Anxiety is now part and parcel of travelling to Iceland – but the payoff is worth it

My aspirations to be a geologist came to a juddering halt years ago during a university field trip to Scotland. I tumbled over a cliff and fractured my skull, duly failing my fieldwork assessment. Yet I’ve retained one particular geological ambition – to see a lava flow eruption. So, when Iceland was confirmed on our travel green list, I moved faster than a pyroclastic flow to witness Mt Fagradalsfjall, currently venting its spleen and promising, quite literally, with magma in excess of 1000oC (1832°F), to be Europe’s hottest ticket this summer.

Yet, I arrived in Iceland with a cautionary air of déjà vu. In June 2020 – wearying of writing roundups about “20 things I learned from walking around my garden” – I visited Iceland as it reopened after Covid-19’s first wave. Unprophetically, on my part, it felt like the beginning of the end of our virus woes. UK infections were falling and almost zero cases existed in Iceland. The only test required was a PCR upon arrival at Keflavik Airport, after which I drove into Reykjavik in my hermitically safe hire car. It was a sunny evening, the bars and restaurants lively, I felt free again. But what a difference a year can make.

This time around, any personal volcanic outpourings were simply relief at having made it to Iceland. The act of travel for the time being is stressful, with so much testing and paperwork. I experienced palpitations of anxiety heading to Heathrow. I’m fully vaccinated against Covid-19 but, in lieu of an international vaccination certificate, would Iceland accept my NHS app as for now it is only admitting Britons who have had both jabs? Likewise, would check-in staff at Heathrow be aware that I didn’t require a negative PCR test to board the flight?

And adding to my seismic concerns, I’d ordered an instant antigen test kit (which meets >97 per cent specificity) to take with me to prepare for my return home. It requires a video conference with some unfortunate observer watching you shove a swab down your larynx to verify the test was taken within 72 hours of returning to the UK. But the kit went Awol in the post, and I had to source another option in Iceland.

The NHS app, however, worked a treat. I arrived in Iceland (which is full-steam ahead with its vaccination programme) and once again received a free PCR test at the airport. My only inconvenience thereafter was quarantining for four hours (the time it took the test to be analysed) at my hotel. This was hardly an ordeal, as the comfortable Northern Lights Inn has a fine view across an irascibly sharp lava field towards Fagradalsfjall.

“Last summer started well for us,” says the hotel’s owner, Frederik Einarsson, sharing the same déjà vu. “But then Iceland’s second Covid-19 wave came, and we brought in quarantine for international arrivals and business died.” His normally strong winter season to view aurora borealis, popular with Britons, disappeared into cosmic ether. “But then Fagradalsfjall erupted.” He smiles. “It was like winning the lottery.

“On March 19 I was watching a dancing show on German television. There’d been many tremors the days before and then it erupted creating an intense glow on the horizon. Almost immediately we began receiving bookings from across the world.”

Fagradalsfjall is four miles from his hotel, and next day I experience one of the profoundest spectacles of my life, wholly justifying the extra complexities heading overseas, as I wasn’t going to see an erupting volcano on a Cornish staycation – even if the nightclubs in Newquay possess some admirable pyrotechnics.

The day commenced in the Reykjanes Peninsula’s empty wilds, where you’re more likely to hear the sonic “drumming” of snipes than human voices. The region is made for social distancing.

Reykjanes is Iceland’s volcanic hotspot where our Eurasian tectonic plate – we do indeed remain geologically attached to the EU – is pulling apart from the North American equivalent at 2cm per year. This fault-line instability has given rise to Pygmalion plains of coal-dark lava sculptures that have acquired downy coats of pale moss and pop-up volcanoes with rufous-hued cones.

At Bruin milli heimsalfa (the Bridge of Continents) the tectonic divide is spanned by a 50ft-long metal footbridge whilst Gunnuhver is a hellish place, a mud-pool hissing with superheated steam billowing like cumulonimbus clouds. Mostly, Reykjanes is a stark lava plain, yet it would be lazy to simply label it a “lunar landscape”. Steam vents and spitting geysers lend the magic of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Midgard in Norse mythology, ravaged by the forces of nature and time. Gandalf would certainly recognise it.

