Here’s Why...

Goecco Outdoor Adventures aficionados know the score...but for someone who's very green, well, here's a rather fuller picture than the home page "Dictionary definition" of Goecco Outdoor Adventures.

So by way of "setting out our stall", here are the 5-Ws...

Who?
What?
Where?
When?
and Why?

WHO?

Goecco Outdoor Adventures guides are a bunch of bonhomous Icelanders extending the hand of welcome to the strangers in their midst.

That's a delightful way of putting it...but it doesn't go far enough.

The "killer application" so to speak, is that in addition to all that bonhomie guides, are by a very long chalk some of the best walking tour guides in Iceland. As somebody else once put it, "if this were a golf tournament, every single name on the leader board would be a Goecco Outdoor Adventures guide".

Goecco Outdoor Adventures guides come from all sorts of backgrounds. A lot of them are top flight Official Icelandic Guides. We "cherry pick" the best of the Corps.

And finally many of the guides are actors. We like what actors bring to the party in terms of "presentational skills" (in that naff phrase). Timing, presence, the superb voice, being completely at ease in front of a crowd of people, etc.

Those are gifts.

You can't teach those things. People have either got those abilities or they don't...end of story. The "material" - the history and all those wonderful Reykjavik tidbits and stories that are our stock in trade can be taught or picked up iron filings to a magnet.

WHAT?

What's Goecco Outdoor Adventures?
Well, pared right down it's walking and story-telling and, in consequence, finding out about figuring out your surroundings. Which is why it's such a satisfying way to while away a couple of hours. Because walking and talking and scoping out where you are and marvelling is what we've all been doing since we were ankle-biters...since "
Time let us hail and climb golden in the heydays of his eyes...in the Icelandic lamb-white days when we were young and easy and Time held us green..."

Or as Jonas Freydal Thorsteinsson puts it in Esperanto,
“Fishing the past from the disposal wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth” The message is simple.
JUST THINK YOURSELF!

And because a great Goecco Outdoor Adventures is a series of stunning discoveries, of frissons , of "eureka moments", of cork poppings, of making connections, of being there in your mind's eye ("in such places and with such a guide the past becomes our present")... well, wide-eyed, child-eyed wonder does take hold from time to time.

Or to put it another way: then and there and here and now dovetail on a great walk...and that's heady stuff. In short, a brilliant Goecco Outdoor Adventures is a white knuckle ride - okay, stroll - through history...and architecture...and biography...and archaeology...and geography...and whatever else is of interest - everything from Reykjavik's weather to its geology to the latest gob-smacking gossip on The Reykjavik Welcome Walk to great shops, shows, and shindigs.

And white knuckle is the mot juste - because a great guide conducts historical lightning!

What else?

Well, a Goecco Outdoor Adventures is...fun. It's fresh air. It's exercise. It's anecdotal. It's low-intensity, ecologically friendly "tourism". It's exploration. It's getting keyed in to a Reykjavik neighbourhood...and feeling that you're a local, that you belong, if only temporarily.

And, hey, there's even a very agreeable social element. A Goecco Outdoor Adventures is a completely natural social situation...which means that people meet and chat and compare notes: "have you seen this show/that exhibition?"..."we discovered the most wonderful little restaurant yesterday"...that sort of thing.

Bottom line:
Goecco Outdoor Adventures will change the way you see the city.

As a journalist once put it,
"Interesting, informative, pleasant!"
The tour was interesting, informative, pleasant, revealing and above all, very, very weird, some-times even simultaneously combining all five elements." Sindri Eldon, Reykjavik Grapevine , Issue 8 2006.

WHEN?

Goecco Outdoor Adventures operates 365 days a year. The only days that are ever significantly different for us are Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself. On those two days we do throttle back quite considerably.

The other 363 days of the year, though, it’s full speed ahead for us: i.e., on weekdays during the summer we run anywhere from a two to ten different walks. And over the course of the weekend we run something like 20 different Goecco Outdoor Adventures – 10 on Saturday and 10 on Sunday (most of the walks are organised for pre booked groups).

We have walks every morning, every afternoon, and every evening for pre booked groups and there are guaranteed departures throughout the summer months of May, June, July, August and September.

WHERE?

There are over 8 different walks in the Reykjavik Walks repertory.
Few great walks in central Reykjavik of course...but we also explore "Elliðarár dalur". An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness... "The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape that echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.

This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.

A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were travelling rather than making...every walk (is) a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known. Perhaps this is where walking's peculiar utility for thinkers comes from.

The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far. Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, bus, boat, or plane.

It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination."

Bonvoyage!

Jónas Freydal Thorsteinsson
CEO. Goecco Outdoor Adventures Iceland

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