On Thin Ice

Selfie sticks punch the sky as three women bob through the milky-blue water. They look like knights charging against a strong wind, but they’re young and they’re American and they persevere. Their hair is piled high on their heads, and they purse their lips as they gaze up at their iPhones. Behind them, a man takes photo after photo of his partner as she swans in small circles. She reviews the shots with a severe expression as he shields the screen from the sun.

When their images post to Instagram, they will all ap­pear to be alone in this otherworldly watering hole, the Blue Lagoon, situated about 45 minutes outside Reykja­vik, Iceland’s capital. In real life, they’re surrounded by tourists from countries such as Pakistan, Algeria and Poland, all similarly posing in the steamy, geothermal seawater or making their way to the bar, where the first glass of sparkling wine is on the house.

The Blue Lagoon warns its patrons that it’s impor­tant to stay hydrated while wading in the 100-degree, silica-heavy pool. Flowing on one side of the lagoon is a metal fountain etched with the words PURE ICELANDIC WATER to signal where visitors can fill their cups for free. If this seems like a marketing ploy to make local water sexy, it’s working. One woman’s eyes go wide as she tells me how great the tap water tastes in Iceland, better than back home. The country’s tourism board playfully rebranded tap water as Kranavatn, a word that literally translates to “tap water.”

Good marketing is behind Iceland’s tourism boom. The country’s seemingly pristine landscapes abound on social-media screens and draw more than 2 million visitors to its shores each year to hike behind thunder­ing waterfalls or to see up close the canyon where Justin Bieber shot his “I’ll Show You” music video. Some land at Keflavik International Airport—the main entry point for foreign travelers—because they’re seeking something more ancient than the Colosseum in Rome, less defiled than Tulum. Others are here because they’ve seen Ice­land’s remote vistas on Facebook or on Game of Thrones, which often filmed here. But as the number of tourists has spiked, with yearly visitors outnumbering perma­nent residents sixfold, traditional systems have broken down. Locals know not to venture onto a glacier in san­dals and to stay on designated paths when hiking. Visi­tors, in their attempts to get photos that don’t feature other gawking tourists, traipse farther and farther off the trail, destroying plant life. Tourists pluck the words send nudes in moss that will take decades to regrow.

The culprits in that very real crime against a hillside are unknown, but you can picture them. News reports have warned about a crisis in the country, one that’s overwhelming everything from hotels to national parks. Iceland’s environment is fragile, and it’s being threat­ened by too many travelers. But tourism helped yank the country out of an earlier crisis, buoying the economy after the debilitating collapse of 2008. And here I am, ready to experience a country whose rapidly expanding popularity may be permanently damaging what lured me here in the first place.

I’m seated next to a man named Jason on my flight from Paris to Reykjavik in late June, and I tell him my plans for the next five days: Drive to a town near the Sólheimajökull glacier, which I’ll climb with a tour group rec­ommended on TripAdvisor, then drive to Reykjavik and visit the Blue Lagoon and the GoldenCircle, a popular tourist route.

Normally I avoid talking to anyone on planes, but I no­tice Jason’s driv­er’s license is from Washing­ton state, which leads us to dis­cover that we graduated from the same college in the same year. The coincidence does not feel so impressive when I recount the number of people I know who’ve visited Iceland in the past few years—nearly two dozen. One of my favorite stories: A woman was in a coffee shop in Reykjavik when she asked the person sit­ting next to her to scoot over. In a country with only about 350,000 residents, perhaps it’s also not so remarkable that the woman was Björk.

Tourism has played a vital role in helping Iceland re­cover from the 2008 economic crash, says Sigríður Dögg Guðmundsdóttir, a spokesperson for Visit Iceland and a sort of hype-woman for the country. The industry has grown rapidly, from fewer than 500,000 visitors in 2010 to 2.2 million in 2018. The country used to be a landing pad for planes to refuel before heading on to Europe or North America. But Iceland-air and, before it collapsed in March, WOW Air, offered stopover deals that helped secure Iceland as a travel destination.

In some ways that growth has been a boon, Guðmundsdóttir says. Restaurants and other services have opened in rural areas, where residents now have entrepreneurial opportunities that didn’t exist before the tourism explosion.

“People are able to move back into the towns and villages they grew up in because they can create jobs for themselves,” she says. Höfn, a town of barely 2,000 where Guðmundsdóttir used to live, now supports a large grocery store and three restaurants—amenities that locals alone couldn’t sustain.

