musicmatzes blog

This was written on 9th August, during my trip through Iceland.

On this day we witnessed an accident of three young guys from Spain. They wanted to cross a river with their car, but got stuck and the car broke down. The complete car was in the river and drowned up to the steering wheel. After we pulled them out with our car (which thankfully has the right tools to pull 9 tons of weight) we noticed that the engine was broken. The three guys, luckily, got out soon enough and were not hurt (but in shock, especially the driver).

I can assure you, their vacation was over at that point. And you know what: This was the first day after they have rented the car.

What drives me to write this article is not their miserable situation or how lucky they were coming out of this alive (five meters further down the river they would be all dead now, probably). Also not because I want to shed some light on us because we are the saviours in this situation (we were just at the right place at the time, lucky for them).

What I really want to talk about is the number of strangers that cared more for the good pictures they got out of this as for helping. Overall it took us about 2.5 hours to get the car out of the river, the guys to calm down, drink some tea and call the car rental company. There were about 50 people passing by in this time, only three groups asked whether help was needed. All others stopped, took a few pictures and continued their journey.

Of course we also documented every step we made with my camera, but we did it while we helped, not while we stood there laughing our asses off (I don't actually think anyone laughed their asses of because it was clearly visible that these guys were in a really dangerous situation down there).

After we got them calmed a bit (one was literally shaking, not only because of the cold water he fell into, but also of fear of having to pay for the whole mess), we brought them to the next camping side from where they could call they police and car rental company.

tags: #life #traveling #iceland