We've been to Iceland three times — in September, October and February — doing the kind of things that make travel insurance less of an afterthought and more of a genuine necessity. Driving remote roads in the dark chasing the northern lights, hiking across lava fields and glaciers, navigating weather that changes faster than any forecast predicted.

Iceland is small but mighty. It's one of the most geographically dramatic countries on earth, and a lot of what makes it worth visiting — the interior highlands, the glacier lagoons, the black sand beaches — is also genuinely remote. The nearest hospital to some of the places we've been is a long drive or a helicopter ride away.

That changes the insurance conversation.

We modified hiking plans twice on our last trip to the Faroe Islands because of wind. Not rain — wind. The trail was fine, the visibility was fine, but the gusts at the cliff edge were the kind that make you reconsider your absence of vertigo. We sat it out in the car, ate some dry fish and tried again. We had a plan B. And a plan C. That, more than anything else, is what hiking the Faroe Islands is actually like. Sure, it’s not as cold or crazy as neighboring Iceland, but Atlantic moody weather is real.

If you can work with that — stay flexible, check the weather obsessively, and genuinely enjoy the possibility that your plans will change — then the Faroes offer some of the best hiking in the North Atlantic. Accessible trails. Dramatic coastal scenery on almost every route. Elevation that rewards without making you cry (hello, Lofoten). And a scale that means you can do a couple of hikes in a day if the conditions cooperate.

What follows is our island-by-island breakdown of the hikes in the Faroe Islands we'd actually recommend — with the real distances, the current fee situation, and the ferry logistics.

Portugal does boutique hotels exceptionally well, and the reason is mostly architectural. There are centuries of convents, palaces, olive oil mills, quintas, and fishermen's houses to work with — buildings that already have bones and history and character built in. Personally, we prefer hotels with character to big, impersonal chains. If you’re like us, Portugal will be heaven for you! Indeed, the best boutique hotels in Portugal tend to be conversions: a former palace on a Lisbon hilltop, a 16th-century olive mill inside Évora's city walls, a clifftop estate in the Alentejo redesigned by an architect who understood and respected what was already there.

What follows is our region-by-region guide to the best boutique stays across Portugal — from the capital to the wild Atlantic coast. Where we have a full regional guide, we link to it rather than repeating ourselves. Where we don't, we go deeper.

The Faroe Islands have fewer hotels than almost anywhere else in the North Atlantic — and that's part of what makes staying here feel special. You're not choosing between interchangeable chains. You're choosing between a harbor-front hotel in the old capital, a turf-roofed guesthouse in a village of twelve people, or a cottage perched above a waterfall that drops straight into the ocean. The accommodation is part of the experience in a way it rarely is anywhere else, and we love that.

The flip side: options fill up fast, especially in summer. The islands see a lot of visitors for their size, and the best Faroe Islands hotels — particularly anything outside Tórshavn — often book out weeks or months in advance. Read this guide, decide where you want to be, and book early.

Most travel insurance policies are written for people who stay on paved surfaces. The fine print tends to assume a hotel, a beach, maybe a city tour. If you're the kind of traveller who plans trips around trails, summits, and carrying everything you need on your back, that fine print deserves more than a skim.

We've hiked in Abisko National Park in freezing temperatures, climbed in the Lofoten Islands, walked alongside icebergs in Greenland, snowshoed through Swedish Lapland, and spent time in some of the more remote corners of Iceland. We've been close enough to needing a claim — a snowmobile incident in Svalbard being the most memorable — to know that having the right coverage matters a lot more than saving €20 on a policy.

Here's what to actually look for when buying travel insurance for hiking and backpacking.

December in Rovaniemi is one of the most atmospheric things you can do in Europe. Snow so deep it swallows fence posts. Darkness that falls at 2pm and stays until 10am. Reindeer moving in slow single file through the forest. The northern lights ripping green across a sky you've never seen that dark. And a silence — an actual silence — that you feel in your chest.

The problem is that the internet has convinced most people that Christmas in Lapland means one specific thing: elves, a man in a red suit, and a theme park experience that costs a fortune and delivers considerably less magic than the landscape sitting five minutes outside it.

We're not here to tell you what to do. But we are here to be honest about what you're actually booking when you book "Christmas in Rovaniemi" — and what December in Finnish Lapland looks like when you strip the commercial layer back.

We run a travel blog, and before that, we worked as freelancers. Which means at some point we crossed the line from "people who travel a lot" to "people who work while traveling" — and that changes the insurance conversation in ways that most standard guides don't address.

When you're working abroad, the stakes are different. You're not just covering a two-week holiday. You need health coverage that works for months at a stretch, potentially in multiple countries. You're carrying equipment — laptops, cameras, hard drives — that represents your income, not just your entertainment. And if something goes wrong, you can't just cut the trip short and go home, because the trip is the job.

