The New Year fireworks cruise in Reykjavik: one sailing a year, from the middle of the harbour

In most capitals New Year fireworks are a single municipal display fired from one point at midnight. Reykjavík does not work that way. Fireworks here are sold in the last days of the year by the volunteer search-and-rescue teams — the ICE-SAR units that pull people off glaciers and out of rivers — and the sales are their principal annual fundraiser.

The result is that tens of thousands of people buy their own, and at midnight the entire city fires at once from gardens, car parks and street corners for something like half an hour. There is no organiser, no timing and no centre to the display. It happens across the whole skyline simultaneously, and the smoke from it hangs over the city for hours.

From the water you get the only vantage point that takes in the whole thing at once: the city from Grandi to Laugardalur in one wide arc, the harbour lights below it, Esja behind, and the flashes reflected in the bay. On land you are inside the display; from a boat you are looking at it, which is a completely different experience.

There is a cultural piece worth knowing. Before midnight much of the city is at a bonfire — the brenna — and many households are indoors watching the annual comedy review on television. The streets fill in the last twenty minutes. If you sail, you trade the bonfires for the panorama.

The evening has a shape, and it is worth knowing before you decide how to spend it.

Late afternoon: bonfires. Neighbourhood brennur are lit across the city from about half past eight, and they are a genuinely local event — families, mulled something, a large fire in a car park.

Half past ten: the streets empty. This is Áramótaskaupið, the annual satirical television review that a very large share of the country watches at the same moment. For half an hour the city is uncannily quiet.

From about half past eleven: everybody comes out at once with the fireworks they bought from the rescue teams, and by midnight the whole horizon is going up. It runs hard for about half an hour and continues in bursts for a good while after.

The boat leaves before all this and puts you where you can see the entire arc of it. What you trade is the bonfires and the street-level chaos, which are also worth seeing. If you have two New Years in Iceland, do one of each; if you have one, decide whether you want to be in the display or looking at it.