My own private Iceland
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A thing to keep in mind is that it was an explicit effort on Iceland's part to position itself as a prime tourist destination. After 2008 banking crisis they were in a severe bend and looked for ways out of it. Hence the push for the tourism. Then that volcano erupted. On one hand it all but killed nascent tourism flow, but on the other hand it actually broadcasted Iceland as a land of volcanoes and natural beauty. And the tourist tsunami started.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
Tourism industry sucked in so many locals that there's now shortage of police force and doctors, because they pay less. But from the visitor's perspective the country now is as comfortable of the destination as it gets.
We did ~3000 km. Main roads are very good. The speed limit is 90kmh, which seems low, but go any faster and you will feel wind gusts starting to throw the car around. Gas stations are there when you need hen. As are hotels and restaurants. Many farms now have cafes or eateries, invariably with unlimited "soup buffets." Cards are universally accepted. In fact I have no idea how Icelandic money look like. Lots of tourists, but the crowd quickly thins out once you leave Reykjavik, or rather its center. Driving around the country side - there's very little traffic. More often than not we were alone on the road. However it's late October, maybe it's different in summer.
The country IS mind-boggingly beautiful. Saying this as someone who've been around the world. Insane scenery. Lava fields covered in moss, pitch black sand beaches, hot rivers that you can bathe in at -1c outside. Really different, invariably impressive.
You all should come ;)
I spent 2 weeks there doing the ring road. Everyone we met spoke perfect English. I mean absolutely perfect. We were talking to our server at a restaurant in a tiny village in the north and asked him if he had ever been to the USA since his accent was a perfect standard USA accent. He said he'd never even left his village to visit Reykjavik!
Language was a non-issue for us. English proficiency was high. For those who don't speak English, if you're friendly enough, you can point to what you need, plus there's so many electronic aids these days if push comes to shove, it's not an issue. Perhaps more importantly, cultural norms will be familiar to Westerners, which makes it easier.
Oh, edit - as others said, things are really quite expensive there, including food and drinks. Research before going. A breakfast of bread, butter, jam, a sausage and two sunny-side-ups can easily be 30 USD. A pint is 8-12 USD. A lunch of an unlimited soup and bread - 15-20 USD.
From the east coast of the US, it's an easy flight. Often cheap too. Or, do a stop-over on your way to/from Europe /UK.
... you drove around the country two and a half times?
Yet around the time of the great earthquake the Abe government say tourism as a possible plug for the massive negative current account balance. The shutdown of nuclear reactors left Japan importing vast volumes of fossil fuels. Tourism leveraged existing capital, the hotels shrines and transport networks japan has always had, while bringing foreign money.
Since then Japan has been signing visa free travel treaties with every non-hostile nation imaginable. As a side effect the Japanese passport is now the most "powerful" passport in the world.
Tokyo and Osaka can handle the foreign hordes no problem, but Kyoto has could not. It is as if Japan has sacrificed the old capital to supply the rest of the nation with fuel.
The government is still playing a 40% increase over the next many years. It will be interesting to see how Kyoto manages, and if other tourist destinations can arise.
Nope, calling bull on this. Not by a long shot. Japan has been a major international tourist destination, particularly in the winter for at least 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Japan#/media/File:F...
Anyways, I like the Nationality index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quality_of_Nationality_Ind...) which takes into account freedom-of-movement with economic and quality-of-life factors, so it isn't just a count of visa-free travel agreements. This seems like a better measure of the power or value of a specific citizenship.
While it’s true that since it’s more accessible, certain places have more tourists than they can handle, Japan has not been “closed” in the way you’re describing for hundreds of years.
This might be true for certain countries who’s people have recently made a direct effort to subsidize tourism in an effort to increases it. But it’s just embarrassing to think anyone who is alive to comment now could claim to be an “early adopter” of a diverse and international city like Barcelona or Venice. These places have played host to cultural (and literal!) revolutions since before we were born and they’ll continue to do so after we’re all long dead, but perhaps there will always be someone to write a pretentious Vox article about how they know the real character of a city and others shouldn’t bother to try.
As a visitor, I would say there were the perfect amount of tourists there.. not so many that it ruined my “experience”. However, that was in March. I can’t imagine what it’s like in Summer.
I’m now learning to speak Icelandic, and looking for software jobs in Reykjavik if that tells you anything. (Hiring managers please contact me)
Maybe I’m part of the problem?
You should go to Iceland.. it’s epic in a non-cliche kind of way.
