We planned for our week in Iceland about as thoroughly as we might have prepared for a beach weekend. We knew there would be mountains, and waterfalls, and vaguely that there was a road that went around most of the island. We knew it was notoriously expensive, and that summer weather was milder than winter, and that it would be light almost all the time, and that there were many hot springs.

We chose it for the contrast: what better way to shock our systems into travel than, 12 hours after taking off from Boston, existing inside a miniature European van, driving through cold rain on the way up the western coast of a volcanic island near the Arctic Circle?

Here are some things we learned about Iceland while we were there:

1. Iceland is windy. The winds come sweeping down from the North Pole. They come racing across the glaciers that, miraculously, still make up a huge portion of the southeastern area of the island. They swirl across the tops of the mountains. They cause sand storms, driving rain, fallen tree branches. They sweep the snowy tops of mountains clean and dent car doors and rock vehicles on their foundations. This was a surprise to us, especially the first night: going on 24 hours without sleep, when we discovered the campground we had intended to stay in was in a ‘purple area’ – winds that, as we had been advised, ‘would move the van.’
2. Iceland is never dark in the summer. Not for a moment. The sun, which set after midnight and rose again before three am, dipped shallowly enough under the horizon that it was bright as morning 24 hours a day. In Húsavík, we nursed sunburns sustained on a whale watching boat at midnight. We saw a whale dive, impossibly slowly, down into the northern sea. Backlit by the low warm sun and the jagged vibrant verdant green of mountains that rose seamlessly from the ocean. Their tops were covered in snow; their flanks crossed by waterfalls that poured into the sea. Later that night, after a dinner that would only taste good camping: a kind of makeshift noodle soup, bouillon and the ragged ends of vegetables and almost-cooked eggs, we did dishes at 2 am to the sound of birdsong.
3. Iceland is, for such a miniscule landmass, impossibly diverse. Most of the pictures we see of Iceland are from the southeastern side of the island. They are the sheer green cliffs; the impossibly spectacular waterfalls. We saw those. But we also saw plains of jagged lava beds with grass sprouting from the cracked ground; a black sand beach with icebergs scattered along it like surreal glass; range after range of snow covered mountains with perfectly flat tops; fields of lupines that stretched literally as far as we could see, so we were suspended in an infinite cloud of purple and green; a world of infertile red and yellow earth, punctuated by boiling pits of sulfur; and vast mountains like drip castles, layers of them streaming towards the ground, carved away by unmistakably glacial blue rivers. There, the ground felt like it was moving.

We processed what we were seeing very differently over the course of a week at what seemed like both the end and the center of the world. One day we spent shouting what the fuck over and over again, an involuntary instinctual exclamation of awe, of joy, of disbelief. By the end, we were reduced to sarcasm – of course there is a double rainbow behind us and a waterfall surrounded by lupines in front of us. Yeah, you thought you were just looking at beautiful rolling fields with baby sheep sleeping in the grass hollows, but obviously there is a spectacular canyon with an ice blue river running along the bottom of it. I would go to brush my teeth at night and find myself standing outside, staring, heart pounding: my body is both at the end and the center of the world.

More than anything, Iceland felt active. You could see the rivers carving their way through the mountains; the way the mountains themselves rose up and softened down; the way time grinds fallen boulders into gravel and sand and eventually, dark dirt from which technicolor moss sprouts in waves up the rockslide sides of mountains. Glaciers poured out from between mountaintops; mountains raced towards the sky. The ground was a kind of desperate green: that two-month growing season motivating more, more, faster.

On the last morning, we drove to a town that’s home to a famous hot river – where a hot spring feeds into a cool stream. (The campground attendant advised us to go early, as it gets crowded. We went at six am and were alone for three hours: tell a New Yorker something gets too busy and just watch how seriously they take you.) To get there, you hike an hour into red mountains until you reach an area that steams and bubbles, deep pits that are white and red and brown with chemicals and minerals from the center of the earth. The river itself carves its way down the side of a hill. It is surrounded by wildflowers. It is just fast enough that if you lie in the center of it, you can feel yourself being pulled by the current.

In Iceland, it was tempting to call out that it felt like we were on Mars. It felt like the sun, it felt like Narnia, like the Shire, like heaven.

But it is on the earth, where we are. It is made out of the same things we are. It is pulled, like we are, by unfathomable currents.