Parting thoughts on Iceland

by Geoff Hart

Previous installment: July 6-7: Return to Reykjavik

On the whole, we had a wonderful—but expensive—trip. Google suggests Iceland recently had a national annual minimum wage of 214000 kronur (a little over $2000 Canadian). That seems awfully low even for people working at the lower end of the food chain, but Google suggests a median income of ca. US$25K per household. That’s just over half of the values in the U.S. and Canada, where prices and tax rates are (respectively) much lower and lower. We certainly saw a lot of high-quality cars (Toyotas and better) and a significant number of luxury brands (Mercedes, Tesla), but also less prestigious brands such as Czech Skodas. The houses and apartments seemed very small by North American standards. As elsewhere, I expect some people are doing very well, some not so well, and the majority are getting by, but on the whole, it seems likely that disposable income would be much less in Iceland.

The number of tourists who visit Iceland is reported to have been growing rapidly, and recently surpassed 1 million (i.e., more than 3 times the national population). Although this is undoubtedly great for the economy, the social impacts of this explosive growth of the tourism industry will be huge, particularly during the current phase of rapid growth, when there will be growing pains as the industry tries to accommodate therapidly growing demand. I can imagine huge increases in vehicle traffic, particularly since tour buses are currently in very short supply and this will increase car and sport ute rentals. I can also imagine a great decrease in opportunities for prime tourism experiences—that is, getting to see something without most of those million tourists standing between you and the sights. We escaped most of the tourists by going early in the seaon, but also by taking the more difficult and demanding hikes whenever we could. Even so, we were rarely out of sight of other hikers for long. I can imagine a future scenario in which Iceland allocates 1 or 2 days per month for "premium" hiking and other tourism experiences: that is, you could buy a special (and pricey) permit to see the parks and museums on days when everyone else is excluded.

It seemed that there were not enough local people to fill the need for service staff; unemployment was reported to be lower than 4%, depending on the source consulted, and might drop as low as 2% according to some predictions. Thus, we saw many imported workers. For example, there were many Chinese staff* at the Grand Hotel in Reykjavik, plus one Irish woman, and our tour guide at the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon was Spanish. This seems to have been reflected in the quality of the service: everyone was friendly, but with few exceptions, only the immigrant workers seemed really enthusiastic or warm. Service was also often indifferent or even outright bad. For example, at one restaurant we visited, the owners lost a good chunk of money because we couldn’t get the waitress’ attention to order dessert and possibly more drinks. I suspect this is a combination of inexperience (it was early in the season and she was young enough this might have been her first service industry job), possibly resentment of the influx of invaders**, and possibly the effect of the no tipping policy; gratuities are included at a standard national rate in the bill, so there’s little reward for providing exceptional customer service.

* There were surprisingly many Chinese tourists. Given the high prices in Iceland and its distance from China, this is additional confirmation of how rapidly China’s prosperity is rising. It also led me to wonder whether the large number of Chinese hotel staff was also a planned comfort thing (i.e., providing familiar faces for Chinese tourists while far from home).

**Oh, the irony: I imagine a Monty Python skit in which a group of dejected Vikings are sitting in a pub, horned helmets on head, swords and axes either peace-bonded or “checked” at the door, complaining about all the tourists invading their country and leaving with the spoils of tourism. (Side note: A display in the national museum explained that Viking helmets were not horned. Maybe this is one of those “[foreign] devils always have horns” images perpetrated by the survivors of Viking raids?)

The first few times I heard spoken Icelandic, it sounded more like Russian, rather than the lilt of Norwegian or Swedish that I’d expected. Later, at least one of our guides had what I’d call a Swedish accent and some other people had what sounded like a Germanic accent. I didn’t hear enough Icelandic to be confident that there’s any one overall accent, as just about everyone spoke English to us and I had few eavesdropping opportunities. I suspect there are likely regional dialects just as there are in North America (e.g., Québecois vs. U.S. Deep South vs. Hahvahd), or more likely generational differences that depend on what English TV or radio a given person listened to while they were learning English.

I noted earlier that stuff was expensive. As an example, we bought a 16” fully loaded pizza for dinner and shared a a pint of Gull lager (pronounced “goodl” = golden), and it cost us nearly C$50. Beer was routinely close to C$8 for a standard bottle and C$11 or more for a pint. Sandwiches at supermarkets were more reasonably priced, ranging from $4 to $8 for reasonably decent sandwiches. I didn’t investigate other drinks, since the water is excellent and I drank mostly water when not drinking coffee or beer. But Iceland isn’t a place where you’re going to dine out on a tight budget. Shopping for supplies in supermarkets and building your own lunches with fresh-baked bread or the amazingly dense (thus, filling) local rye bread supplemented by cheese, peanut butter, or coldcuts is a good plan for cutting the cost. Ditto for apples, bananas, and locally grown vegetables. Another option is to bring your own snacks: as of 2015, Iceland has quite weak restrictions on food imports (nobody even asked us if we were importing food), so you can bring a lot of processed food. If you're thinking of bringing peanut butter, remember that the TSA considers it a dangerous incendiary device, so you’ll need to pack it in your checked baggage rather than carrying it onto the plane.

