Cold is Just Another Word for Quiet

Iceland in January: the sun barely crests the horizon. You have roughly four hours of usable light, and the rest is just silence and stars.

Silence is the underrated thing about Iceland in winter. In the summer it is crowded — the midnight sun attracts everyone. In January you have the landscape largely to yourself, which is not a small thing when the landscape is this dramatic.

The cold is manageable if you layer properly. What is harder to manage is the darkness, which has a quality beyond just the absence of light. It feels like pressure, or thickness. After two weeks I began to understand why the Icelanders developed so many different words for darkness and light.