Road trip: across Iceland in a very yellow Citroen Cactus

Here I am, semi-naked in a cave, being observed by a wide-eyed and tungsten-headed division of elderly German tourists. They look surprised to find me floating nearly nude in an underground geothermal hot spring somewhere in the back country of eastern Iceland, but, then again, this isn't your average Wednesday morning. This Wednesday, I am attempting to find instant inner peace. Purest calm before tomorrow. Elysium before teatime. To do so, I have travelled to the spiritual expanse of Iceland - a country I've always found to be emotionally soothing - and have had two days to reboot my misfiring chakras and enlighten my cynical soul. It's not working. I've got to be at another enlightenment appointment in an hour, and thanks to recent geological disturbances, this pool is so warm that it feels like I'm being boiled alive. The so-called healing water is 45+ degrees Celsius. Much more healing, and I'll have second-degree burns, which means that I'm unlikely to find much Zen outside of a specialist treatment unit. I retreat, somewhat pinkly, to my secret weapon in the search for serenity - a lime-green Citroen C4 Cactus.

Pictures: John Wycherley

This feature was originally published in the August 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine

I know what you're thinking. How can a car named after a stabby plant possibly provide a path to tranquillity? Well, this newest little Citroen has placidity at its core. It's been designed to be friendly and simple and calm. To abdicate responsibility for the arms race of complexity that plagues carmakers, to revert to the straightforward. Strip away the unnecessary, concentrate on making the important stuff better and, in the process, cook up an antidote to overly elaborate, stressful design. In other words, make it cheap and simple but satisfying. A tricky mission statement when many measure a car's worth based on Byzantine functions they never use - after all, ‘simple' is a word not too far from ‘utilitarian'. And ‘utilitarian' often translates badly.

Still, on the outside, the Cactus doesn't look dull. Anything but. It looks like a conceptual mini-SUV, with a semi-raised ride height, squinty eyes and lots of visual jewellery. There are shades of new Picasso in there and bold Citroen chevrons. The raised rectilinear blisters on the side are called Airbumps and really are little squishy pockets designed to absorb the kind of supermarket door scuffs that annoy beyond reason. The roof rails add a bit of square-jawed ruggedness, and the ‘floating roof' looks vogueish and contemporary but is accomplished by the slightly more prosaic method of falsely wrapping the windowline around the car with swathes of black plastic. But it looks fresh and interesting and more than a little bit exciting - certainly more entertaining than a conventional hatch.

Which is exactly what it is below the skin. Don't let the stance and style fool you: underneath, the C4 Cactus is a version of the C3/Peugeot 208 platform, a mass-produced, well-proven base. There are MacPherson struts for the front suspension and a simple torsion bar in the rear, and the biggest engine available produces a humble 109bhp. Which is the one we have here. You can specify a more conventional turbodiesel four-cylinder, but the petrol engines in the C4 Cactus are all versions of a turbocharged 1.2-litre three-cylinder with variously managed outputs, and the quirky-but-good three-pot seems appropriate. The offbeat thrum of the little motor certainly suits the car, and as we haul away from the cave bath and lightly appalled European pensioners up one of eastern Iceland's long, sweeping uphill roads, the little turbo whooshes along most satisfactorily. It's not fast by any means, and there are only five speeds available from the floppy manual gearbox, but somehow it doesn't seem to matter. Immediately, it's a happy little thing.

We track out and along the top part of some of the Icelandic back country, overtaking lumbering, hugely tyred local super trucks and dawdling hired Toyota hatchbacks, making both seem by turn immensely archaic and intensely boring. The countryside beats up and down in a smooth black lava oscillation, a massive, ancient geological heartbeat - the main road cutting through it like a single tarmac main artery feeding innumerable veins of gravelly, unmade tracks. We're on our way to a place where I can look into the future. A future in which a low-impact, efficient little car like the Cactus will fit very nicely.

On the way, I have time to think. Iceland's a bit like that. It's a beautiful but brutal island, measured in muted tones, scarred by the violence of its conception. And it makes you prone to a kind of slightly dark contemplation. There is no daylight in the winter months, and now, in summer, night time is just a slight greying of the horizon. Not sure which is worse. I've only been here a couple of days, and it's already starting to mess with my head. It must be, because despite my obsession with horsepower, I'm starting to really fall for the Cactus, and it has approximately 400 less bhp than I usually require to fuel my ego. It's pretty obvious from the driving experience that, underneath the "simplification over complication" PR spin, this is just a C3 with a glittery frock, but the Cactus really will be cheap in some versions - starting at just under £13k - and it's really wonderfully characterful for that. A little pod of soft, friendly vibes. Hard not to feel comforted by it, in this place.