The good news: there are plans built for exactly this. The less good news: not all of them are worth the money, and the distinctions between them matter more than most people realize before they actually need to make a claim.

For years we bought travel insurance the way most people do: per trip, every time, slightly begrudgingly and always wondering if it was worth it. A policy for Iceland. A policy for Norway. Another one for Portugal. By the time we were taking five or six trips a year — which added up faster than we expected once travel became our job — without even considering the time factor.

The switch to an annual plan travel insurance felt obvious. One policy, one payment, covered for every trip we take that year — including the spontaneous ones, the long weekends, and the press trips we sometimes get a short notice for.

But an annual multi-trip travel insurance isn't the right answer for everyone. If you're planning one long continuous trip — a three-month slow travel stint through Southeast Asia, a working season abroad, a sabbatical — a long-stay policy is a completely different product and usually a better fit. Here's how both work, and how to figure out which one applies to you.

We've chased the northern lights in Iceland several times — and the single most important thing we learned is that timing is only half the equation. The other half is knowing how to read the conditions on the night itself and being willing to move when the forecast tells you to (well, and a bit of elf magic and luck too).

Most northern lights guides will tell you to go in January and cross your fingers. That's not wrong, but it's not the whole picture either. The best time to see the northern lights in Iceland depends on what you're optimising for — maximum darkness, best weather odds, equinox activity, or the current solar cycle — and the answer is different depending on which of those matters most to you.

This article is specifically about timing and forecasting. If you're still deciding whether Iceland is the right aurora destination for you at all, we've covered that in detail in our northern lights Iceland guide. If you're new to aurora hunting altogether, start with our northern lights for dummies guide first. And if you're ready to book and need hotel recommendations, go straight to our best northern lights hotels in Iceland. This piece sits between those two: it's for people who are going, and want to make the most of it.

Everything here is part of our northern lights hub — our full library of aurora guides covering destinations, gear, photography, and planning.

The Algarve everyone knows — the golden sea stacks, the crowded summer beaches, the all-inclusive resorts — is real. But it's a small part of a region that has cork oak forests, protected Atlantic coastline, Moorish architecture, wetland nature reserves, and some of the most characterful small hotels in Portugal.

The accommodation on this list exists across all of it. The best version of an Algarve trip (in our humble opinion) usually combines at least two of these areas: a few days in the backcountry west, a few days in the east near Tavira, and as much time as possible on the beaches in between.

Most people visit Sintra as a day trip from Lisbon. We get it — it's only 40 minutes by train, the palaces are right there, and the Instagram shots basically take themselves. But if you leave when the last bus goes, you miss what Sintra actually is.

Stay overnight and you get the village after the tour groups have gone. Cobblestone streets with no one on them. The fog rolling in off the Serra de Sintra as the light fades. The Pena Palace turning a deep orange in the last hour of sun. And, if you venture towards the sea, you’ll find sweeping ocean views all to yourself. A completely different place from the one 20,000 day-trippers saw.

The other thing nobody tells you: Sintra has some of the most characterful boutique accommodation in all of Portugal. Converted manor houses on century-old estates. Cliff-top guesthouses with rooms named after the Atlantic light. Former town halls turned into seven-suite hotels. The options are unique, and unlike Lisbon, they haven't been swallowed up by big chains yet.

Here's where to stay in Sintra, broken down by area.

The Alentejo is the kind of region that people stumble into without much of a plan and end up rearranging their whole trip around. Cork trees, bone-white hilltop villages, vineyards that stretch to the horizon. Pair it with the Costa Vicentina — the wild, protected coastline that runs south toward the Algarve — and you've got one of the most underrated stretches of Portugal. We absolutely fell in love with it!

The hotels tend to match the landscape. Converted farmhouses on 300-year-old estates. Low-slung whitewashed houses built into the Alentejo plain. Rural guesthouses where breakfast is local cheese, tomatoes, and bread still warm from the oven. Finding the right hotel in the Alentejo or along Costa Vicentina often means the whole trip falls into place around it.

We've split this guide by region, because the Alentejo interior and the coast are different trips (but are ideal when combined).

Portugal is one of those countries where the accommodation itself becomes part of the trip. You can find a hotel in Portugal that overlooks an Atlantic cliff, wake up to the sound of cork oaks in the Alentejo, or stumble into a surf lodge where the salt air never leaves. And you can do most of it without paying five-star prices — if you know where to look.

There are a lot of Portugal guides out there, but they all mention the same tourist spots. What follows is our by-region breakdown of where to stay in Portugal — the places we've stayed, the ones we'd book today, and the regions we think are seriously underrated.

Planning a Ring Road self-drive is one of those trips that feels straightforward on paper — one road, loop it, done — until you actually try to figure out where to sleep. Iceland's Route 1 runs 1,332 km around the entire island, and even the South Coast stretch alone — from Reykjavík east to Höfn, covering the waterfalls, the glaciers, and Jökulsárlón — takes the better part of a week if you're doing it properly (and as it deserves).

