Iceland review - 2016, Page 80

78 ICELAND REVIEW
When George Orwell went traveling to Marrakesh
he managed to wrangle this sentence out of his
stay: “As the corpse went past the flies left the
restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they
came back a few minutes later.” Not a bad way to begin a
travel essay. For a modern-day Orwell traveling to Iceland,
what would the equivalent be? There are generally no
corpses in the streets, and since the locals are more hygien-
ic than they used to be, the flies are unlikely to follow them
as they walk past. In any case, a local person walking past is
not a common occurrence. Reykjavík is mostly populated
by tourists.
There is a North African connection to the Icelandic
tourist boom. In 2010 Eyjafjallajökull exploded and left
international travelers stranded. We had managed to draw
attention to ourselves. But tourism in Iceland started tak-
ing off when the Arab Spring swept across North Africa
in 2011, making travel to the region unsafe. Iceland is
about the same distance from many European airports as
is northern Africa and, like northern Africa, it is sufficient-
ly different from much of Europe to make it feel exotic.
Iceland makes you feel like you have reached the outer
edges of the civilized world. You can sense danger lurking
underneath the surface and that’s what makes it exciting.
One wrong turn while hiking as the weather changes for
the worse, and your life is in peril. If it weren’t for the
volunteer rescue squads around the country, we would lose
many more tourists than we do. Not a week goes by with-
out someone being rescued from a tight spot.
The number of tourists in Iceland has increased at a
rapid rate over the last few years. In 2010 we had 488,000
visitors. This year we are expecting 1.73 million people.
This is not a high number as such, but the increase is
sudden, and it has important implications, both economic
and social.
BOOMING ECONOMY
Iceland’s economy used to be defined by fishing, which
dominated politics, as well as the economy. When the
industry teetered on the brink of collapse, the króna was
devalued by 10 or 20 percent, cutting wages in a swoop, but
Tourism has boosted the Icelandic economy,
but the country is struggling to cope.
BY HALLDÓR LÁRUSSON.
PHOTOS BY PÁLL STEFÁNSSON.
saving jobs. Later, the country used plentiful
cheap energy to attract aluminum smelters,
and for a long time aluminum and fish
constituted the bulk of our export earnings.
The fact that renewable energy was sold
much too cheaply, in reality being used to
subsidize jobs, is a very contentious issue. It
was probably justifiable in the seventies and
eighties, but has now become unacceptable.
But then, no one could have foreseen the
impact of increased tourism on the econo-
my. Last year tourism brought in 39 percent
of our foreign currency earnings, compared
to 31 percent for fishing and 30 percent for
industry. Landsbankinn bank has forecast
an increase in earnings from tourism of 42
percent between now and 2017, potentially
taking income from tourism to more than
50 percent of our foreign currency earnings.
It’s not surprising, then, that economic
growth in Iceland is around 4 percent and
well above that of most of Western Europe.
The tourism boom is also one of the rea-
sons why it’s difficult to answer the question
whether other countries can learn from the
way Iceland tackled the banking crisis. The
country has made a remarkable recovery.
Successive governments can claim credit
for doing some things right—things which
could be copied by other countries—but no
one could replicate this huge injection of
money without which Iceland would still
be reeling from the shock of all its banks
collapsing over the space of a few weeks in
2008.
The rise in tourism also means that the
fishing industry’s lobbying power is on the
wane and the balance of power in the coun-
try is shifting. Tourism is different from
fishing in that fishing is dominated by a few
big players, but in tourism there are many
small companies, even though there are
DYSTOPIAN VISION