Last summer, I stood at the head of a deep, dramatic rip in the fabric of Iceland and gazed down at Thingvellir, site of the ancient Viking parliament and the tectonic divide between Europe and America. At least I tried to, because between me and the plunging walls of volcanic basalt lay a forest of selfie sticks and extended Goretex-clad arms. The sightseeing hordes had disembarked from a great fleet of coaches parked by a new visitor centre, muttering animatedly in many languages with one common English phrase: Game of Thrones, the global TV phenomenon in which Thingvellir has starred as a regular location.

It was very hard to square this scene with my first visit in 1987. Touring the country in her mother’s Daihatsu Charade, my Icelandic wife-to-be and I bumped up to Thingvellir on a desolate unmade road, and walked through that terrific chasm alone. Indeed it often felt as if we had the entire extraordinary country to ourselves. Even the fabled “golden circle” sights in day-trip range of Reykjavík — the cataclysmic Gullfoss waterfall, and Geysir, eponymous home of boiling water spouts — lay deserted. The Blue Lagoon, now a popular geothermal spa where a swim costs between IKr5,400 (￡40) and IKr26,500 (￡200), was then an untamed site for guerrilla bathers: you got changed in the car, then shuffled gingerly into the milky hot water at your own risk.

Since that first trip I’ve been to Iceland at least once a year, and seen its alien panoramas populated by an ever-growing cast of visitors. Adventurers conquering the Arctic-deserts on mountain bikes. Britpop era hipsters taking a left-field minibreak in the land of Bj?rk. Then, suddenly and in ratcheting profusion, the mass-market travelling everymen. In 2009, Iceland welcomed 464,000 tourists. By last year, that had shot up to nearly 1.8m and the growth is accelerating. The first two months of this year were up 59 per cent on the same period of 2016 and by the end of the year the nation expects to hit 2.4m visitors. “The graph of tourist numbers is currently almost vertical,” says Professor Edward Huijbens of the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre. When I first came, there were two Icelanders per tourist; the 340,000 natives are now outnumbered by the annual tally of US visitors alone. In the words of Paul Fontaine, news editor of English-language The Reykjavík Grapevine, “It’s got to the point where even the tourists are complaining about too many tourists.”