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experience. Practically almost impossible to try or test before purchase, the
tourism product becomes highly dependent upon its de-materialized
appearance in tourism cartographic imaginationing. Unlike Iceland itself,
images of it as a tourist destination are spatially mobile and may be
transported to a tourist generating region. Tourist representations
simultaneously display and erase, reduce and select, just as the cartography
of the tourist imaginationing they want to find a place in. For the tourists,
here and now, then and there, a cartography that is as real as imagined. So
therefore:
Iceland is not a myth, it is actual and real, a solid portion of the earth’s
surface. It is not, either, what every one supposes, nor what we have
reason to believe it is, from its name, its location, and the meager
descriptions we have of it. (Miles 1852, in Boucher 1989, p. 17).
More formally expressed, the territory of the map is not the territory
of its referential other. The cultural product Blue Lagoon may appear in the
“groomed” guise of nature, and it will work as an efficient tourist
destination image because it is unique and therefore not representative of
Iceland. As always, something more is needed than a mere silent spatial
co-ordinate of a location in order to spark off and change the destiny of a
tourist imaginationing, for example; “Energy for life through the forces of
nature” (see image 3.4).
Image 3.4: Blue Lagoon: forces of culture through nature? 24
24 Marketing of the Blue Lagoon in “Map of Iceland, 2008-2009”.
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