Eli Whitman´s Journey

In 2014, I was living and traveling across Iceland, such a touching experience that is inside of my heart as a beautiful treasure (actually, I´m trying to publish a compilation of anecdotes and pictures in a volume called Hverfisgata 49). Beyond that what is explained in documentary films and travel guides, Iceland is a place that shows a thousand of different faces. Up there, in this island lost almost in the Arctic, you can visit dark shores where witches were killed just a hundred years ago; find yourself in a natural pool of hot water in the middle of the most desolate cold plain; greet funny seals in rivers of ice; observe the eruption of a volcano that bears slept for a thousand years; meet the place where Jules Verne imagined getting himself into the center of Earth; bump on the streets of Reykjavík with Jónsi, Sigur Rós singer, or Bjork; marvel yourself with the way of speaking of Icelanders, who show the remnants of the Viking tradition; see the magnificent space where Tolkien was inspired to create Mordor and the Middle Earth; reach the end of the world in an abandoned fiord lost in the twilight of eternal dusk; imagine black swans bringing you luck; talk without words with the midnight sun and the flush of the ocean; take pictures of the photogenic Icelandic horses; listen Heart is a drum, by Beck, driving on iced roads; find the Elephant Rock in the November ice; envision the steps that led offenders to the inhospitable highlands; want to move to the Paris of the Norte, Akureyri; live the dramatic landing in the Isafjördur airport; see abandoned bays where de herring industry died; jump on every one of the amazing waterfalls, feeling like you vaporize yourself as the water crashing against the rocks; feel how it feels a world that is created from nothing all the time; swim in crystal clear water at exact point where the Earth is pushing away America and Europe; watch the Atlantic ocean in a black beach, covered with rocks of ice, watching the ocean so vast and deep that you feel nothing; touch the magic of the history in the Icelandic sagas; sleep in a car at -10º C, protected by the stars and the northern lights. All that, and much more, is possible in Iceland. I know. I´ve been there.