Orwell went travelling to Marrakesh. „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.“
For a modern-day Orwell travelling to Iceland, what would the equivalent be? There are generally no corpses in the streets, and since the locals are more hygienic than they used to be, the flies are unlikely to follow them as they would 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 taking 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 sufficiently 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 there weren’t the volunteer rescue squads around the country we would lose many more tourists than we do. Not a week goes by without someone being rescued from a tight spot.
The number of tourists in Iceland has increased in a rapid rate over the last few years. In 2010 we had 488.000 visitors. The year 2016 we are expecting 2 million people. This is not a high number as such, but the increase is sudden, and it has important implications, both economic and social.
Excerpt from „Dystopian Vision“
written by Halldór Lárusson, published in ICELAND REVIEW 04.16
Halldór Lárusson is an entrepreneur, He has degrees in
Economics, Philosophy and History of Science