[WE ARE FROM HERE]
We have been planning trips in Iceland since 2000. We know this place in February as well as we know it in July. Anyone can love Iceland in July.
That year about 300,000 people visited the country. By 2018 it was 2.3 million. We have therefore spent our entire working life inside one of the fastest tourism booms any small country has been through, and we have watched what it does. Which farms sold up. Which valleys got a car park. Which operators grew carefully and which ones grew until the quality went out of them.
Friðrik started the company in 2000 and still owns it. What he began with was not a business plan. It was a set of phone numbers, a fairly complete picture of which roads go out in which month, and a strong opinion about what a good day in this country looks like. Twenty-six years later that is still the method. There are simply more phone numbers.
Some of what we know cannot be researched. It is the accumulation of having been here through it, of having sent people up a particular track in a particular week of a particular year and found out whether it worked. That kind of knowledge cannot be bought in. It can only be sat through.
