Driving through the depths of Connemara on a lonely winter’s day is the same kind of haunting, remote feeling you get as you’re travelling across the bog-like lava fields from the airport to downtown Reykjavik. The melancholy of Iceland wraps itself around your heart, squeezes hard and addicts you.

Our enthusiasm when booking our trip was fired by the chance to see the Northern Lights. Maybe I had put them on too much of a pedestal in my imagination. In real life, seeing the Northern Lights, I couldn’t get the jingle Mild Green Fairy Liquid out of my head.

The lights looked like the giants in heaven had thrown out a basin of soapy washing up water and streaked the sky with it. Hardly surprising at Halloween in Iceland, but sweet Divine Mother of Jesus, the cold at 1am in the morning, waiting expectantly for this streaky, stained glass sky effect to appear.

After 48 hours into our trip, we thought we were acclimatised enough and kitted out adequately in our ski gear. But just as the aurora borealis deigned to appear to us, I was stubbornly prepared to just sit it out on the bus and not venture out into the elements to watch the drama unfold.

The two natural dramas that hooked me were the geysers and our precarious jeep ride on the side of a glacier. Geysir, the field with multiple geysers is where I felt ‘this is what I came to Iceland for’.

There was not a jaded tourist in sight. Even the teenagers on geography school tours were genuinely impressed by the few kilometer stretch of the Earth’s natural cauldron bubbling and belching away and every few minutes erupting spectacularly.

You’re looking at mud and the bubbling puddles and then whoosh the steam erupts out of the mud pools and rises high into the sky and sometimes you see water erupting too. Strokkur was the geyser most on form blowing its lid every eight minutes. Spectacular – the clouds of mist making you think of giant steam kettles boiling and pushing their mist up through the earth’s crust.

Then there was the unplanned day trip we thought we weren’t going to make it home alive from. Disappointed that weather conditions were too adverse to go snowmobiling; we trusted the guide’s advice that it would be safer to tour the glacier in a Jeep.

We were exhilarated by the blustery conditions as us two, a ballsy Swedish girl and our guide loaded ourselves into the jeep. Exhilaration turned to nervousness as the snow swirled heavier around us and the Jeep was no longer able to plough through the snow.

Even the confident Swede paled when the young tour guide said he’d put on the GPS as the snow was obscuring his vision of where exactly on the glacier we might be. And then fear curdled inside me when he asked us to get out of the Jeep which was now stuck in the snow.

He hoped unloading our weight would make the Jeep shift. But when my husband opened the door, we were perched, literally perched, on the side of the glacier.

We shimmied across to get out the other side while the guide inflated or deflated – or something – the tyres; thankfully we managed to move out of the snow drift and safely down off the glacier. But not before the thought had flashed across my mind: If we perish, how long would it take people to realise we never arrived home from Iceland?’

Entries to The Irish Times Travel Writer competition, in association with Travel Department, are now closed. The winning writer will be announced on October 29th. See irishtimes.com/travelwriter