Likewise, he’d appreciate Fagradalsfjall’s sorcery. The eruption is occurring an hour’s drive south-west from Reykjavik. “At first it was chaos. Helicopters flying over and locals barbecuing sausages in the lava flow. Icelanders went slightly crazy,” says Eythor Saemundsson, who I meet hiking to the volcano. “It’s easy to reach and it’s going to be good for Iceland this summer,” he predicts.

Make no mistake, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. A moderately exerting hour-long hike renders the eruption highly accessible and it’s easy to follow streams of Icelanders snaking their way up the mountainside – schoolchildren with colourful lunch boxes, a young couple in flip-flops, an 83-year-old man with a tobacco pipe, who offers me his walking stick.

I couldn’t imagine health-and-safety obsessed Britain permitting such access to an active volcano yet here the Icelandic government has added a car park and levelled out a hiking track.

Signs advising maintaining two-metre social distancing are surely ironic because the track ends on a barren hillside of shattered glacial scree that is scarcely 1,300ft away from Fagradalsfjall’s emerging new cone, which is singed like an overcooked Christmas pudding. “It’s 20 times bigger than when I came a month ago,” hollers Saemundsson, above a primeval growl from within the cone that sounds like a rasping tide dragging pebbles down a beach.

This noise intensifies and proves to be a precursor for eruptions occurring like clockwork, every 10 minutes or so. It heralds a torrent of molten lava breeching a gap in the crater wall, before, with intensifying pressure, the Ploutonion gate to the underworld, a temporary cooling crust, is blown sky high to smithereens by an explosive upwelling of blazing magma rearing in multiple waves. At its crescendo, the magma momentarily suspends mid-air, bubbling lava and ash, frozen in a viscous firestorm.

The heat prickles my skin, the intensity of light is not some colour-chart variations of orange, marmalade or tangerine, but the very hue of geomorphic creation. The exiting lava is forging a new landscape. The molten flow shunting and overriding the brittle rock before it, sparking fires upon collision, sounding like shattering glass being tipped into a skip. Sometimes the flow releases dendritic veins scorching new pathways across the blackened plain, in places forming into beautiful sequential ripples, known in geologic parlance as pahoehoe.

And then with a sonorous boom, the minute-long eruption abates. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, I’m utterly magnetised by this cataclysmic spectacle, and I stay several hours watching this cycle of destruction and renewal.

“The sights and sounds come from another dimension,” says Arnar Olaffson, co-owner of an adventure company, Icelandic Mountain Guides, who takes me glacial hiking next day. “Many tourists are already coming to Iceland to see it. I had a small tour group recently who cried after the experience.”

“Every time we have a crisis in Iceland, a volcano erupts and saves us,” he adds, referring to the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, which followed Iceland’s banking crisis. “Now is a good time to visit Iceland, not just because of the volcano, but there are fewer crowds at the major attractions.”

Indeed, attaching crampons that afternoon, we hike onto Solheimajokull, a glacial tongue emanating from the country’s fourth largest ice-cap. Usually, it’s one of Olaffson’s biggest selling tours, yet there’s just one other group on the chaotic icy outflow, an Eton mess of angular peaks and crevasses, shadowy with sooty ash scatterings, dichromatic like a charcoal etching. “The guides call this Mordor,” says Olaffson, heaping on the Tolkienism. “It’s dark and mysterious.”

Yet throughout this hike, my mind is still with Fagradalsfjall. I can still smell a cindery residue on my jacket from the volcano’s ash fallout. A smell, no doubt, of a successful summer ahead for Icelandic tourism – a green light destination most definitely in the red zone.

Mark Stratton travelled as a guest of the Iceland Tourist Board (visiticeland.com). Read more: Telegraph Travel's guide to the best hotels in Iceland.