RooMXMatez TM: BETWEEN FIRE AND ICE

BETWEEN FIRE AND ICE

By Unknown Tuesday, January 12, 2016 Travel

First impression? - Not as cold as you would expect, but still cold, and, despite the time of the year being October, still quite green. While I was there the first snow fell. The whole country is characterized by its thermal and volcanic activity. Everywhere you look you see either steam that rises from the hot springs, volcanoes or the landscape covered with lava and on the other hand glaciers. That is Iceland: a land with many very big glaciers in Europe, therefore it is also called the land of fire and ice.

I visited the village of Geysir, where you can imagine what I saw... I'm not quite sure what got its name first. A geyser is an international word that indicates outbreaks of boiling water, which erupts many ten meters in the air: a very interesting thing to see. That day I continued my way to one of the numerous waterfalls in Iceland and a beautiful one at that. Gullfoss waterfall has an interesting story, because inhabitants wanted to use it to generate electricity, but one local woman mocked their plan with threatening to throw herself into the waterfall, if they intended to build a hydroelectric power station on it. I also visited the oldest parliament in Europe in the city of Thingvellir, where it is clearly visible how two tectonic plates deviate from one another. In Thingvellir there can also be seen many naturally created hexagonal pillars.

Water! Iceland has very clean water. In fact, the whole nature is pristine as Iceland is relatively sparsely populated. In the whole country live about 300 thousand inhabitants (half of those in Reykjavik). Iceland is about five times bigger than Slovenia, but most of the country is uninhabited, as the land does not permit the inhabitation.

During my visit, I visited the Viðey island, which is located close to Reykjavik. On this island, every year in October on the day of the death of John Lennon, in his honour his efforts for world peace, they light "Imagine Peace Tower", a powerful beam of lights that shines high in the sky. Every year the guest of honour is his wife, Yoko Ono. They together visited Iceland many times and this island apparently must have had a great impact on them. Iceland people are one of the most friendly, hospitable and tolerant people I’ve ever met. I can say that I have not met a single one that I would not have liked nor one that would in any aspect be rude or impolite to me.

One of the highlights of my visit were also the Westman islands, where I enjoyed the exceptional hospitality of a friend that I previously only vaguely got to know.

A place you should also visit is the Glacier Lagoon. The Northern lights didn't impress me as much as I expected, but it is true that it happens in countless variations. Maybe mine was not the best variation of them all.

Otherwise, Iceland has a lot of beautiful places and things to see and so many things to do. Among the major are: whale watching in their natural environment, walking on glaciers, trips on snowmobiles or wads, diving, helicopter tours, many different excursions and all kinds of daily tours, hiking and many more things. There is also a bad thing about Iceland, the prices for everything are very expensive, about three to four times the prices in Slovenia.

About half of the people living there are driving around with SUVs with huge wheels - some due to the conditions and some just because they like that. Besides that, you can see pretty good cars on the roads in Iceland these days. In the past the picture was slightly different, almost all vehicles were luxury cars, but the crisis had quite a huge impact on Iceland.

All in all, I highly recommend a visit to Iceland. You should explore the country for about two to three weeks and have enough money with you. The experience will definitely be gorgeous!

Jure Rugani - Timi Letonja - Jana Letonja - Simone Bronzi

Male model (Interviewee) - CEO & Founder of RooMXMatez TM (Co-writer) - Contributing journalist (Co-writer) - Creative Director of RooMXMatez TM (Editor)