But the influx of tourists has also strained infrastructure, she says, especially at the most-trafficked sites, including the Golden Circle. The canyon from Bieber’s music video, which has almost half a billion views on YouTube, closed temporarily after Beliebers from across the globe overran it, destroying delicate vegetation. An­other hiking spot, Reykjadalur, also went dark after Iceland’s environmental agency decided it had been endangered by tourists. A 2018 report from the Minister of Tour­ism, Industry and Innovation says beloved vistas including the Dverghamrar basalt columns and the Gullfoss waterfall are all at risk of damage.

Some of these sites were simply never meant to be popular. The country has an “Icelandic Pledge” that it encourages tourists to take, promising to travel respon­sibly, camp at campsites and so on. The tap water campaign aimed at tourists is a national effort to cut back on plastic bottles. At gas stations, Styrofoam and paper cups, ubiquitous in the United States, are hard to come by. If you want a coffee to go, you’ll often need to bring your own mug or buy a reusable one.

Iceland chairs the Arctic Council and holds the presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers, and one of its three focuses for the latter is sustainable tourism, including “decarbonization” of the industry. A member of the Paris Agreement, the country aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2030 and be carbon neutral by 2040. A 50 percent increase to its 2010 carbon tax went into effect last year. Iceland also wants to electrify its vehicle fleet. The impacts of climate change are al­ready apparent, says Guðmundsdóttir. But, she adds, “there’s a really strong will in Iceland to preserve nature and maintain tourism as a sustainable industry.”

It’s bright and cold when I land in Ke­flavik. It’s summertime, so the sun won’t set till around midnight. Driving on near-empty roads to my Airbnb near Hvolsvöllur, I pass purple Alaska lu­pines, an invasive plant species, blanket­ing the rolling, rocky hills. There are as many tour buses barreling down the Ring Road, the route that loops the country, as there are cars. Navigating through small towns I see hostels and buildings with Airbnb logos affixed to the windows.

The waterfall by my Airbnb, which you might know as #skogafoss, is majes­tic. Campers have set up tents near the base, and a woman is furiously adjust­ing her selfie stick in the spray while climbing the hundreds of steps to the top. As lambs gallop down the grass be­side the stairs, the place feels peaceful, even private. I could see the waterfall from a nearby restaurant, which seems emblematic of how tourism affects rural towns—part of the cottage industry sup­porting the interlopers who are chang­ing these communities.

It’s still light when I fall asleep at the Airbnb. A chicken coop backs up to the guesthouse, but the rooster never crows. The next day, my host smiles gently as she presents breakfast: bread made with barley from their farm, homemade dandelion and rhubarb jams, Angelica pesto and lamb paté. The eggs are from their chickens, the milk from their cows. Seated around the table are more people from the U.S., including women from California, Florida and Seattle and a man from New York City. He was in Europe for work but took advantage of the stopover and is visiting Iceland for about 48 hours.

Judy Butler is in Iceland because the airfare to Ireland from her home in Kittery, Maine was too expensive, plus a lot of her colleagues at the school where she teaches English have been here and liked it. Butler and I soon depart for the Sólheimajökull glacier. The trail leads us through an ash-covered icescape that our guide, a British man named Simon Rees, calls Mordor. The ash, left over from past volcanic eruptions, insulates the ice, forming dark peaks and valleys near the water’s edge.

“First chance for photos for all you instagrammers,” Rees says after a few minutes of walking. The actor who plays Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones posted a selfie he took on Sólheimajökull, Rees says before encouraging us to ask him questions about glaciers. Or the TV show. I ask about the show. First he tells me he didn’t like the ending. Then he points to a sign hammered into the earth that marks where the glacier reached back in 2010. According to Rees, it’s one of the fastest disappearing in Europe.

“And I’ll leave it up to you to decide why,” he says, skirting any conversations about climate change. (Soon after my trip, the Copernicus Climate Change Service reports that July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth.) In brief, he tells us, there’s less snow in the winter and more melt in the summer. The same amount of ice has disappeared in the past 10 years as in the past 100. Icebergs sticking out of the lagoon like meringue won’t exist by the end of this summer, he says, and he notices more break­ing off all the time. Later, he shows me a photo a friend of his took from the same spot in September 2018. There was a wall of ice. Now there’s water. Tour guides will need to jump the stream, he says, and then build a bridge.

“Eventually we won’t be able to get here at all.”

Retreating glaciers can be increasingly hard to access, says Nathan Reigner, an Arctic Ful­bright Scholar in Reyk­javik, but the glacial melt is also creating new sites, like the Jökulsárlón gla­cier lagoon that formed when glaciers calved and melted along the south coast. As more of these sites have emerged, he says, there has been an “arms race” for who can develop tourism busi­nesses to meet the sky­rocketing demand. What one study early in the tourism boom called a “surprising lack of plan­ning and control at the national level” led to a spate of visitors and tour companies that were ig­norant of environmental sustainability guidelines.

