Akureyri

Akureyri stands at the head of Iceland's longest fjord, a town of twenty thousand backed by steep, flat-topped mountains. It is the capital of the north in the way a harbour town is a capital: coloured tin houses, a working quay, and Akureyri Church at the top of a stone stair. Its traffic lights turn red in the shape of a heart, a habit picked up after the country's financial crash and never dropped. Akureyri Botanical Garden grows plants from all over the world just below the Arctic Circle. Beyond the town the scale changes, at Goðafoss, where a chieftain is said to have thrown his pagan idols into the river in the year 1000, and at Dettifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Europe. Around Mývatn the ground steams, through the lava towers of Dimmuborgir and the milky pools of Mývatn Nature Baths. Boats leave Húsavík to find whales in the bay.