There's a reasonable tech scene and a pretty big part of that is made up of immigrants. I worked in three companies here and all three were mostly English speaking. That can vary a bit but none of my peers have had problems moving into new roles where that wasn't the case (and its a surefire way to get better at the language quickly). Now I'm working remotely for a SV startup.
Moving here is pretty trivial if you're in the EEA as is staying on if you have work.
For tech jobs there is also:
https://www.tvinna.is/ (in Icelandic although some job ads are actually in English)
For startup news about Iceland:
https://northstack.is/ (English)
Now that I think about it we did hike for 25min out to the plane crash. When we arrived it was full of instagram models taking selfies and wearing Supreme gear.. not really the kind of wilderness I was looking for.
On the flip side, we did see the Northern lights at a camp site up North. There were only a handful of people since it was still in the Winter months. It felt very pure and intimate. Like it was our secret no one else knew about. One of the greatest experiences of my life. I think that’s what all tourists are searching for.
Learning new languages is fun though! I think it changes the way your brain thinks.
This is the route I took last year, for similiar reasons as yourself. I'm now pursuing my Master's in CS there and having a great time.
(1) Assuming you also meet all of ÚTL's general requirements.
There’s also a full Bachelor’s program for people who have gotten the basics already. Because the baseline admission requirements are higher, I imagine it entails comparably higher amount of effort.
Here’s my email if you’re interested: jpseawell@gmail.com
Cities like Prague and Budapest make for great photos, but if you go just 20 minutes in any direction life is very different. There is very little glamour if you're outside the old towns.
Being a digital nomad forces you to actually live in a city rather than just sweeping through it and staying at 5 star hotels. Even then, you can't fully experience a place if you don't speak the language.
In Munich there were so many events going on, but they were not really accessible unless you spoke German.
Even if you're not in a place to do the full time digital nomad thing, I highly recommend trying the live and work in a city for a month, it's highly educational.
It’s a mistake to think a city represents the entire character of a country but it’s also not fair to think of it as fake or that no people from that country actually live there. I guess what I’m saying is that it sounds like you are just more interested in places that have a different class character which is totally fine. But it’s not the case that there aren’t city people who are proud of and would love to show off the beauty and history of the place they live in every city.
(Also, if you’re showing up and staying at expensive hotels you’re doing it wrong. That’s for sure.)
But your point is otherwise true, it's about living where normal residents live.
Maybe responsible (although also lazy - go visit some actual place that's not overcrowded). Not authentic.
I would call Perlan and similar aurora tourist attractions "aurora porn". They always present the biggest and brightest and usually speed up the clip so you can more easily see things moving. In reality, my experience of seeing auroras just incidentally (once while walking around town and another time while out at a remote cabin) has been perhaps not as visually striking but still emotionally moving. It was so faint and slow that I kept wondering if what I was seeing was really there. It was very much a different experience from the films I'd seen of auroras.
Of course, the big bright auroras are out there, too, but would you call buying a fish authentic fishing even if the fish you bought was more appealing than the fish you caught? I think not.
But it makes me think of this photo series http://www.photography.at/_fake_holidays.html (or with more words: https://medium.com/gone/surreal-photos-from-inside-the-fake-...) of faked vacation spots: a ski hall in Dubai or of a tropical beach inside a hangar in Germany. And I have to wonder, how "authentic" is even Reykjavik nowadays? It certainly has been Disneyfied with the many many souvenir shops and "trendy" cafes, and as the article said, x years ago it used to be empty, and now it's full of tourists, so it certainly isn't "authentic" Reykjavik.
But then again, maybe tourists nowadays are just like watchers of porn. They know it's fake, but it's what they're seeking anyway. I was in Iceland in July, and even with the tourists, the nature is still great. Although I had to wonder what people were actually doing... they see something pretty and their first reaction is, "I have to take a picture of this!".
I wouldn't hold the crowds in Reykjavik against the town itself, though. It's no less authentic than the seasonality of a college town. It's not the same as it was years ago, certainly, but everything changes. And I've found the tourism traffic pattern around town is actually quite narrow. Laugavegur is packed in the summer, but just move one block over and the street's practically empty. Also get out of downtown and into the suburbs and things feel much more normal.
Of course, tourists don't usually travel to foreign countries to walk around suburbs. And there's definitely an Icelandic hipster culture that enjoys the craft beer and fancy cafes as much as the tourists, so I wouldn't say that's inauthentic of modern Icelandic life. So then there's the question of which version of Iceland one considers "authentic".
Oddly, it's primarily targeted at South Korean tourists rather than locals.
