Where The #$% Am I?

- David Kushner

BEFORE NOEL SANTILLAN became famous for getting lost in Iceland, he was just another guy from New Jersey looking for adventure, armed with the modern traveler’s two essentials: a dream and, more important, a GPS unit.

On a frigid, pitch-black February morning in 2016, the 28-year-old marketing manager was driving away from Keflavík International Airport in a rented Nissan hatchback toward a hotel in Reykjavík, about 40 minutes away. He was excited that his one-week journey was beginning but groggy from the five-hour redeye flight. As a pink sun rose over the ocean and illuminated the snow-covered lava rocks along the shore, Santillan dutifully followed the commands of the GPS that came with the car, a calm female voice directing him to an address on Laugarvegur Road— a left here, a right there.

But after stopping on a desolate gravel road next to a sign for a gas station, Santillan got the feeling that the voice might be steering him wrong. He’d already been driving for nearly an hour, yet the ETA on the GPS put his arrival time at around 5:20 p.m., eight hours later. He reentered his destination and got the same result. Though he sensed that something was off, he decided to trust the machine.

The farther he drove, the fewer cars he saw. The roads became icier. Sleeplessness fogged his brain, and his empty stomach churned. The only stations he could find on the radio were airing strange talk shows in Icelandic. He hadn’t set up his phone for international use, so that was no help. At around 2 p.m., as his tires skidded along a narrow mountain road that skirted a steep cliff, he knew that the device had failed him.