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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.
    Iceland is God’s finest hour.

Japan
    When you wake up in a Japanese hotel bedroom after a fourteen-hour flight across the international date line, you get an idea of how Dave Bowman felt at the end of
2001: A Space Odyssey
.
    Yes, it is a hotel room with a bed, a dressing table, a television and a wardrobe. The bathroom looks normal too, right down to the fan that will not shut down unless you hit it with a hammer.
    But there are little clues which suggest that this is a facsimile of a real hotel room. The carpet, for instance, is the same shade of purple as a pair of loons I had back in 1971. The easy chair is button-back and finished in ice-white plastic. None of the food listed in the room service menu is recognisable as such. I wanted bacon and eggs. I got a Thai green curry.
    Then there’s the telephone. Not once during my two-week stay did I ever work it out. I think I once managed to get through to someone in England, but it sure as hell wasn’t my wife. Mostly, I ended up talking to hotel laundry boys, who’d scuttle into my room moments later, sweeping up all the clothes I’d planned to wear that day.
    And I’d run after them, saying ‘no’ a lot and looking ridiculous because the hotel-issue dressing gown didabout as much to protect my modesty as one of Colin Moynahan’s cardigans.
    Generally speaking, international hotels have a remarkable knack of erasing any clues about what country you’re in. They’ve tried in Japan too, but they’ve failed. Miserably.
    In one hotel there, in Kyoto, there was a different pair of slippers laid out in each of the suite’s many rooms. However, as they were of a size that would have given a baby blisters, I just clomped around in my cowboy boots. It’s also worth mentioning that in this hotel bedroom, there was one huge ingredient missing – a bed. Also, none of the tables or chairs had legs, and the bath was made of wood.
    Even the television wasn’t normal. It doesn’t matter where you go on the planet, you always get CNN which rattles through world events in eight seconds