Reigner is a recreation and tourism consultant with a background in park management, con­centrating in part on crowding, capacity and conflict. At a coffee shop in downtown Reykjavik he gives me a primer on Icelandic tourism.

To wit: Tourists have been coming to Iceland since the 19th century. At first it was rich Eu­ropeans. By 2008, when the economy crashed, the country hosted about 500,000 visitors a year. The financial crisis’s en­core was the volcanic eruption that grounded flights on the continent for weeks.

But the krona, already a volatile currency, was down steeply against the dollar. It be­came cheap to venture here, and Visit Iceland, the country’s official tourism arm, rallied to save the 2010 summer tourism season. It worked. By 2013, about 800,000 people were landing in the country each year; by 2017, more than 2.2 million.

As adventure-seekers visited Iceland and exposed their friends and family (or follow­ers) to images of the country, those places became destinations. And Iceland didn’t have the structures it needed to support the surge. A range of goods and services have followed the tourists to towns of all sizes. Even Reykjavik has more bars, Reigner says. Locals are happy their swimming pools are open later.

During the summer, on any given day, about one in five people on the island are tourists, Reigner says. But as the krona regains its value, visitors are staying for fewer days. That means their land travel is lim­ited. It might be more appealing to stay on, say, the Golden Circle than spend a day driving to a more re­mote coastal village. This causes problems by concen­trating the environmental footprint within a small area. Distributing tourists more evenly across the country can reduce the negative impacts. For exam­ple, Keflavik airport currently centers traffic in the country’s southwest region, so in 2015 the govern­ment resolved to develop new flight routes to lesser-known airports, such as Akureyri in the northeast.

Icelanders are split on how much the tourism in­dustry benefits their communities. Generally they’re happy with it, but some feel priced out or crowded out, Reigner says. Others feel Iceland has become a cartoon of itself. The government devel­oped a plan to collect reliable data to improve transportation, infrastructure and more. And, Reigner says, they’ve been largely successful. By looking at issues including freshwater, wastewater, nature sites and carbon footprints, the country seems to be tackling the conflicts that stem from tourism. Still, many Icelanders believe tourists “spoil” nature. I ask Reigner if he agrees. He leans back in his chair and thinks for a second.

“Intensive use,” he says, “requires intensive man­agement.” He goes on to say that no “management machine” could have coped with the rapid growth of tourism in Iceland.

“It’s not that people did a bad job,” he says. “It’s that the job is impossible.”

When Reigner first visited Iceland, in 2015, he thought it was a playground. Now he thinks about it more holistically. He wishes he could help tourists connect more with the culture, a challenge on a week-long or weekend trip. Being a tourist means going somewhere to find meaning for your­self, but in doing so you also change the meaning of a place.

By the time everyone has boarded the Arctic Adventures minibus for the Golden Circle tour that ferries tourists from Thingvellir National Park to the Geysir geothermal area to the Gullfoss waterfall, 12 of us are buck­led in, plus our guide, Heimir. Nine are from the United States and five, including me, live in Texas. A couple from San Antonio tells me about a cave they visited that may be closed because tourists keep scrawling their names in the bacteria covering its walls. The guide showed them one such graffito from 2006 that’s still visible today. Cori Clymer, who’s here from Philadelphia to celebrate her 50th birthday with her mom, passes around a dried fish snack. Michelle Brinker, from Houston, takes my photo at the national park, a UNESCO world heritage site with a parking lot full of sightseeing buses. One tourist climbs over the rope installed to keep visi­tors away from a cliff. He wants a better photo.

One story Heimir tells us about tourists sits with me longer than the rest. It dates to the early 2000s, before the tourism boom. People hop­ing to see a UFO land on a glacier had descended on Reykjavik, renting cars and driving into the rural countryside. Many ran out of gas before they could find filling stations. Others showed up at overbooked hotels. The region wasn’t equipped to host so many people at once, but farm­ers opened their doors and welcomed the ignorant travelers.That same hospitality is on show today among Airbnb hosts and restaurant servers who patiently wait while I fumble to find the correct amount of krona to pay for a meal. For my final dinner in Iceland I eat at Skál, in a food hall in Reykjavik. (An American suggested it.) Sitting at the bar, I order a skirt steak that another American, sitting nearby, recommended. After it’s placed in front of me, the woman next to me nods and smiles. I feel as though I’ve finally earned a local’s approval, but when she speaks, it’s clear she’s American.

“So good,” she says. Then she pulls out her phone.