The Home Exchanger

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap, Part 7: Final Reflections on Iceland

Having completed two big trips, we reconciled ourselves to a final few days in Reykjavik. Almost half the population lives in the capital and on Friday and Saturday nights, we joined residents to drink coffee in mellow little shops, dance in all-night clubs where the joyous atmosphere felt like a high school dance, and dine on the national dish, which is a really terrific steamed hot dog served with two kinds of mustard, fried and raw onions, and remoulade. The best stand is Baejarins Bestu, which is near the harbor and easy to find as a line stretches here 24 hours a day. Five dollars: a dog and a Coke.

Other products worth eating are delicious salmon, cod, and lamb - the lamb is a single breed that came over with the Viking horses.

If it wasn't for the incredible cost of things, Iceland would be perfect. We failed to anticipate these prices.

A gallon of gas costs $7, groceries lasting us two days were $90, a six-pack of beer is $18, a movie ticket costs $12, a hotel room is about $300 per night, a meal in a typical restaurant has appetizers priced between $20-25 and entrees between $40-60. KFC? Four chicken sandwiches, drinks, and fries. Sixty bucks.

Next time we're bringing food from home. Icelanders told me restaurants are reserved for special occasions. People live frugally.

Living like an Icelander helped. The Blue Lagoon, a top tourist attraction, is a hot pool in the middle of a lava field. It's worth visiting, but it cost the four of us about $70 (plus the price of towels). We did it better by going to one of the many municipal pools and hot tubs - about $3 per person.

Maybe one day Iceland will be affordable. But now it's best to enjoy the 4 H's: hiking, hot springs, horses, and hot dogs.

When I got back home I tried to find out why it's so darn expensive. Here's what I discovered: Eighteen months ago, Iceland's banks were privatized - Landsbanki, the largest bank, is majority stockholder (33%) in the only airline which, in turn, owns major hotels and many restaurants, The Guardian, Financial Times and Iceland Review all raised the question this month: Is the Russian Mafia providing the money to those who bought the banks? And is there a connection between private banks having so much control over the tourism industry and high prices? I don't know. But I do know this: At $100 for a tank of gas, something's not right...

Editor's note: An article detailing Scott Haas' Icelandic vacation also appeared in the St.Petersburg Times - click here to read that account.

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap, Part 6: Iceland as Mordor?

We returned to Reykjavik after this and sat around the pilot's house sleeping late and shopping at a nearby mall for fish, lamb, and potatoes. We went to the movies. My wife and I drank beer. The pilot called every day to ask how Emma was doing and we said she was fine and she was. We liked her a lot. She spoke our language.

A week later we drove to Landmannalauger, which is a base camp for deep mountain hiking. Though only about 2500 feet above sea level, we were able to see vast distances and rounded hills in shades of pale blue, gold, tan, brown, orange, red, and green. We walked by geysers, plumes of smoke, snowy fields, and pools of boiling water. It was devilish and heavenly.

"This looks like Mordor," my daughter Madeline said. "But also like the moon."

And no wonder - the ancient Icelandic sagas, which inspired Lord of the Rings, were written on the island 700 years ago.

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap, Part 5: Icelandic Countryside

So we drove seven hours northeast of Reykjavik to Jokulsargljufur National Park where we rented a farmhouse for three nights. The drive took us through amazingly varied landscapes: deserts, volcanic fields, alpine-like meadows, arctic vistas. It was truly lovely. The farmhoue itself looked a lot like the one I recalled seeing in that neat little movie, "In Cold Blood". It seemed as if it was made out of tarpaper, balsam, and linoleum. But the kitchen worked and the sun never set and the place was nearly clean. My wife pitched the kids:  "It's an experience," which they didn't buy, not at all, but who asked them, anyway? Not me, certainly not me.

The main thing, in fact, was that where we were was exquisitely beautiful. Each day we took long, easy hikes on volcanic terrain where we saw spectacular canyons, deserts, an Dettifoss, a powerful, terrifying waterfall. When we weren't hiking, we rode Icelandic horses, which are the size of ponies, first brought as a breed to the island 1100 years ago by Norse settlers and their Celtic slaves. Gentle and curious, they provided an ideal perspective for viewing the landscape.

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap, Part 4: Reykjavik

I have been to Iceland four times in the past two years on work-related trips to report on food fairs, night clubs, sheep round ups and fancy hotels. I knew my way around Reykjavik. Actually, most people know their way around Reykjavik after an hour or two--it's small, manageable, sweet, and friendly. During the day there's very little to do except stroll around and look in shop windows or drink a coffee or have a beer. At night the place rocks until the next morning and you can dance with complete strangers innocently or dangerously depending on how much you value your current relationship. Icelanders tend to be somewhat aloof with one another, but are intrigued by foreigners until they get bored with them too. But by then it's time to go to sleep.

The trick is to get outside of the small and sleepy capital into the countryside that is so spectacular it makes your brain numb. On earlier trips, I had not managed to get very far. This time was different--we had a free and decent car through the exchange.

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap, Part 3: The Dog Exchange

An Icelandic pilot, his wife (a nurse) and their two very young daughters needed someone to take care of Emma, their gorgeous French sheep dog. Fine, we said. I like dogs. I love dogs. I often prefer them to people.

We also wanted to convince our teenagers - Madeline is 18 and Nick is 15 years old - to leave their friends and instead hang out with their bickering, self-centered, and downright creepy parents. I felt like going to a new locale would distract them.

My strategy worked. Within 24 hours, Nick termed Iceland "sick", which he says is the same as "lovely."

The pilot met us at the airport, shook hands, gave us the car and house keys, and boarded a plane to Boston.

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap, Part Two: The Dog Problem

One big reason we decided to go to Iceland was because of  the dog. The person who normally takes care of our dog was unavailable this past summer -- having inconviently died in November, 2004 -- and we couldn't find anyone else foolish enought to walk a big Bernese mountain dog three times a day in the heat. And heaven forbid put the dog in a kennel! He's never seen a kennel. The shock would be too great. We were certain it would kill him. We'd come home, the dog would be dead.

We decided to trade homes with anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as they would take care of our dog.

As members of Intervac, we were contacted by a half dozen families wanting to come to Boston. Families got in touch with us from Sweden, Iceland, France, Germany, England, and Denmark. Our dollar is getting whipped by the Euro and Europeans are eager to come here and shop. Ask any European what they love about America and they will all tell you it's the prices.

But only one family responded eagerly and with experience to The Dog Problem.

Scott Haas' Icelandic Home Swap: Part One

We are delighted that our friend Scott Haas, author of Are We There Yet? , NPR contributer and longtime member of Intervac, has agreed to be a guest blogger for this site from time to time. Here he speaks about his most recent home swap - Iceland, this summer. This is Part One.

Picture Hawaiian lava fields and the deep, blue Pacific. Palm branches swaying, black sand beaches. A romantic melody plays on a steel guitar. Now chop down 99% of the trees, drop temperatues to the 50s, add rain and cloudy skies, earthquakes, geysers, enormous waterfalls, and 200 volcanoes, eardrum-shattering techno music blasting until 5 AM in downtown clubs, 24 hour sunlight in the summer and total darkness in the winter, men and women who resemble Vikings, and glacial lakes and mountains covering 80% of the terrain until it looks like "Jurassic Park"...That's Iceland.

I recently returned from two weeks there with my wife and our two teenagers. All of us agreed that no place we'd been to as a family was more exotic, spellbinding and natural.  It doesn't have Italy's warmth, France's food or the madcap fun of Disneyworld, but it has...it has...hmmm, what does it have? Why did we go?