You may have been on an Alaska Cruise, but for the daring amongst you why not try diving headfirst into the depths of the mysterious and mythical world of Iceland? Take a cruise to a place where landscapes are not associated with delightfully rolling green hills and lush meadows, but are laden with ice and lava.
The crackling cold, stiff winds, active volcanoes, lava flows, hot, bubbling pools, spouting geysers and mystical sagas, replete with monsters, goblins and other phantoms of the netherworld, seem determined to haunt you in your dreams.
Even to this day when people disappear and are never to be seen again elves and trolls are the convenient scapegoats used to explain the strange vanishings. This fact doesn’t help to shake off the eerie shudder that runs down your spine…
The world’s geologically youngest island, located in the North Atlantic Ocean is where you can look into our earth’s growling and fire-breathing belly.
Here, in Þingvellir, is the only place on this planet where on land you can see the European and American continental plate drift apart 2 cm per year, leaving deep cracks disfiguring the earth’s face and shaking the island with seismic spasms.
Maybe partly due to the landscape that appears like a gateway to another world better left unexplored, and the rich historic legacy of dramatic storytelling, about half of the modern Icelandic population still believe that they share the island with otherworldly creatures.
Roads are being re-routed around suspected elf-dwellings and built around fallen boulders as they believe trolls threw them to chase evil away or because they were angry, and before houses are built an elf-spotter is hired to investigate if the land already belongs to the spirits.
Trolls, so legend has it, are creatures of the night because they fear the sun as its rays instantly turn them into stone.
Knowing this tale, you will suddenly spot fiends, strange faces and anthropomorphic formations everywhere in the infernal terrain that is cast in a constant acidic and pungent smell of sulfur.
Although transmitting an underlying, distant sense of menace, the bubbling mud, the jets of hot steam and the seemingly weightless floating rock formations of volcanic injections of magma off the coast also captivate your imagination, hypnotize you and make you believe you have stepped into a parallel universe, a domain that is only yours, yours to explore, yours to shape and yours to write home about – if only to make others go.
It is a magical and mystical place not to be missed by anyone!
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