Running on empty is a feeling we often experience before visiting Iceland’s wonderful Porsche community. We’ve had friends up there going back a long time: Fusi the network specialist, Björki in his garage and Petur, who divides his time between flying a Boeing 757 for Iceland Air and running Porsche Club Iceland. After just a few days in Iceland our batteries have been replenished, as the island acts like a charging station. We have switched from worn out and exhausted to wide awake, deeply relaxed and ready for anything. After six visits to Iceland at different times of year, we want to return the favor with this issue of CURVES. We salute this miraculous country in the Arctic Circle, telling its story and taking our CURVES readers on a journey around the island. It was about time.
Yet again, Iceland managed to spring a few surprises. There is no other way to describe it: what you are holding here in your hands is just the tip of the iceberg or, more aptly, the cone of the volcano. Iceland is almost impossible to capture on camera, sending sensors into meltdown, while still ensuring an incredible flood of images. Perhaps we have reached the most impressive moment of this journey: while looking through the resulting pictorial record, we come face to face with the indelible memories of many hundreds of kilometers traveled: the weather, the wind, the people, the road. This is the reason why we have enjoyed spending some quiet time revisiting the images in the comfort of the CURVES office. Although the country has disappeared in a distant haze, it comes back with a bang in the photos and videos. Even just a small percentage of the snapshots taken are more than enough to make an engrossing story for our readers, taking them on the journey with us. In every issue of CURVES produced over the last 10 years we have been amazed at what the camera has captured; things that we might missed entirely in the heat of the moment while photographing or filming. Suddenly they are there: structures, colors, wildness, tiny beauties. To repeat: this is something we have discovered again and again over a period of 10 years. But Iceland blows us away completely in this regard. It’s hard to believe that we were actually there, in the shadow of lava-spewing volcanoes, on the grinding gray North Atlantic coast, crossing vast monochrome deserts and multicolored landscapes. We start to ask ourselves: Was it actually the way we remember? What might have been? What if we arrived just a day earlier or later?
Let’s put it this way: CURVES readers shouldn’t be surprised to find us publishing a second or third issue on this journey at some stage in the future. We have more than enough material to ensure not a moment’s boredom. Maybe we’ll do things differently and return to Iceland in a few months’ time. We may need to go back to the little gravel road where we turned back just a few days ago. The photo revisits a question that still lingers in the memory: “Aren’t you curious to know what lies at the end?”
We should remember to thank Iceland itself. Thanks also to all our friends. And to the local people, whom we have found to be extremely friendly, positive and supportive. After a few words, the thin layer of polite reserve gives way to relaxed and dogged helpfulness and a frost-bitten cheeriness that cracks and creaks like the ice floes in the North Atlantic. We were helped up the sides of volcanoes and let into people’s living rooms and kitchens – Iceland is so beautiful because its people are so special. We’d like to say: Takk!