It's well worth the visit if you're in the area.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Huawei+Songshan+Lake+Base&t=h_&iar...
You were unlucky, it seems. Several times the groups I was meeting up with were unlucky as well, and freaked out about the faintest glow over the horizon (and in both cases it was a better-than-50%-chance timewise).
People often actually don't believe it until they see it. It's the kind of thing I have to stop the car for or I'll crash due to not watching the road.
It's like looking at porn and then not believing fantastic sex exists at all.
Countries and places all around the world, pre-mass tourist, have, however been authentic.
In that they didn't have tourist traps, their economy / businesses weren't set up on tourisms, local were indeed surprised to see you -- and not just seeing you as just another tourist to bring them money, restaurants etc were all what locals ate, etc.
So people visiting at those times -- even as recently as the 70s-80s or so for some places--, if we can call them tourists (the most used term then would be "travellers" then I guess), did get an authentic experience of the place.
Not necessarily in their own mind of course (they could still experience it under whatever BS prism), but in the physical / economic / etc reality that they encountered.
>If fully one-fifth of humanity are traveling away from home, then how foreign are tourists, after all?
As foreign they can be. Will tourists are always around in some place, each individual tourist is foreign, in that they'll spend their 2-4 weeks and leave.
They're not invested in the place, they artificially skew the local economy to cater to them, e.g. by inflating rents (e.g. through AirBnB) for people who do live and work in the place, they bring extra pollution (often-times being 2-10x the resident population of some place per year), they feed a class of rent-seekers (literally rent-seeking people like hotels, rooms to let, private beaches and exhibits, and so on), and they also bring the distasteful demand for bland services (from souvenir shops, tourist traps, BS dance clubs, fast food chains, "authentic" tourist restaurants, etc, that the locals could not care less about, but live on because of the tourists).
How is it artificial? It's just an export, like any other. Silicon Valley exports software, Lloret de Mar exports beaches and hotel rooms. Both industries add a demand for local resources and discharge externalities, which can be overwhelming to the local community - or not.
Eventually it comes full circle and the local identity is built around some perceived vision of self importance (coping mechanism?) and being quaint and catering to tourists. These things the locals "could not care less about" eventually become the culture, disgusting as that may be. I grew up in such a place.
I could write a novel but it suffices to say that everyone who didn't stand to inherit a business fleecing tourists (or fleecing people who fleece tourists) got out as soon as they could resulting in a morally bankrupt society where you cannot trust anyone not to screw you for personal gain and I (and thousands of other people who "got out" over the years) am very much rooting for global warming to wash them all into the ocean.
Yes, that's absolutely true.
And while the modern mindset (at least in some countries) doesn't allow us to make value judgements in such matters (the idea being that "everything is OK as long as the one doing it is not forced by gun to do it, and they make money doing so"), I'd still say it's bad and sad.
It's a beautiful country, a bit eerily so. The blue lagoon is stunning to look at but too expensive to bathe in. Once you've seen it, you've seen it. The views don't change that much. Even on the golden triangle, looking out the window tends to get boring.
For a country constantly emphasizing the need for safety on the road, I was surprised to get a very beat up Toyota with worn out brake pads, no working charger in the car and the guy just saying "you get what you pay for".
It's incredibly expensive. Two sandwiches (and I mean 2x slices of bread with some cheese and lettuce) and soft drinks was like 20EUR or more.
I enjoyed the trip but don't really understand the hype. Perhaps it just gets more exposure cause it's safe and easy.
Among the 40+ countries I've visited the best views and nature for me were in Tenerife (of all places), inland around El Teide, Morocco's Atlas mountains and North Vietnam, everything between Hanoi and the Laotian / Chinese borders.
The golden circle isn't a long trip. There's a lot more to see.
> For a country constantly emphasizing the need for safety on the road, I was surprised to get a very beat up Toyota with worn out brake pads, no working charger in the car and the guy just saying "you get what you pay for".
Car hire services have been under scrutiny by the media here recently for unsafe cars, bad service and selling their old cars with the odometer rolled back. Unfortunately there still hasn't been a proper crackdown on them. I recommend to everyone to use the global brands.
> It's incredibly expensive. Two sandwiches (and I mean 2x slices of bread with some cheese and lettuce) and soft drinks was like 20EUR or more.
It's infuriating. Reykjavík and the bigger towns are OK but the price gouging that happens all around cannot be justified.
Reykjavik itself didn't feel any more crowded than any other major European city. Far less so than London or Paris. Probably more like Amsterdam, but with a smaller overall footprint.
