When we drove onto the return ferry two weeks ago, I was certain that 48 hours offline in a cramped cabin would be enough to process everything from our three weeks on Iceland. I didn’t manage a single sentence. Sensory overload had caught up with me days before leaving the island - that strange cognitive burnout where your eyes register everything around you, but your mind has simply stopped absorbing the scale of it.
When words don’t come easily, they say it’s best to begin at the very end.
No sensor or lens captures the true depth of those empty spacess or the deep blue of ancient ice. But to keep those moments alive alongside the words and sounds, we stitched our footage into a short film: our road to freedom.
Our final two days on the island were spent literally trapped. A sudden early-June blizzard slammed the east coast, burying the mountain pass and severing the small town of Seyðisfjörður from the rest of the country. There was dark irony in that: Seyðisfjörður is where the Icelandic thriller Trapped was filmed years ago - the very series that originally planted the dream in our heads to see these fjords with our own eyes.
Intense winter storms in June are rare even by Icelandic standards, but I probably asked for it. Driving out of Gdańsk weeks earlier, Monia asked what kind of weather I was hoping for. “Neither strictly good nor bad,” I told her. “Just real, uncompromising Icelandic weather, to see how people actually survive out here.” The island delivered in full: from quiet summer calms to battering swells that cured me of several maritime ambitions for years to come.
Lying in the back of the car for hours, listening to gale-force winds threatening to rip our sea kayaks clean off the roof racks, we decided to make a run for hot coffee and food the moment conditions eased. Over steaming cups, sensing the inevitable end of the journey, Monia asked: “So, what’s the verdict? Iceland or Norway?”
Before I could collect my thoughts, she smiled: “Iceland, hands down.”
I paused. “Norway was easier to love, but Iceland left a much deeper mark.” We laughed about my dramatic phrasing, but weeks later, that verdict stands.
Our goal was simple: take the total self-reliance we discovered in Scandinavia the previous year and drop it onto Iceland. We strapped the kayaks to the roof, tossed a sleeping mattress into the back, and packed four labeled storage boxes: Warm, Cold, Sins, and Technical. Bags packed with layers and books, pillowcases stuffed with laundry. To bring that setup without flying, we boarded the ferry out of Hirtshals, Denmark. The detour added nearly a week of driving and open-sea crossings, but rewarded us with sunlit views of the Shetland Islands, a quick layover exploring the Faroe Islands, and endless uninterrupted hours to study maps and read together.
Iceland met us with a stark, unsettling beauty. The difficulty climbed alongside the scenery. Within our first few days, we managed a plunge into a freezing glacial river, lost a mountain trail entirely, and punctured a tire on sharp volcanic gravel. Winds routinely made opening car doors a two-handed wrestling match, turning our evening routine of converting the cabin into a bedroom into an endurance sport. Solutions we tested back home during winter on Kaszuby proved barely adequate here.
Yet when I look back now, it isn’t the sweeping vistas that linger most - it’s the sounds, scents, and words.
I still can’t define the smell of the sea beneath Mount Kirkjufell. To me, carrying my usual romantic kayak lens, it smelled refined, almost like perfume. To Monia, it was simply “a surprisingly pleasant aroma of kelp.” For sounds, I’ll never shake the gunshot cracks of calving glaciers or the relentless white noise that followed us everywhere: howling wind, roaring waterfalls, pounding breakers, and the hum of gravel grinding under our tires across desolate tracks. A hum I strangely miss every day now.
Most of all, four spoken sentences define the expedition:
“I saw you guys yesterday near the glacier! Bringing your own kayaks to Iceland is the absolute best thing you could have done!” - an Icelandic mountain guide we ran into at a gravel turnout. Over thousands of kilometers, we never saw another vehicle carrying private kayaks. We felt like minor local celebrities - waves, thumbs-up, roadside chats, and even nearly ending up as the centerpiece of a photoshoot for a car dealership in Akureyri.
“This is the best paddling session of my life!” - Monia, through happy tears, as we drifted between icebergs while curious seals hauled out onto floes just paddle-lengths away.
“I had to nudge that iceberg with my paddle, it had so much potential to flip!” - Monia, laughing, right after a house-sized block of blue ice rolled violently just behind her stern. I had just come from a stern briefing with Vatnajökull National Park rangers warning us that rolling ice floes are fatal and unpredictable.
“We’re in this together.” - Monia again, completely calm, as we sat stranded on an empty volcanic track with a shredded tire, realizing our spare wheel well was crammed with spare milk cartons and sleeping quilts.