How to Go (Far, Far) Away— and What to Do There

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Is there any place that feels as far away as Iceland? It’s not so difficult to get to from the US, but the sense of being far, far removed from the grid—and the grind of twenty-first-century American life—is profound. Floating in a geothermally heated pool made of black volcanic rock, perched in a small mountain valley somewhere along the Troll Peninsula in the north of Iceland—mesmerized by a near-hallucinatory display of northern lights—might be one of the more luxuriously remote experiences there is.

sheep on a hill
Ducking under a thundering, ice-cold waterfall (protected by a dry suit you were outfitted in an hour earlier) to discover an entire cave lined in neon-green moss, having your words drowned out by a chorus of seabirds nesting in the cliffs of an island seven miles from the Arctic Circle, or heli-skiing down wild, untouched, enormous verticals leaves you with a similar, soul-relaxing sense of total retreat.

That you can do all these things from a chicly black-painted, sod-roofed, gorgeously decorated, and supremely comfortable home base makes whatever experiences you choose all the more transformative. At Deplar Farm, the staff has thought of everything—and they take “everything” to new levels.

The stunningly spare, modernist spa opens out onto a Viking sauna built, per ancient tradition, into the hillside (you watch the grasses and wildflowers on top of it wave in the breeze as you lower yourself gingerly into the adjacent 4°C plunge pool after sweating for longer than you think you can bear in the sauna).!