Hot showers in the morning meant waking up to the smell of rotten eggs. It’s actually not that bad once you get used to it. However, experiencing it for the first time means you are either shocked into full consciousness or end up fainting. Wide awake then we set off on what was to be a spectacular day.

Sun and blue skies throughout helped us get over the patchy weather yesterday. It wasn’t this that made the day special. We covered a lot of ground and at every turn we saw some breathtaking scenery. Today was definitely picture postcard day. We got to see waterfalls, rainbows, mirror lakes, snow covered mountains with glaciers and waves crashing against ice on an ashen beach.

Pick of the day for me was a lighthouse on-top a cliff edge at Dyrhólaey. We were there initially to visit a natural arch in the rocks but ended up the wrong side of it for the time of day seeing it only as a silhouette against the bright morning sun. The light was magnificent though and turned the dead grass around a wonderful golden brown. The lighthouse, and a smattering of outhouses, with nothing else in sight for miles gave me a sense of remoteness and planted a seed in my mind that would inform the rest of this photographic journey.

One thing that surprised me after driving halfway through the night then retracing our steps a few miles back the next morning, was that there were no trees. Driving the previous night, I could have sworn blind we were driving through forest, I saw no lights on the horizon, just the odd light of a farm here and there. Drive in the UK and you see the glow of the next town or village from miles away, if you don’t, you’re probably driving in a forest.

The black mirror-like effect of the lake at Dyrhólaey was enchanting and mesmerising. The ¼ inch of water on the black sand gave a perfect mirror-like finish. Fantastic! We then visited Skogafoss waterfall, the sun was low enough in the sky to grace us with a complete half rainbow in the spray of the falls.

Over midday, we drove across the front of Vatnajökull glacier to Jokulsárlón, a glacier lake connected by a short iceberg filled river to the sea. The evening light shining through the icebergs with a gorgeous green-blue aura.

The rain from the first day gave way on day two to uninterrupted sunshine. And in Iceland that means one thing: rainbows. The waterfalls in Iceland are beautiful enough on their own, but at the right time of day and with the right weather, the sun is low enough in the sky to produce the most spectacular rainbows in the spray, and today was no exception as the giant Skógafoss afforded us a complete arc.

Much of day two was spent in wonder at the astonishing distance from which the peak at Hvannadalshnjúkur was visible. At 2119 m (6952 feet), Hvannadalshnjúkur, part of the rim of a volcanic crater called Öræfajökull, is the highest point in Iceland and is visible from as far away as Vík, approximately 150km (90 miles) distant. The road from Vík leads through Eldhraun, an enormous expanse of lava covered with moss, before passing through the small town of Kirkjubæjarklaustur, from where it crosses Skeiðarársandur, an area of gravel and rivers where water from the great Vatnajökull ice cap melts and flows towards the sea. The remains of an iron bridge, destroyed in 1996 in the jökulhlaup (glacier burst) have been left as a monument to the power of nature.

Past Hvannadalshnjúkur we drove to a place where the Vatnajökull glacier meets the sea, at Jökulsárlón. Here, icebergs calved from the glacier stretched as far as the eye can see in a wide lagoon, drifting slowly towards the sea. On the shore itself, where the sand was jet black, chunks of ice lay melting in the sunset, as clear as glass, while larger icebergs that survived the journey were pounded by the waves just offshore.

We watched the sun set over Öræfajökull, turning the mountains to the east blood-red, before heading off to the farmhouse that was to be our accommodation on the second night.