Photos by Eadaoin Fagan
This August, I spread my wings, took a deep breath (multiple times), and went on my first ever solo trip. Iceland always fascinated me, so I thought what better place to start. My friends were having an amazing time on their girls holiday in the Amalfi Coast, and the space between my comfort zone and a dream I always had to travel solo seemed impossibly large. However, for the sake of personal growth and wanting to understand what people mean when they say they “truly found themselves” on solo trips, I did it.
The Icelandic landscape turned out to be beyond my imagination. It was like looking at my Junior Cert geography book come to life. With the waterfalls gushing, glaciers in the horizon, hot springs creating a foggy mist, and volcanoes actively erupting – all of this happening naturally, just mother earth doing her thing. It made me realise how I am a tiny speck on this earth, and how lucky I am to experience a life surrounded by such beauty. An important lesson I took with me was there is so much out there waiting for us to explore and experience, it’s just up to us to go and seek it.
I spent most of my time traveling around the country. I stayed in Reykjavik, which is where most of the population (only 360,000 population on the whole island!) live, as the rest of the island is mostly inhabitable. My favourite trip of the holiday was a 14-hour trip to the Glacier Lagoon: Jökulsárlón. Here’s some of my journal entry from that day:
“Driving there, although really far away, the views were like something out of a movie. There were really long, long roads surrounded by mountains. The roads were basically empty. We went on a boat in the Glacier Lagoon, full of icebergs, some only roughly 10 weeks old, freshly broken away from the glacier. The colours of these icebergs were breathtaking. The Diamond Beach was just across the bridge – I think it’s called that because pieces of iceberg were washed up on the shore and the way the sun shone on them really made them look like diamonds. We stopped at a waterfall, and I can’t explain the feeling of walking behind it. It really emphasised how vast and wonderfully beautiful the world is and how it is up to me to make the most of it. It was a moment where I felt like anything is possible for me to do, “the world is your oyster” type feeling.”
Since the world of travel is back up and running, I can’t wait to explore more places, either by myself or with friends and family. After being cooped up for the past year and a half, I think most people are itching to travel. The world is wide and it is ours to explore – what better time to start doing that than after being refined to our own cities for so long.
