Although the result of chance, the experience that we tell you through this "Iceland for millennials" is representative of a generation of travelers that you, readers, and we, protagonists, share.
Eight young people arrive on a paradise island to write an adventure report, led by an intrepid guide who will have to face external elements, like the climate and the inflexibility of the natives, and internal, like parsimony and hedonism of its tourists. Y is not a reality show.
Road trip through Iceland.
It seems logical that a group of millennials choose one of the youngest (in historical terms) and most fashionable (in tourist terms) countries for your vacation. It is, however, somewhat more paradoxical than the first contact with this land of Viking mythology and the epic sagas is through a prosaic Whatsapp group, in informal English: WeRoaders in Iceland. (By the way, only then do I think of the little sense of this toponym in Spanish; shouldn't it be something like Iceland? Having thought about it a few centuries ago…).
Each character feeds the stereotype of current diversity: different races, languages, sexual orientations, aspirations and tastes... and a common goal: meet and have fun. A clear expression of thirtysomething, for better and for worse, wanting to interrupt your routine with a little exoticism, early risers and new faces. Young people willing to invest a month's salary to fill their Instagram with amazing landscapes and have the feeling that they are back to being backpackers with a adventure under control.
Though the company WeRoad organizes hundreds of trips like this around the world, ours has the particularity of being the first whose members they come from three different countries and travel to write it. Of course, the script in this "Iceland for millennials" is similar: instead of a bus waiting for us at the Keflavik Airport, our guide, with a case of beers and our same curiosity and excitement about the trip, is now ready to rent all three cars with whom we will travel part of the country the following days.
White night in Reykjavik.
At the first dinner we began to put a face to the WhatsApp numbers. From the beginning, the relaxed rhythm helps us to get rid of such formalities that appear with age and which we would have dispensed with in those distant youth camps summer, which is the format that this trip reminds us of. In a good restaurant drinks and fish make up for the ride, though tiredness and strict plan the next day discourage us from prolonging the evening See you later.
Our short walk back to the hotel is not enough to give Reykjavík the least interest as capital. However, that midnight Sun and the snow-capped volcanoes that surround its bay do allow us to understand that we have a few days ahead of us in which we will share something unusual.
ON THE ROAD
First, landscape. We got in the cars early, we buy bread and some ineffable sausages for the road and we began to advance through a kind of video game. It's like everything arose in fantasy, as if an extravagant author had been offered an immense empty lot to mold it to his whim: come on, here we are going to put some volcanoes, there some cliffs, colored rocks and now a peninsula full of great fjords, he thought.
Without a doubt, he likes water, since there are plenty of waterfalls, rivers, geysers, the sea, ice, glaciers... But without neglecting some alien plains, those in which Aldrin and Armstrong trained before traveling to the moon. To top it off, add caves, mountains, lava, hot rivers and exotic animals such as seals and puffins, which give life to the inhospitable peninsula of Snæfellsnes . In exchange for this captivating beauty, we pay the price of a schizoid climate, which endangers any activity.
Godafoss, one of the most beautiful and most visited waterfalls in Iceland.
All these stimuli those we attend without too much geological or historical information, serve to fill the few silences and occupy vacant moments. The small size of the group, the measured rhythms of its members and flexibility that the car and nature give us (and minimal linguistic impediments aside) affect the feeling of autonomy, that it is us and not a third party the one who decides what to play next.
We all like how fast we move, but lack of context and mutual understanding keeps printing a artificial well in the first days. That our guide shares our surprise at the landscapes and the difficulties in pronouncing his names make him part of the group, but he leaves us without referents to understand the whims of nature or the history of the country. At that point, we ask ourselves if that thirst for information is it a professional flaw (and the fear of ending up writing a sterile report) or something shared by other WeRoad travelers.
