best months are November through February. The forecast apps (veður.is is the Icelandic Met Office service, used by locals) give cloud cover predictions. Drive away from light pollution — even Reykjavík's modest glow can wash out weaker displays.
Highway 1 circles the entire island, a 1,300km loop that most travellers attempt in summer. In winter, it becomes a more committed undertaking: the southern stretch is manageable; the north and east can close without warning. Rental companies in Reykjavík will tell you which sections are open and, more importantly, which to avoid.
The compensations are significant. The waterfalls that are merely dramatic in summer become architecture in winter: Seljalandsfoss, which you can walk behind, surrounded by walls of ice; Skógafoss, at the base of which ice forms bizarre architectural formations. The black sand beach at Reynisfjara has the North Atlantic all to itself in January — no crowds, just the volcanic sand, the basalt columns, and waves that arrive in sets that are genuinely dangerous.
Iceland's geothermal energy means that everywhere, including in the wilderness, there are pools of naturally heated water. The Blue Lagoon is famous and worth visiting once (book months ahead). But the experience of the local hot pots — village swimming pools heated by geothermal water, costing a few hundred krónur and populated entirely by locals — is the better one.
Laugardalslaug in Reykjavík, Krauma near the famous Deildartunguhver hot spring (the highest-flow hot spring in Europe), the Geosea baths in Húsavík: each is different, each is a window into the Icelandic relationship with heat and cold and the land that provides both.
Packing note: The cold is real but manageable. Wool base layers (Icelandic lopapeysa sweaters are not a tourist cliché — they are functional), waterproof outer layers, and micro-spikes for ice are the essentials. The wind is the actual enemy.
Leaving Reykjavík on the last morning, the city was lit by a low winter sun turning everything amber and gold. Four hours of this light, then the long dark again. The Icelanders have a word — lystigarðurinn — for the winter's brief daily gift of colour. They do not take it for granted.
Wanderlust