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Icelandic Sagas and the North Atlantic: Reading the Settlement Landscape

Icelandic Sagas and the North Atlantic: Reading the Settlement Landscape The settlement story the sagas record reaches beyond Iceland’s own coast: a Greenland fjord, settled from Iceland around 985. Stand in the Almannagjá rift at Þingvellir and the ground itself is a kind of text: the seam where two tectonic plates pull apart, and the […]

Vatnsnes Seals and Hvitserkur: Wildlife on Iceland’s Northern Coast

North of Hrútafjörður, the Vatnsnes Peninsula reaches into the sea like an afterthought — a low, treeless finger of basalt and grazing land that most drivers on Iceland’s Ring Road never see, because the Ring Road itself skirts well to the south. It rewards the detour. Grey and harbour seals haul out along its shingle […]

Látrabjarg Puffins: Bird Cliffs and Seabird Life on Iceland’s West Coast

Látrabjarg Puffins: Bird Cliffs and Seabird Life on Iceland’s West Coast Látrabjarg’s cliffline runs for kilometres along Iceland’s westernmost coast, with puffins nesting along the grassy edge. At the westernmost tip of Europe, a wall of basalt drops more than 400 metres into the North Atlantic, and for a few weeks each summer that wall […]

Húsavík Whale Watching: Marine Life and North Iceland’s Coastal Culture

Skjálfandi Bay opens out from the fishing town of Húsavík like a wide, sheltered amphitheatre, and on a calm North Iceland morning it can feel like the whole ocean is holding its breath. This is the water Icelanders themselves call the whale-watching capital of the country, a title earned over three decades of near-daily sightings […]

Nijo Castle: Architecture, Ceremony and Tokugawa Rule in Kyoto

Nijo Castle’s low, elegant palace sits behind a moat and gardens rather than stone ramparts — a fortress built to stage authority, not repel one. Nijo Castle does not look, at first glance, like a fortress built to intimidate. There are no towering stone keeps, no dramatic ramparts — just a low, elegant timber palace […]

Bashō’s Tokyo: Fukagawa, Asakusa and the Start of the Narrow Road

Fukagawa’s quiet canal-side streets still open onto the skyline of the modern city just across the river. Long before Matsuo Bashō became the wandering poet of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he was a Tokyo local — living not in some romantic borrowed lodging but in a modest, banana-tree-shaded cottage in the working […]

Ísafjörður’s Fishing Heritage: How the Westfjords Shaped Icelandic Life

Ísafjörður’s Fishing Heritage: How the Westfjords Shaped Icelandic Life The road north from Látrabjarg climbs, drops and climbs again through a landscape of fjords carved by ice, before it finally reaches Ísafjörður — a town of some 4,000 people, built on a narrow spit of flat land between the mountains and the sea. It is […]

Iceland Small Group Tours for Mature Travellers

Iceland Small Group Tours for Mature Travellers Iceland rewards travellers who take their time with it. The volcanic landscapes, fishing villages and saga-era history strung around this small island are best absorbed at a walking pace, with someone on hand to explain what you are looking at — not from behind the wheel of a […]

Snæfellsnes and Jules Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth in Iceland

Snæfellsnes and Jules Verne: Journey to the Centre of the Earth in Iceland Jules Verne never set foot in Iceland, yet he chose one exact spot on it — the ice-capped crater of Snæfellsjökull — as the entrance to the centre of the earth. On the fourth day of Odyssey’s small group tour, travellers drive […]

How Iceland Uses Geothermal Energy: From Hot Springs to Greenhouses

How Iceland Uses Geothermal Energy: From Hot Springs to Greenhouses Geothermal heat shapes daily life across Iceland, from home heating to greenhouses and hot spring bathing. Iceland sits directly on the boundary where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart, and that restlessness has quietly reshaped daily life on the island […]

Iceland’s Black Sand Beaches: Volcanoes, Glaciers and the South Coast

South of Iceland’s interior icecaps, the coastline turns black. Rivers braid across a volcanic outwash plain, glaciers calve into the same sands that swallow a footprint within minutes of a receding wave, and a village barely large enough to hold a church looks out over some of the most recognisable cliffs in the North Atlantic. […]