Ultimately, the resolution and knowledge of the guide solve these moments in which fictional adventures are forged... which strikes the perfect balance for those who do not want to get stuck with their friends in the middle of a glacier but he also doesn't feel like traveling with a group of compulsive photographers guided by a tour operator.
The hot springs of Iceland.
The journey is based on experiences, relationally and visually. Iceland feeds and impresses us, but as the car hours accumulate, we feel that the real discovery is the collective, where humor and generational traits take precedence over differences.
There are also no lack comments guild, with exchanges of ideas on how we will deal with this text. I'm aware of not only are they my characters, but I can end up being theirs. "Don't give yourself so much importance", says someone to put us in our place, when we were about to believe us Kapuscinski.
SHARED EXPERIENCES AND FRUSTRATIONS
In addition to that common goal, our flexibility unites us and the joy of finding travel company in a stage in which our respective friends take refuge in their partners or their children. Often, yes, it appears the barrier of nomophobia, when a mobile phone seizes its owner and engulfs him to a parallel universe, whether during a monotonous car ride or in front of the imposing Gullfoss waterfall. At least the trip is perfectly documented.
accustomed to traveling alone, I am amazed at the ease with which time flows in a group. But also I get especially frustrated when a person's delay (or her alarm clock) invalidates our early morning and, with it, one of the most promising activities. So instead of dive between tectonic plates that separate Eurasia and America, we have to resign ourselves to seeing them from a watcher full of souvenirs.
Underwater in Iceland.
We are now on the third day, which begins tarnished by that disappointment and for the long hours in the car. nature is so generous that at times we fall into a kind of tourist pornography: we visit places compulsively, as soon as we stick our heads out, we read a sign and we leave without much more than a photo surrounded by other tourists. To make matters worse, toponymy is so complex that we can barely remember where have we been
BLUE CATHARIS
However, towards night a proposal takes us out of lethargy tourist. If the weather is not too bad, we can make a path of three kilometers up the mountain and get to some hot springs, says the guide. We accept without being fully aware of what awaits us: we are in the Reykjadalur river valley, whose descent between the mountains is betrayed by serpentine columns of smoke.
This vapor curtain directs the eye to where the earth, bare and with some trace of snow, grazes the clear evening sky. At each bend in the road, the landscape demands a photo, but we are eager to move on and be able to rest in one of its backwaters, where the water oscillates between 50 and 100 degrees.
Kirkjufellsfoss, Iceland.
It may not be as spectacular as the geysers, like the Kirkjufellsfoss waterfall or the caves of the Snæfellsjökull volcano that we left behind, but, exhausted after the ascent, we feel that this place is our discovery, that we deserve this hot bath in the evening sun, a shot of beer and a sandwich. Better yet, we feel that we have found it together and that cathartic effect comforts us to return completely surrendered to the hotel.
The fluctuation of sensations It is not by chance, as a WeRoad manager confesses to us. A group of analysts study travel experience curves with more social activities at the beginning, free time in the middle and more active excursions that culminate, in the end, in one or several days of relaxation and partying.
In fact, when you are aware that you spend the last few hours with a person, something pushes to condense everything that had been developing for months. On the last day we walk around the center of Reykjavik, eat what is supposed to be the best hot dog in the world and we sing in the car on the way towards the Blue Lagoon.
Thermal lagoon, Iceland.
There we also discover that one of the most desired places of the country is not natural, but the leftovers of a geothermal power plant nearby, whose hot water and the algae in its pipes achieve this alien color and healthy effects for the skin. Soaking, we make us hungry until a last supper that includes whale, shark or horse…
We draw strength from weakness and once again enjoy the white night that enters through the windows of a seedy nightclub, in which we promise each other, without a shadow of a doubt, that we will soon meet in Madrid.
rheumy and with a queasy stomach, we say goodbye with affection at Keflavík airport, aware that, far beyond the impression of these landscapes, the really difficult thing will be to forget these faces and anecdotes that could have happened in any other place, but that we will always associate with Iceland.