We’d just landed in Iceland and taken a rental out of Keflavic airport when I went onto Instagram. I was just scrolling through my feed when one of the ads showed me this gorgeous picture of a crashed white aircraft with the northern lights in the background, set in the middle of no-where. I looked it up, its location was right there in Iceland! I whipped out my mom’s “itinerary” to see if we’d be anywhere near there on the whole trip. What we were doing was driving around the whole of Iceland on a circuit called the “Golden Circle”. This would more or less take us around the entire coast of the country. Turns out, with a minor adjustment to the highway we took back to Reykjavik, we would go right by the crashed plane.

Another fun fact I discovered while looking it up is that the same plane was used as a shooting location for a Bollywood movie song called “Dilwaale”. In my country, Shah Rukh Khan is the “King of Bollywood” and the largest and an almost cult-like following back home. He is way past his glory days, but with this particular movie, he was making a come-back with an old on-screen sweetheart, Kajol. It was safe to say that the movie was gathering a lot of attention back home.

Now, about the plane. It’s an old US Navy DC-3 that crashed while making a routine flight from a nearby base. Reports suggest that the pilot tried switching over to the wrong and a very empty fuel tank. Fortunately, everyone survived the crash. Even more fortunately, nobody wanted to salvage the aircraft. They just left it there in the middle of nowhere to rot. If you Google the location of the crash, it shows up as a white spec in a sea of black for miles in every direction. The crash site is located on the south coast of Iceland about 20 mins west from the nearest town of Vik. Just off the main highway is a parking lot from where anyone who wants to see the aircraft, must walk 4 km towards the coast. We got there on an overcast day, The temperature was around 2°C and it was drizzling. There were only two other cars parked in the parking lot that day. I was the only one in my party willing to brave the conditions to go see the plane, and damn, am I glad I did.

When I say it was in the middle of nowhere, I literally mean nowhere. To the West, as far as you could see, it was just an endless desert of black sand. To the South, one could make out the coast and then the infinite expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The East featured a lone hill creating a stark outline before the emptiness behind it and in the North; just a ribbon of tarmac cutting its way along the base of a huge glacier. The terrain gave it that raw brutal effect that nature inspires only in the most remote of places. Everything here seemed harsh and exposed. Nothing survived here, and nothing ever would… and there was something eerily appealing about that. The weather just supplemented my mood, giving a gloomy yet serene effect to everything. The hike exposes you to true loneliness. I didn’t see a single other soul during the entire walk there. It was just me, my thoughts, the frozen wind and the inhospitable landscape. Now I can’t say it would feel the same on a good day with other people around but it was the most enlightening and self aware walk I’d ever taken.

I’d wrapped a waterproof poncho around me to protect against the rain but the sharp wind whipping around me made sure I got drenched and frozen anyway. My camera I kept tucked away in the folds of my various layers to keep it from getting wet. A path marked by poles takes you toward the plane but you cant really see it until about 40 minutes into your hike. When the aircraft first came into view, I was disappointed to see I wasn’t alone. There were a bunch of American college kids jumping around and climbing the wreck. Fortunately though, they didn’t stick around too long once I got there. I’m pretty sure the cold got to them too. That’s when I got a whole hour to myself just photographing the crash and admiring the setting of it all. Every time I got the camera out, it would get drenched and the lens would fog up (which is what I suspect caused it to stop working a few weeks later), but I finally did manage to get a few good shots of the plane. Then I just took 30 minutes and sat there facing the sea, taking it all in.

The entire hike back I just plugged in my earphones and played “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” and the Hobbit score by Howard Shore, all the while staring at the glacier in front of me, under towering clouds that made the mountains look bigger than life.

I really do love these off-beat sights and they are the most important thing to me on my trips. They are what make any place worth visiting.