It had snowed through the night — heavily. The plan was to head towards Hella, but the roads looked brutal and we waited, hoping it would ease. It didn't. If anything, it got worse. So we made the call: go anyway.

What followed was one of the more nerve-wracking drives of the trip. Visibility was almost nothing. You could barely see the car ahead. We followed tail lights, trusted the road was still there beneath the white, and kept moving. And then — almost without warning, as we approached Hella — the snow stopped, the sky lifted, and everything changed.

We checked in, caught our breath, and headed out for the afternoon. First stop: Urriðafoss — a waterfall with enormous volume, the kind that doesn't need height to impress. Then Seljalandsfoss, where you can walk behind the curtain of water. The sun had come out by then and hit the waterfall at exactly the right angle. The whole cliff face glowed amber. A rainbow appeared in the mist. And then we walked behind it and watched the sun set through the water.

We thought the day was done. Then the weather cleared further that evening, and the northern lights appeared — our first glimpse, unexpected and completely unplanned.

The Golden Circle is Iceland's most famous route — and for good reason. What we didn't expect was to do it entirely under a fresh coat of snow, which turned what is usually scenic into something genuinely breathtaking.

Thingvellir National Park came first — the rift valley where the tectonic plates also surface on land, a place of geological and historical weight. Standing at the top of the Almannagjá gorge, looking out over the snow-covered valley with mountains in the far distance, tiny figures of other visitors far below, it felt enormous and humbling.

Then the Geysir hot spring area — steam rising from the ground against a bright blue sky, the earth bubbling quietly. Gullfoss next — photographed from a drone, it looked like turquoise ink pressed between sheets of white. At the viewpoint, standing in the sharp cold with the falls thundering below, it was hard to look away. And finally Kerið, the volcanic crater, its red walls dusted in snow, the frozen lake at the bottom sitting perfectly still.

The day could have ended there. Then the sky darkened, the clouds cleared, and the northern lights came out again — this time properly. Green and magenta, rippling overhead.

That evening, the sky did something we hadn't planned for — the northern lights don't work on a schedule. The temperature had dropped, the clouds had thinned, and someone stepped outside and said: come. Green ribbons first, then purple, then a wide sweep of magenta that covered most of the sky. We stood in the cold for a long time, phones raised, barely speaking. There are things the camera catches and things it doesn't. The silence, the cold, the sense of scale — those stay with you differently. But the photograph isn't bad either.

The longest drive of the trip — and also the most dramatic shift in landscape. As we headed east, the mountains came closer. The terrain became starker, more barren, more powerful. Nothing around for miles. It felt like driving through a different planet. Or Narnia, but the cold kind without the lamppost.

First stop was Skogafoss — the rainbow waterfall. You could see why it earned the name. Even in April, the sun at the right angle splits the mist into colour. The falls themselves are enormous, the roar of them constant.

We passed through Vik and kept going east to Vestrahorn, where the jagged black mountain peaks rise dramatically behind a beach. The reflections weren't perfect — the water wasn't completely still — but the mountains themselves needed no mirror to be stunning. We also stopped at the Viking Village nearby. Then into Hofn for dinner at Pakkus, the harbour restaurant where the seafood is properly spectacular. The garlic shrimp arrived in a cast-iron skillet. The lamb, again, was pink and perfect.

Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon in the morning. Blue icebergs, impossibly blue, floating silently in still water with a wall of mountains behind them. And seals — nobody promised seals. A face surfacing between the icebergs, looking directly at us, then slipping back under. None of us had ever seen one in the wild before.

The Diamond Beach sits at the lagoon's outlet, where icebergs travel to the sea and wash up on black sand. In the morning, the beach was full of them — all sizes, some clear as glass, catching the light from every angle. People moved around them carefully, quietly. It looked nothing like the photographs and exactly like the photographs at the same time. When we came back in the evening, the tides had taken every single one. The beach was empty. The same place, completely different.

In the afternoon, ice caves. These form naturally over thousands of years inside the glacier, melt away every summer, and return each winter — which means they are never the same twice. We went near the end of the season. Inside, the ice above you glows turquoise and swirls in patterns that look almost carved. Nothing prepares you for it.

The roads opened. We left early and drove to Vik — the southernmost village in Iceland, perched above a black sand beach with sea stacks jutting out of the water. We'd planned two days here. We saw everything in one.

The Vik church first — small, white, with a vivid red roof, sitting on a hill with the entire black coastline behind it. One of those images that looks almost too composed to be real. Then down to the beach. The black sand was unlike any beach — not dark grey, truly black. The waves crash differently here; the ocean feels less friendly, more powerful.

There are places around Vik that don't appear in any travel guide — small pull-offs, unnamed viewpoints, roads that seem to lead nowhere but open into something extraordinary. We found a few. Then the Yoga cave, carved by the sea into the cliff face, its mouth framing two rocks and the ocean perfectly. And Reynisfjara, with its towering hexagonal basalt columns and the lone sea stack in the distance.

The plane wreck at Sólheimasandur sits in the middle of the black sand, abandoned, partly graffitied, utterly surreal. You walk out to it across a flat, dark expanse and it still doesn't look real when you arrive.

The last full day. We drove back towards Reykjavik, and the road was everything Iceland does well in one long frame — a straight black line through white, mountains filling the windshield, blue sky doing something dramatic above it all.

The city felt like a gentle landing after days of wilderness. Hallgrímskirkja first, the great church that looks like it was designed by the same forces that made the basalt columns — and in a way, it was, its architect drawing directly from that landscape. We walked Rainbow Road, the famous painted street that leads straight to it. Had good food. Walked slowly.

The next morning, we left for Munich at 6am. Nine days in Iceland, most of them unpredictable, some of them frightening, all of them extraordinary. The trip had been on the list so long it had become a running joke. It turned out to be worth every year of waiting.