This guide covers exactly that section. We've organized it by driving segment, because when you're planning a road trip, what you actually need to know is where to sleep after each day's drive. One rule before we start: book the glacier lagoon area first. Before Vík, before Reykjavík, before anything. Fewest options, highest demand, fastest sellout. If you read nothing else, remember that.

All properties here are bookable via Booking.com. Several also appear in our dedicated northern lights hotels in Iceland guide — we've flagged those below, since this stretch of the South Coast is excellent aurora territory in winter.

Reykjavik, as cool as it is, has earned its reputation as one of Europe's pricier capitals. A sit-down dinner for two, a round of drinks, a whale watching tour — the numbers add up fast, and they tend to go in one direction. But here's something the typical "budget Iceland" articles gloss over: Reykjavik has a surprisingly solid free list. Not "free in the sense that you're still spending on transport and food" free — genuinely, spend-nothing free.

The locals aren't eating at tourist restaurants or paying for entry to every museum. They're swimming in geothermal pools, walking the harbor, browsing flea markets, and sitting outside bakeries with a coffee and a pastry watching the light do something extraordinary to the sky. Most of that costs very little, and some of it costs nothing at all.

Here's what's actually worth your time — and your money, in the cases where a small amount is well spent.

We've been to Iceland three times. The first was right after the 2008 financial crisis, when the Icelandic króna had collapsed and the country briefly became a very affordable destination. A private room in a hostel for €60. Those days are firmly gone.

If you’re wondering if Iceland is that expensive, let's be direct: Iceland is one of the most expensive countries in the world to visit. That's not a rumor or a rounding error — it's consistently near the top of the global rankings for cost of living and travel costs. A coffee will make you wince. A restaurant meal will drain your budget. The silver lining? It’s so expensive that even Norway will look cheap after it!

But here's the thing. The gap between a poorly planned Iceland trip and a well-planned one is enormous — larger than almost anywhere else. A few smart decisions on flights, car rental, food, and accommodation can cut your total spend dramatically without touching the parts of Iceland that actually matter. The volcanoes, the waterfalls, the glaciers, the northern lights — those are mostly free. What costs money is everything around them, and that's where the savings are.

We often get asked if a travel insurance is necessary.

Good question!

Keep reading to find out, to learn all the benefits of a travel insurance, and to enjoy 5% discount — up to 15% off with seasonal offers — exclusive to Penguin Trampoline readers if you do need one.

Iceland has a well-worn tourist circuit. Jökulsárlón, Reynisfjara, the Blue Lagoon, Gullfoss, Geysir — these are famous for good reason, and most people see all of them in a week-long ring road loop. They're genuinely spectacular. No one's going to talk you out of visiting them.

But here's the thing: these places have become way too popular. When we first visited 17 years ago, we had them mostly to ourselves in autumn. In 2026, it’s a different story. However, for most of these spots, the best-kept secret is that you barely have to go anywhere to find something just as good with a fraction of the people. The alternatives aren't buried on some niche hiking forum. They're right there — a 10-minute walk in most cases, or a short drive at most. You just have to know to look.

This guide is for people who already have the classics on the itinerary, got tired of the crowds and want to know what else is hiding nearby. All of it is doable with a rental car and no specialist equipment. Most of it is free.

Iceland is probably the most Googled northern lights destination on the planet. And honestly? There are good reasons for that — but also a few things the average aurora guide won't tell you. If you're deciding whether Iceland is the right choice for your northern lights trip, this is the honest version of that answer.

The short version: yes, Iceland is a legitimate aurora destination, and for most people it's a brilliant choice. But it comes with a specific set of trade-offs that are worth understanding before you book. Because if you're going solely to see the lights with the highest possible odds, Iceland isn't actually your best bet. If you're going to Iceland for the full experience — and you want the lights as a bonus that will make the whole thing extraordinary — it might be the best trip of your life.

I (Eli) have walked on a glacier before. Specifically, on the Root Glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska — one of the coolest things I have ever done, literally. I came away from that trip with something I hadn't expected: a genuine obsession. Not with glaciers as a category, but with the specific, irrepeatable character of each one. They move differently, they look different, they feel different underfoot. Each glacier is like a natural museum. I will never get tired of them.

This was Jake's first glacier hike, and we both had been in an ice cave in Svalbard. And here's the thing about that: it didn't matter that I'd done it before. Walking onto Vatnajökull felt new for both of us.

We did the Ice Cave & Glacier Hike in Skaftafell with Icelandia — the tour brand of Icelandic Mountain Guides, one of the most established glacier guiding operations in Iceland, and our guide was Brook. Here’s our experience.