We wanted to dine out and sample Icelandic food, but were still pretending to be on a budget, so we decided to live on a combination of the breakfast buffet at the hotel (which was included in our tour price and was decent, if not up to North American “everything including the squeal” buffet standards), snacks or sandwiches for lunch, and restaurants for dinner. To cover the snacks component of our diet, we packed about 4 pounds of trail mix and dried fruit, which came in particularly handy for hiking snacks. We also packed chocolate (about a pound of dark chocolate almonds), but largely because I’m a chocoholic and get twitchy if I go more than an hour or two without having some. Icelandic chocolate is very good (including, to my surprise, milk chocolate with lumps of salty black licorice embedded), but it’s too pricey for consuming in bulk: about C$3 to C$5 for about three Hershey’s bars worth of middle-grade locally made chocolate, and up to C$10 for the gourmet-grade stuff. I bought a bunch of the middle-end stuff, but saved it for savoring—and it was definitely worth savoring. We also packed about half a pound of dark chocolate-covered espresso beans, which is great for providing a jolt of caffeine when you’re nowhere near a coffee shop or don’t want to pay worse-than-Starbucks prices. (Again, Icelandic coffee was generally very good. Just not cheap.)

If you’ve read the blog for my China trip, you know that I use the deeply sophisticated and mathematically robust t-shirt index to gauge overall prices. This past May, t-shirts were running ca. C$4 to C$5 in China, versus C$10 on sale to C$20+ at full price in Canada. In Iceland, C$32 seemed to be the going price, though there were several “buy 3 for the price of 2 deals” in shops that specialized in t-shirts. No such discounts in places where the shirt was only one of a great many other items. I usually bring home a t-shirt as a souvenir, but not at these prices. Instead, I brought home a few nice chunks of lava. (Even a million tourists won't deplete Iceland's lava supply, and the island is making more every year. Still, don't tell the government.)

Hotels were an interesting and mixed bag. The Grand Hotel, the first place we stayed and the swankiest, has a rack rate of more than C$300 per night for even simple rooms. Presumably tour companies can negotiate a better rate. That includes a decent breakfast buffet that lets you eat enough that you can skip lunch, though they discourage stuffing your pockets to make your own lunch. But the rooms don’t provide taken-for-granted Western stuff like packaged soap and boutique-brand shampoo and skin lotion; just liquid soap or body wash. That’s practical and ecologically sensible, because it’s far less wasteful. But for the high price, I’d expect more of the frills. There were also unnecessarily complex shower controls. (A recurring theme in my travel writing is “their bathrooms make no sense!” This is a combination of cultural relativism at its finest and [mostly] tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating “Innocents Abroad” humor, I hasten to add.) The first night, I couldn’t figure out the shower because there was a button on the temperature dial that you had to depress before you could rotate the dial more than a couple stops; I didn’t depress it sufficiently, so it stopped moving before the water warmed. Presumably it’s there to stop you from scalding yourself, but since it doesn’t stop you from achieving egg-boiling temperatures once you know how the button works, there are better ways to do that. A different room on our last night at the same hotel had seemingly identical controls, which I approached with hubristic confidence of my hard-won mastery, but was thwarted when I found no way to divert the water from the bathtub spout to the showerhead. Turns out you had to rotate the water volume dial counterclockwise from the “stop” position instead of clockwise. One assumes that Icelanders (like people everywhere in the world) learn these default behaviors at their parents’ knees, but they confused heck out of me, a scalded veteran of many perplexing foreign bathrooms.

One final hotel issue: All three hotels where we stayed provided a pair of narrow single beds, sometimes pushed together and sometimes not, and this also seemed common on hotel Web sites that provided room photos. Thus, it seems a ubiquitous Icelandic thing. I suppose this could be just some ancient and much-emulated interior decorator’s creative metaphor to remind everyone that the country straddles the mid-Atlantic ridge in a universe where the rate of expansion is accelerating, and that beds and everything else should behave in a way that reflects this metaphor. (Perhaps separatist Quebec hotels should also embrace this metaphor to subtly shape the minds of their guests.) Or perhaps it's some fossilized Lutheran* birth control method, as this would explain Iceland’s low population size. However, without parting the veil of discretion too far, I’ll only say that we found ways around this problem. Where there’s a will...

* Lutheranism is the official state religion, but we were told (and read in a few places) that most Icelanders are not particularly religious. In fact, one bit of anecdata I saw suggests that more Icelanders believe in trolls, elves, and the other hidden people than attend church.

Bottom line: Iceland was a wonderful experience, and if you love the outdoors and the drama of geology run amok, you'll love the country as much as we did. If you're more of an urban person, Reykjavik is a small, clean, very pleasant city with a ton of good dining, a really good museum, and a thriving arts and music scene that we didn't have time to explore. Guess we'll have to return again!