There's a particular type of tourist attraction in Iceland that does the same thing: ambient music, a café serving overpriced skyr, and a few hundred people in matching robes shuffling between milky pools. They're great. The views are real. But after the third one, you start to wonder if you're visiting Iceland or an influencer's photo shoot studio.

Hvammsvík is different.

Eight natural geothermal pools cut directly into the North Atlantic shoreline of Hvalfjörður — Whale Fjord — about 56 kilometers from Reykjavík. At high tide, the lowest pools merge with the sea. There's no ambient playlist. No silica mud ceremony. No instructions to apply a complimentary face mask. Just warm water, cold air carrying salt and kelp from the fjord, mountains across the water, and — if you go on a quiet winter morning and time it right — almost nobody else there.

We went on exactly that morning. One of the better decisions we've made when choosing hot springs in Iceland.

There's a tunnel under Hvalfjörður that most people take without thinking twice. It shaves 42 kilometres off the drive north. Efficient and practical? Sure. And almost certainly the biggest navigational mistake you can make in West Iceland.

Drive around the fjord instead. And if you really want to do it properly, stay there.

Out of curiosity, I (Eli) drove around Hvalfjördur 15 years ago on my way to the Snæfellsnes peninsula and still remembered it. Quiet, empty, no tour buses, and cool road signs like “Blindhæð” and “Sheep crossing”. The kind of Icelandic landscape that makes you feel like the country is performing exclusively for you rather than for the forty people in matching rain jackets behind you at Geysir.

And this time, even though Iceland got way more (too?) popular, we still found exactly this: a 30-kilometre fjord flanked by mountains that drop straight into dark water, a sky that does something different every single hour of the day, and a cabin on a hillside that we didn't particularly want to leave: Brekka Retreat & Spa Suites.

There's a particular kind of overconfidence that comes with booking an igloo in Iceland. You picture yourself lying in a warm, transparent pod, a glass of something good in hand, the northern lights pulsing overhead like the sky has been switched to a setting nobody told you about. It looks incredible on Instagram. It looks incredible in your head.

But, obviously, Lady Aurora (and nature) doesn’t work on a schedule.

We stayed at Aurora Igloo South just outside the small town of Hella on Iceland's south coast, during a night of low KP and stubborn cloud cover. We didn't see the northern lights. What we did see was a gorgeous orange sunset, followed by the kind of star-filled sky you only get when you're far enough from anything to actually notice the dark. It wasn't what we'd planned. It was still worth every minute.

This is the honest version of that stay.