Our rental was a Golf Polo (the small hatchback) from a name-brand agency (Hertz or somebody like that) and it was in fine condition.
It was expensive, no question. But, that's also fairly well documented in travel brochures (online or otherwise). So, it shouldn't be a surprise. We opted to rent a flat and cook for most meals. The only problem that caused - the grocer has a wall of milk of varying degrees of "sourness" and we grabbed something that, to my American palate, was rotten. Oops.
Blue Lagoon was definitely touristy. We went at dusk in a snow storm, so the atmosphere was nice (the mist and snow made it less obvious we were swimming with a few hundred other tourists). We enjoyed it, but there's no need to go twice unless you really like a spa experience.
We went snorkeling in Silfra Fissure, which was neat. Nothing at all like snorkeling on a coral reef.
I'd love to go back and do the whole ring road around the island, with a bit of hiking and camping mixed in. We only had a long weekend, so stayed in the city and all the sites we visited were fairly close. We didn't get to the northwest or southeast.
It was about half the price of other places at the time. I was fully prepared to be disappointed, but it was excellent — and had a full kitchen, which helped because food in Iceland is insanely expensive ($20 for an 'authentic' Icelandic hot dog at an outdoor stand is real ). Groceries were only(!) about 20% more than New York (still high, but not unreasonable for a remote island).
Also, I think Iceland is missing an oppertunity to export high-quality room-darkening blinds. Vampire-approved.
There were once two or three decent mid-sized concert venues in downtown Reykjavik (capacity ~500 - ~1000) now, as far as I know there are none, as they were closed to make way for more hotels.
My partner is Icelandic and she saw the pattern from the original collapse repeating: when the number of tourists slows those new hotels will lie empty and the local culture, well the music scene at least, will be the worse off for it.
I don’t really follow the music scene here much, but there seems to be a pretty steady stream of concerts coming through Harpa, Gamla Bíó, and Háskólabíó, along with several bars that have live music all the time.
Never been to a show at Háskólabíó, is it decent?
Is Gaukurinn still going?
[0]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/simone_brunozzi/albums/7215760...
We did the whole Golden Circle thing. We knew from that start that we were obviously been ferried around the same routes as everyone else. I was OK with that for a first trip to any country.
I didn't find the crowds over powering. Everything is either new to you or you've seen it in TV/films but you get a kick out of seeing it for real.
When we next go to Iceland I think we'll probably stay in the north and make our own way around. That'll be a different kind of holiday but still equally good.
...also I'm pretty sure that Theo said he wasn't originally from Reykjavik no matter what those lying journalist say. :P
- We partied in Reykjavik on weekend and my god! I was amazed to see the clubbing culture there. It was so different from Bay area. Nightclubs were open till 4 and people stayed till 6. Not to mention it was summer; so sun was setting at 3am-ish while people were drunk on dance floor.
- We went towards laugavegur next day for our adventure of 4 day trail. It was a pretty smooth drive until we were attacked by armies of black fly who entered our car through open window and my friend almost toppled the car over while fighting them off (yes the road was 9-10 ft above the land).
- Next day, we started our trek where we experienced the unforgiving weather of Icelandic highlands. I have been stuck in avalanches before (rockies, patagonia, himalayas) but this was a level up. The weather was colder, the wind had a deathly sting. We had to dig up our camp in snow and at that point tbh it seemed like I was digging my grave. It kind of made sense why they shot Castle black senes for GoT here. Don't get me wrong, I fully enjoyed the hike. The colors, the view and the greenery was amazing. The best part of it was making pinto beans over steam coming below 6ft of snow.
- Next 5 days we camped near beautiful waterfall of Seljalandsfoss. It was surreal. We used to drive to same grocery store in morning, get basic stuff to cook and get drunk in the afternoon (or night..? it was hard to tell). It was pretty close to popular Skogafoss waterfall but this waterfall was equally beautiful with lot less people visiting.
The point I am trying to make is yes, tourism is overwhelming for a delicate place for Iceland but you don't have to visit just the golden circle or the jokursalon. Yes, these places are beautiful but the experience really gets terrible when there are a thousand people trying to get glimpse of snow island in 200 m long standing space.
My advice to the people who are in 20s: Try to hike, drive to unconventional places. Iceland has a lot to offer than what you see or read in blogs/instagram. The fun of travel is in experiencing local culture, exploring places and stumbling upon things. It is NOT about getting selfie and checking off things to do in a list written in some random blog.