Jeremy Clarkson - Motorworld

I guess I was down to about 50 mph halfway across when the strangest thing happened. Gisli came past in his Jeep. I’m not kidding. I felt pretty manly and hirsute on my lightweight skidoo but here was a man driving his 900-bhp Jeep on water.

They tried to explain the physics of it later but frankly, I kept trying to match the man’s face with the boat race on the Turin shroud. I guess if Jesus wanted to come to earth again for a bit of a poke around, Iceland makes sense — lots of fishing, no one bats an eyelid when you walk on water, bikers who look like disciples anyway. It’s the perfect cover.

And should Pilot Pontiusson come round with some centurions, lots of places to hide.

Iceland’s interior is deserted, by which I mean no crofter’s huts, no pylons, no people. Think about that. Imagine being able to go from Newcastle upon Tyne to Oxford without seeing any evidence at all of man’s existence. This is one big chunk of nature.

And the biggest chunk of the lot is the glacier. Vatnajokull is bigger than Yorkshire.

I guess it’s time to get all Blue Peter -ish now and explain that you can’t simply drive onto this kilometre-thick chunk of ice all on your own. You need guides, satellite navigation equipment and some very, very special vehicles.

They’re basically big four-wheel-drive vans which have been described by one American magazine as the best snow vehicles in the world, and you can’t argue with that, as they cruise over crevices so deep that mammoths still live at the bottom. You also can’t argue when you see how much they cost — £60,000 is by no means uncommon.

I should explain that every square metre of Iceland has been plotted and, with the right satnav equipment, you can drive across the middle in a car with blacked-out windows.

But a glacier moves. Your pet satellite can tell you which way you’re going but not what’s between you and your destination. It’s no good thinking, as you plummet down a kilometre-deep crack, ‘That’s odd. This wasn’t here yesterday.’

Plus, you need to be mindful of the weather. Not even in the uppermost reaches of Scotland’s taller bits will you find changeable conditions like this. You can be sunbathing one minute and dead the next. We’re a few miles from the Arctic Circle here and they have blizzards which would give Michael Fish a heart attack. Sometimes, they’re even more powerful than his jackets.

So why, then, do Icelanders bother to go up there? Well, first of all, they’re mad, and second, they go because there’s no reason not to.

Why, for instance, go into the African bush when there’s a better-than-evens chance of not getting out with all your legs on? Why climb Everest and why, in British terms, have a barbecue when you have an oven?

The first thing you do before hitting the ice is drop the tyre pressure down to just two pounds per square inch, so that the rubber makes a bigger footprint on the snow. And don’t worry about it coming off the wheel because you only need a Zippo and some lighter fluid to put it back on again. What you do is spray the butane into the tyre and light it. The resultant explosion pops the tyre back on the rim and gives just enough pressure to carry on. And carry on you must because journey’s end is a huge slash in the ice.

And to give you an idea about how huge, you could play hide-and-seek in there with Canary Wharf and not find it.

I don’t want to get all religious here but when you stand on the edge of this absurd crater you do start to wonder a little bit about the puniness of man. I mean, not even the most powerful nuclear bomb could do this. The power that created it is beyond the ken of even our most sophisticated computer. We really are pretty pathetic and I suppose that if I lived near it, and all Iceland’s other wonders, I might have a slightly lower opinion of myself.

Perhaps this is why Icelanders, more than anyone else I’ve ever met, live so close to the edge.

Either that or they have the fishing industry to thank. I mean, if a country relies for its huge wealth on fish, which can only be caught by ploughing the North Atlantic in small boats, playtime is going to be pretty special.

I also think, though, that quite by chance we’d stumbled on a nation that simply likes cars. Certainly, it’s hard to see the internal combustion engine as a threat to mankind up there.

When you stand in a normal city street, and the whole thing is clogged up with tail pipes, smoky buses and the interminable din from a million diesels, it’s easy to see why the environmental argument can get a toehold.

But in Iceland, one exhaust pipe on a glacier the size of Yorkshire doesn’t seem so bad.

Then we have the queues. It’s easy to see the appeal of public transport in Britain where every motorway is clogged, and every B-road alternative a washboard route directly to the osteopath.

They have queues in Iceland too, but never so severely that you’d think about taking the bus instead. And anyway, you can always call the transport minister whose number — and that of the President herself — appears in the phonebook.

‘Oh people call me up all the time,’ he says. ‘If there’s the slightest problem, they’re straight on the phone to me. This is a small place and everyone knows everyone else. Just because you work in the transport ministry doesn’t mean you stop knowing people.’

The transport ministry needs to be defined though. Put it like this. When he goes out for lunch, it’s closed.

Sure, he has the planes, the buses and the cars to worry about but, thankfully, no trains. There are none.

However, outside California, Iceland does have the highest car-ownership levels in the world and the roads have to keep pace with a demand that just won’t slow down.

To cope, they have Road One, which circumnavigates Iceland and is paved for very nearly its entire length. The best stretch is in the south where you’ll find the Big Bridge which was paid for by Iceland’s lottery and is fashioned from wood — odd in a country without any trees. Well there used to be some, but the original Irish settlers — Reg and Vic — chopped them all down.

There is no Road Two but there is a myriad of unnumbered and unpaved tracks which litter the coastal plains. On these you should be very, very careful indeed because Iceland’s growing band of rally drivers use them for practice in their homemade cars.

In Britain they’d call it joy-riding and the transport minister would appear on television with a stern face. But hey, this is Iceland and the transport minister thinks it’s OK so long as they’re careful.

He’s also not that bothered by the microlighting fraternity, who simply land on what, in Britain, would be the M1, and pull into a service station for petrol. ‘Well where else would I get gas?’ said one.

You sometimes get the impression that the Icelandic parliament is rather like a parish council presiding over a piece of geological lunacy, but it’s not. Iceland is in NATO and is a European state, even if they’ve had the good sense to keep the EC at bay.

They really have worked out a different way of life up there and it works a damn sight better than every other country I’ve ever been to. Iceland, as far as I’m concerned, is simply the best.

I wasn’t even slightly surprised to find that Reykjavik is chock-full of ex-pat Britishers who went there for a holiday once and decided not to come home. Ask them why and you always get the same answer. ‘What? Are you kidding!’

They may moan about the agonising price of everything and the desperation of living through an Icelandic winter, but they know they’re at the best party in town, and they’re not coming home.

Indeed, when you’re in Iceland, you tend to look out on the rest of the world through shit-coloured spectacles.