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    <h2>UNDERSTANDING ICELAND</h2>
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Before you get too excited thinking of this ancient Viking paradise, I’m going to slightly burst your bubble. Iceland is not that old. The earliest recorded settlement goes back to 870AD (which for Europe is like, yesterday). However, like all great things in history, important people who write important leather-bound books dispute this fact.
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Despite being such an infant in European terms, Iceland can claim the world’s oldest existing parliament, Althing (or AlÞingi in Icelandic — yes they have a cool hybrid letter P which is pronounced like an English ‘th’). It dates back to 930AD. For the majority of the next 1000 years, the Norwegians and the Danes controlled Iceland until it was granted complete independence in 1944.
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Today, Iceland is absolutely thriving as a progressive European nation. It survived a debilitating banking crisis that hit in 2008 and now draw masses of travellers every year.
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      Iceland (Icelandic: Ísland [ˈistlant])[7] is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic, with a population of 348,580 and an area of 103,000 km2 (40,000 sq mi), making it the most sparsely populated country in Europe.
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    Surprise, surprise, to get to Iceland you will have to fly. The shortest direct international flight you can take to get there is from Aberdeen (Scotland) and the longest is from Los Angeles (USA). Although there is a small airport in the capital, all international flights will take you to Keflavik Airport, which is about 45 minutes away from Reykjavik. For a list of cities from which you can get a direct flight to Keflavik Airport check out this handy resource from Kayak here.
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    <p>
    As far as airlines go, there are a number of different choices with the local Icelandair being the most popular. If you are flying between North America and Europe and using Icelandair you will be pleased to know that you can do a free stopover for up to 7 days in Iceland for no additional cost. This is a pretty genius move by the national airline as it allows visitors to turn their stopover destination into a holiday itself.
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    Alternatively, European low-cost airlines are now frequenting Iceland and some of the cheapest include WOW Air, Easyjet and Wizz Air. Personally, we used Wizz Air and flew from Gdansk, Poland. This worked out great as we stayed there for 4 days also and got to see a city we generally wouldn’t have gone out of our way to travel to.
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If you are planning on flying from the UK, there are a number of package deals that you can take advantage of which will also include accommodation and Northern Lights tours — generally, these are 3 or 4 night packages and sometimes they can be great value. It’s always good practice to price up the accommodation, flights and tours individually to ensure you are getting a good deal here too.
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