For the last six years, between the months of September and March, Maps & Stories has been taking guests to Iceland, to witness one of the most spectacular shows on earth – the Dance of the Northern Lights. Nature’s own Broadway, if you will – where the sky is the stage, the open fields are the theatre, the auroras are the actors, and the travellers are the audience.

Over a course of 28 guided trips, we have had the absolute pleasure of seeing the joy, the wonder, the amazement in the eyes of our guests when they see the lights for the first time – an experience that can never be described in words, an image that can never be captured by the finest lens, and a memory that can never be replicated by any virtual technology.

Returning from Iceland earlier this year from our last trip, little did we know that we are not going back for quite some time! Not in our wildest dreams did we imagine that a small virus would consume the entire world for months to come!! And that we would have to cancel all our trips for the rest of the year and resign ourselves to a life behind a mask in the confines of a lockdown.

But the boundaries of a lockdown do not apply to the mind. We believe that every trip starts in the mind first – the senses will follow. So let your mind soar the high skies, imagine places far beyond, and conjecture experiences which are to be banked until a time that you can travel again. That is what will separate the travellers from tourists. And when you are ready to travel again, we will be there. Because we believe in tomorrow. The great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier’”. Yes, we are hopeful. That we will be back in Iceland very soon. That the theatre will be sold out again, that the house will be full. That the auditorium will resound in oohs and aahs and wowwwws.

That the lights will shine once again.