The night that never came: Iceland's midnight sun

The thing no photograph prepared me for in Iceland was the light, or rather, the refusal of the dark. I went at the end of June, and for the whole trip the sun simply did not set. It dipped, it reddened, it hovered near the horizon as if thinking about it, and then it climbed back up. Night never came.

It does strange things to you. On our first evening in Reykjavik I kept wandering the streets long after I should have slept, because there was no darkness to tell me to stop. Out on the trail a few days later, deep in the highlands, we hit a stretch of snow that slowed us to a crawl, and rather than make camp we just kept walking, at what should have been midnight, in full grey daylight, because why not. Time loses its grip. You eat when you are hungry, walk until your legs give out, and sleep because a clock tells you to, not because the sky does.

Later, driving the Ring Road, the same thing kept us out at all hours, pulling over at empty viewpoints at one in the morning with the landscape still fully lit and not another soul in sight.

It is disorienting, it wrecks your sleep, and it is one of the most quietly magical things about visiting Iceland in summer. You are not given a normal day with a normal end. You are handed one long, soft, endless afternoon, and you can do with it whatever you like.