I’m told that when inclement weather looms in Iceland, all you need to do is wait five minutes and it will probably get worse. The weather here has always had a ubiquitous reputation for five seasons in one day.

It’s 9 a.m. and I’m clambering, caffeine deprived, aboard the large four-wheel-drive swamping the footpath outside my guesthouse and bracing for an arctic-style assault on my extremities. Thermals? Check. GPS distress beacon? Check.

Rakki, my guide, extends a wiry hand, pulling his cap low until it almost covers his eyebrows. “You’re the only one today,” he says, promising to return me by dusk with the full complement of fingers and toes I’m starting with. It’s a good start.

As we make our way northeast from Reykjavik, Iceland’s burgeoning capital and the hippest new scene for the UK party crowd — being a mere three-hour hop from London — the city limits fade from view. We are driving to Thingvellir National Park, in Iceland’s Golden Circle region.

Specially modified arctic trucks are the off-road mode of transport in Iceland's snowy landscape.

Over the rumbling hum of our sizeable wheels, I ask Rakki why, for such a small city, there are so many cars. “It’s simple,” he says, “Icelanders love their independence. If you have a car, it’s a sign that you’re someone and going places.”

Thingvellir, a natural amphitheater approximately 14 miles (23 k) from Reykjavik, was home to the country’s parliament, which met annually, beginning in A.D. 930.

While most of Europe at the time was struggling through feudalism, chieftains — including descendants of Iceland’s first settler, Norwegian Viking chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson, who arrived in 870 — debated the issues that confronted the country for hundreds of years at Thingvellir, until 1798.

In the year 2000, some 30,000 Icelanders turned out at Thingvellir to celebrate 1,000 years of Christianity. They probably all drove. In 2004, UNESCO added the park to its World Heritage list, citing Thingvellir as a place of great historical importance to its people.

I set off on foot following a trail down to the plain below, where the great rift between the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates appears to carve the landscape in two with dramatic effect. A stinging wind whips at my face until my eyes fill with tears. The only sounds are the crunching of snow beneath my boots — and the faint sound of the plates moving ever so slowly apart.

The giant plates move approximately 1 millimeter a year, and in doing so have left a series of dramatic fissures in the earth, the biggest of them the great divide at Almannagjá, a canyon that snakes its way down into Thingvallavatn, Iceland’s largest lake.

Much of the area remains untouched by man, and signs or tourist information are scarce. Hiking trails cut a curious path through the lava fields of the park, with ice and snow long since having covered any trace of the perennial summer crowds.

As the temperature dips to 28° F (-2° C), the sun sits low on the horizon, casting a permanent late-afternoon glow over the scarred and lava-filled landscape. Small, cotton-candy clouds dot an otherwise perfect blue sky.