Iceland’s Westfjords: A Route Through Fjords, Cliffs and Fishing Communities

A fjord road threads beneath dark basalt headlands past one of the Westfjords’ small, isolated fishing settlements. Most of Iceland’s Ring Road runs through a landscape still being made: young lava fields, steaming vents, glaciers grinding fresh gravel into outwash plains. The Westfjords are older. This is Iceland’s oldest exposed rock, cut by ice into […]

Iceland Ring Road Itinerary for Mature Travellers: A 17-Day Circumnavigation

Iceland Ring Road Itinerary for Mature Travellers: A 17-Day Circumnavigation Landmannalaugar’s rhyolite mountains and obsidian lava fields, the highland crossing near the end of this 17-day circumnavigation. Iceland does not reward a single detour so much as a full circuit of it. The Ring Road — Route 1, the two-lane highway that traces the coastline […]

Lake Mývatn: Volcanoes, Craters, Birds and the Making of North Iceland

Lake Mývatn: Volcanoes, Craters, Birds and the Making of North Iceland Few places on the tour compress so much of Iceland’s volcanic story into a single afternoon as the basin around Lake Mývatn. Within a few kilometres you can stand on a lava field that was still erupting within living memory, walk between grass-topped pseudo-craters […]

Icelandic Food: Fish, Lamb, Rye Bread and Geothermal Greenhouses

Icelandic Food: Fish, Lamb, Rye Bread and Geothermal Greenhouses A working farm on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, where curing sheds and pasture meet the Atlantic coastline. Iceland has never been an easy place to grow food. Its farmers work a short summer against volcanic soil, salt spray and near-constant wind, and for a thousand years its […]

Snorri Sturluson and Reykholt: Sagas, History and Icelandic Independence

Snorri Sturluson and Reykholt: Sagas, History and Icelandic Independence Reykholt’s church stands at the centre of the valley settlement that was once the estate of Snorri Sturluson. West of Reykjavík, where Route 50 leaves the Ring Road and climbs into the Borgarfjörður valley, sits a settlement small enough to miss in a moment’s inattention: Reykholt. […]

Icelandic Horses: Breeding, Gaits and Rural Life Across the Island

Icelandic horses grazing in the breeding valleys of Skagafjörður, on Iceland’s north coast. Iceland has exactly one breed of horse, and by law, it will never have a second. Since the Althing outlawed the import of foreign horses in 982, the island’s herds have bred true to a stock some visitors mistake for ponies and […]

Xuanzang Shrine at Sun Moon Lake: Pilgrimage, Scripture and Buddhist Memory

Xuanzang Shrine at Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan: Pilgrimage and Memory Sun Moon Lake, seen from the water, with Xuanzang Temple set into the forested hillside above. On the southern shore of Sun Moon Lake, a white-walled hillside temple holds what devotees believe is a fragment of the skull of history’s most travelled monk. Xuanzang Shrine […]

Taoyuan Lantern Festival: Lights and Lunar New Year in Taiwan

Taoyuan Lantern Festival: Lights and Lunar New Year in Taiwan The Taoyuan Lantern Festival spreads varied lantern displays across an open civic plaza, anchored by a central main lantern. The Taoyuan Lantern Festival closes Lunar New Year the way it opened: with light. On the tenth night of our Taiwan tour, after two weeks of […]

Sun Moon Lake Tea: How Assam Roots Became Taiwan’s Ruby Black Tea

Sun Moon Lake Tea: How Assam Roots Became Taiwan’s Ruby Black Tea Tea terraces above Sun Moon Lake, where Assam-derived bushes have grown since the 1920s. Sun Moon Lake tea did not begin in Taiwan at all. Its bushes trace back to Assam, in northeast India, planted on Taiwanese hillsides under Japanese colonial administration nearly […]

Qingshui Cliff: Marble Cliffs on Taiwan’s Pacific Coast

Qingshui Cliff: Marble Cliffs on Taiwan’s Pacific Coast Qingshui Cliff’s escarpment drops toward the Pacific along Taiwan’s east coast. For twenty-odd kilometres between Su’ao and Hualien, Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range simply refuses to negotiate with the sea. The marble face of Qingshui Cliff drops almost straight down to the Pacific, and the coastal highway threading […]