What’s your
plan?
No matter what you were thinking, Iceland isn’t the kind of
place you show up to without a plan. Maybe
you imagine just arriving, renting a car and going at your own pace. Forget it
and be warned- Iceland’s vast distances and scant resources require expert
planning and attention to detail.
With more tourists each year than Iceland’s entire
population, there are just too few places to eat and sleep, not to mention find
fuel. Rooms often sell out entirely to residents alone, leaving you spending hours
each afternoon trying to find a place to sleep, missing dinner before
restaurants close for the night, panicking about diminishing fuel levels in
your car.
No doubt just winging it you’ll see some lovely scenery. But
what you won’t know about is everything you missed- the transforming
experiences that you can’t possibly imagine having never been there before.
After dozens of trips across a decade of adventure there I
can assure you, the stronger your plan is going in, the greater your
fulfillment will be coming out.
I hate
tours.
If you’re like me, you’d never consider joining a tour
group. You’re already a savvy traveler who’d rather just do it alone. You don’t
feel a group dynamic has anything to offer you, and know to the contrary it
would only limit your experience and cramp your style.
You don’t go to places like Iceland to meet people you
wouldn’t hang out with back home. You certainly don’t stay in the kinds of
hotels, eat the kinds of meals and go on planned circuits that tour companies do.
The idea of nine days in a bus makes your skin crawl. Instead you just want to
explore things your way, all on your own.
Besides, you don’t trust the value a tour operator is
offering and figure you can do it much better on your own, and for a lot less.
Instead, you pick up a few good guidebooks and ask your
friends who have already been- friends whose taste you trust a lot more than a
tour company’s. You go online to see what travel blogs and publications like
Conde Nast Traveler and New York Times have to say about your destination, and
maybe even look at tour websites like this one just to get the scoop on
logistics. But at the end of the day you book it all on your own, and even
pride yourself a little for doing so.
But having never been there- having never driven the
distances and experienced their nuances first-hand, having never gone through
exercises of timing, booking excursions, etc. - you cant really understand how
to put it all together to get the most out of every day, much less get around
the entire island in time for your flight home, and that makes all the
difference.
Best-kept
secrets…
A few of us have been lucky enough to have the kind of
experience once or twice in a lifetime of being taken to the really special,
authentic places where there are no tourists. Going it alone is fantastic, but
even better is having a local person show you the best-kept secrets you’d never
find on your own- and certainly not with a conventional tour operator.
What’s more, regardless of the most resourceful self-guided
planning, the truly exceptional experiences simply aren’t available to the
independent traveler because they require a group for efficiencies in requisite
expertise, specialized equipment and cost. For the kinds of really moving opportunities
it helps to have the numbers of a group to open doors and get things going.
To put it in more descriptive terms, as warm and generous as
Icelanders truly are, an accredited guide just can’t set aside a whole day,
bring in specialized four-wheel-drive equipment and drive you 12 hours across
rugged lava floes if there are only two of you.
Nor can a sea captain spend an afternoon on a private boat
taking you to an abandoned island to scale its cliffs and find a hidden colony
of enchanting puffins if you are traveling alone.
In just a week there you’ll be hard-pressed to receive an
invitation to spend an evening at a bonfire on a private black sand beach or to
a historic private home for an exquisite 5-course meal if you opt to show up on
your own.
Having traveled to Iceland several times a year for a decade
now, I’ve built up many close friendships along the way (read about just a few
of them under ‘About Us’) and I’ve gained insights that are utterly unavailable
through conventional tourism- not just Iceland’s greatest highlights but also
some its most elusive opportunities.
Icepedition’s unique itineraries get the most out of nine
days without compromising individuality and personal style.
Have your
Icelandic pancake and eat it too.
Through Icepedition you can have all the advantages of team
of private expert personal planners, and still decide your own level of
independence- at a price lower than most conventional tour operators.
Icepedition is like having a team of private expert planners
on the sidelines that you call on as much or as little as you prefer.