One of the reasons is that the Cactus feels... light. Both physically and emotionally. The styling doesn't take itself too seriously, and everyone we meet seems happily interested in it. It's unthreatening but not comical, interesting but not pastiche. There's a huge glass roof that saves 6kg over conventional steel sheet and makes the car feel open and airy, and the rear bench doesn't split or slide, saving precious weight. Most pointlessly electrified functions make do with manual adjustment, with only the front windows being electric and the rears hingeing out a couple of inches. Sounds annoying, but electric motors are heavy, and the lack of wind-down rear windows saves 11kg and allows the rear doors to be sculpted for more elbow-room, so the car always feels roomy, even if it's 20cm shorter and 6cm narrower than a C4. The result is that the Cactus really is, by modern standards, a featherweight. In fact, this little acid green Citroen (the official colour is ‘Hello Yellow', but it looks green to me) only weighs about a tonne. Anything with this interior volume generally weighs about a fifth more, which means that the modest engine range doesn't need to work hard to motivate the car. It also means that the Cactus can have smaller brakes, less need for cooling and a lighter drivetrain - it's a virtuous circle that means it feels peppy without ever troubling the limits of a somewhat modest handling capability. Indeed, Iceland's big sweeping curves do little to dispel the notion that the Cactus has any pretension to being fun to drive, and the endless uphills suck the momentum right out of the little car and require a downchange and revs to keep the little engine whirring in its powerband. There's not much for the keen driver here. But there's still something about the little Citroen that means it keeps your faith. It's an interesting little thing, plucky and fun, and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that there's something of the Fiat Panda about it. Small and cheap but not boring or thoughtless. And there would be definite possibilities for a proper Cactus AWD, or some sort of low-mu traction control and winter tyres, at least. I'm still thinking when we come across our next stop - the Krafla geothermal powerplant.

It looks like a Mars landing station. Silver and orange geodesic domes linked by swooping lines of pipes that race across the dusty, reddish-tinted earth like 22nd-century transit tubes. The main building looks like a modern museum, billowing clouds of sulphurous, artistic steam that smell disconcertingly of very rotten eggs. The best bit is that this is the industrial equivalent of the Cactus: using existing resources creatively. It looks like science fiction but has a far more unpretentious premise. In fact, it's bafflingly simple: Krafla is one of Iceland's original geothermal power stations, producing 60MW of power, and is basically a big heat exchanger dropped on the top of the Krafla volcano. It uses 33 boreholes to drop water onto Iceland's volcanic undercarriage to produce steam, and, in turn, electricity. Places like this do a lot for my inner peace by assuaging my inherent motoring guilt. If we could make more of hot rocks, maybe I could offset my V8 habit a little. But even this isn't hitting the spot. I'm not nearing nirvana, despite being intrigued and comforted by super-green technology.

Back to the Cactus, and I'm starting to get a headache from the pressure to remain calm. Which is self-defeating. But the little Citroen helps. No, there are no heated seats or massively complex infotainment systems, but the interior is pared back, and the better for it, much like the view. There's a pleasing lack of buttons, most controls grouped into a single 7in touchscreen on the top of the dash, with a little LCD panel in front of the driver that displays basic info. The rest is given over to handy storage and the luxury - in a small car anyway - of space. There's a decent top-mounted glovebox on the dash, made possible by a passenger airbag that's disappeared up into the roof behind the sun visor, and big, wide, comfortable seats up front and a squashy bench in the back - if you get the ETG auto 'box, you even get a sociable one-piece front seat. There's a slight worry that if the touchscreen decides to die in five years, then you'll only be able to operate the heated rear window, but generally it allows you to concentrate on pottering about without getting stressed because you can't find the right setting for the adaptive cruise control.

We head out to Lake My´vatn, and Iceland suddenly becomes a lot greener. There's not exactly an abundance of ancient forest, but the general ambience gently segues from black lava and sand the colour of dried blood to more healthy hues. Water. That'll do it. We stop, and I gaze out over the flat, glassy tranquillity of the lake, whose waters are punctuated by odd-looking pillars and arches of lava left from when the lake first appeared 2,300 years ago. I breathe deeply and try to find some sort of yogic centre, only to imagine that I look like I'm having a light asthma attack. There's one problem. My contemplation of the gentle majesty of age in nature is somewhat disturbed by having the local fauna stuffed up my nose, in my ears and dipping ceaselessly into my eyes. Flies. Endless swarms of tiny, personal-space-invading flies. I run around swatting at clouds of them like a loon, spitting them from my mouth and accidentally squashing them into my ears. It's enough to give you a phobia. And then I come across a helpful sign. Apparently ‘My´' in Icelandic is ‘midge'. And you'll have guessed already that ‘vatn' means ‘lake'. Nice view, but it's about as relaxing as being dipped in crawling insects. I retreat to a hotel, and night time grazes the horizon like a low-flying storm. Far from being more relaxed, I think I'm starting to lose it.

The next day, I track across wilder country, on unmade roads, and the Cactus throws up a few more surprises. The fact that the car is raised means that it rides well, and even running down a few light-hearted bits of off-roading, it deals with lumps and bumps without getting too fraught, which bodes well for the vagaries of sleeping policepersons in the UK. And while the little Citroen bobbles along, the views get bolder. We run along the side of a big hill, the path little more than a set of tyre tracks in red dust, and I suddenly realise that, as bizarre as it seems, the Cactus suits Iceland. What better car for a country that flips between lunar and Martian geography than one that looks like My First Spaceship? Much like the country, it makes use of known factors but somehow makes them look interesting, even if the underlying premise is simple. It has its own unique style, even though at first it feels a bit odd and unfamiliar. But, better than that, it brings things back to basics, without being beige. Up near the top of the hill, Iceland proves the same point. We round a corner, and spread below us is a view to make your brain stall.

In the near distance are volcanic vents that are pouring steam, hissing slightly. They're surrounded by glittering mineral deposits that phase from orange to yellow to red, and the water vapour in the air swirls little glistening rainbows around and about, highlighted against the dark smudge of the far horizon. The panorama is spread out in front like a painting, dipped in myriad shades. And it turns out that you don't need healing waters and technology to feel calm. You just need a big view and the time to enjoy it. Simple pleasures. It feels like freedom. Like peace. And the little, simple Citroen Cactus finally helped me get here.