Tag: Travel

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5055 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2022-09-15 18:03:50 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-09-15 18:03:50 [post_content] =>

Want to be a better tourist? Start by embracing local lore.

When I visited Iceland, there were a few things on my list: an active volcano, a museum of witchcraft in the Westfjords, a puffin tour, and running into Björk and becoming best friends. I kind of knew I wanted to visit Hafnarfjörður, a port town close to Reykjavík, home to an idyllic volcanic park known for elf sightings. But it was an afterthought, a kitschy stop that I expected to experience as a skeptical tourist rather than a believer.

Icelandic people’s belief in and deference to the Huldufólk (Hidden People) is well-documented. Tourists know it, and mock it, all while indulging in activities like the Elf School, which is exactly what it sounds like. On an episode of Travel Man, host Richard Ayoade and his companion attended the school and spent the segment mocking the very elves they were supposed to be learning about, leaving no more enlightened than when they went in. Global headlines read things like, “More Than Half of [This Country] Believes in Elves,” but obscure what that belief really means. It’s a punchline, something to make the people of Iceland seem naive, primitive. As if to say: There was a time when it was appropriate, but now there are cars on the road. Grow out of it, already.

The belief varies person to person, but the general consensus is that elves exist in nature, in rocks and volcanoes and forests and water. There are over 50 kinds, all with different physiques and temperaments, depending on where they live. And regardless of proof or lack thereof, one thing is for sure: When an elf’s home is moved, to make way for construction or similar human disturbances, bad things tend to happen. This alone is enough to deter most people from fucking with them. When starting construction, many people will consult with elf experts like Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, who can liaise with the elves and find out who lives where and whether they’d consider moving on. If they won’t, construction stops. The result is a country that lives in harmony with its expansive, alien landscape. A country and a people that moves and develops slowly enough to let nature—and the Huldufólk who protect it—flourish around them.

It’s that volcanic landscape that drew me, and draws most tourists, to Iceland. Fagradalsfjall was still active, as it is again now, and the country-wide presence of volcanic rock is enough to distinguish it from anywhere else I’ve ever been. Whole fields of lava feel like a walk on the moon, sparse and removed from humanity, and yet teeming with life. Where another country might have cleared them away, Iceland builds tourism around its volcanoes, turning large expanses of hardened lava into family friendly parks and attractions. I ultimately decided to go to Hafnarfjörður, not for the elves, but for this scenery and the quiet that comes with it.

The park in Hafnarfjörður, like much of Iceland’s scenery, grows around lava and the ever-present threat of volcanic eruption. Despite the human feet stomping around, however, locals say that all that untouched nature creates the perfect environment for elves. Hafnarfjörður plays up the legend somewhat, with little human-built elf houses and a gift shop that sells elf dust. It’s kind of a tourist trap—but a very quiet one, with local families just hanging out. While I thought I just wanted to relax in the park, I was also primed to retreat into the rocks with the Huldufólk: That morning, my phone was filling up with people congratulating me on something that should have been exciting but instead felt overwhelming. I set it to airplane mode and set off into the park, trying to let myself be in tune with another world, which felt easy with an unusually warm Icelandic sun on my back.

It was there that I found the Huldufólk, or they found me. I came across a crack in the lava and crouched down, laying my hands on rock that still felt warm, alive. I peered inside and saw nothing in it, no elves teasing me, so I lay a flower at the entrance, where thick, hard, clear slime interlaced with rainbows decorated the grass. I sat, still, the peace that had been evading me finally gathering. I thanked the elves for the quiet and moved on after a while, enjoying the rest of the park.

In all of the photos surreptitiously taken of me hanging out by that crack in the rock, there is a rainbow enveloping me. It hadn’t been raining and I hadn’t seen the rainbow, except in the slime, but there it was. When my fiancée and I later told a friend of his, an Icelandic professor, about our experience, she said, “Oh yes, elf slime,” like it was the most normal thing in the world. She also gave a stern warning: Do not follow the elves, no matter what they offer.

When we later shared our experiences with other Icelandic people, it caught me off guard how difficult it was to be embarrassed. They listened, told us that we were lucky, that the elves didn’t appear to just anyone, and so rarely to tourists. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t “seen” an elf—the extent of my small interaction was enough. I felt grateful to be believed, but I also felt some gratitude in return that I hadn’t questioned their beliefs or culture. I went in, two-footed, willing to see the elves if they would show themselves to me. What I got was something special, an experience to talk about, but also a moment of peace that I desperately needed, elves or not.

For much of my early life I believed in magic, something that faded as I got older. As a child, I believed wholeheartedly in the tooth fairy, insofar as I believed she would be my friend and bring me gifts. So maybe it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise that I found myself among elves, wanting to fall into gaps in the volcanic rock. But why shouldn’t we look for magic as adults, especially in places like Iceland that offer it up so freely? Who does it harm to respect someone else’s version of the tooth fairy I’d loved, and maybe even try to meet them, too?

When—if—we share our supernatural experiences with people who don’t come from cultures that share them readily, there’s always a moment of shared trepidation. You can sense them tip-toeing around their own experiences, hedging with “I don’t usually believe in this stuff” or “it could have been anything.” After a while, when each person realizes they are safe, they share. We might not always have proof, but what we experience and how we perceive it is real. When we experience it with others, our beliefs—and our confidence in our own experiences—gain power.

More than that, when we as tourists are lucky enough to spend time in other people’s countries and cultures, we need to honor them. That means trying their food, understanding their customs, learning to fit in. That means not immediately complaining if you don’t get enough ice or the service isn’t fast enough. It means exploring temples and monuments and other important sites with respect. It means trying your best to speak the language and not just shouting “chips, PLEASE” in a waiter’s face.

It also means taking on those customs and beliefs that are maybe even more foreign to you, like believing in elves. It means not laughing at something that means a lot to a lot of people in a country that for the most part gets by just fine without you. In Iceland, the Huldufólk maintain the rule of the land, a respect for the sparse, otherworldly landscape that blooms freely. Believing in elves or magic or ghosts or God or tree spirits isn’t inherently childish or naive, it’s a part of being a human being with a belief system and a desire for rituals and order.

More than that, by having patience and respect for the places you visit, even when it requires a suspension of disbelief, you might open yourself up to a little magic. You might make friends and take home experiences that you could never have had if you scoffed at something meaningful to someone else. You might even meet an elf. Plus, you’ll just seem like less of an asshole, one less reason for people to hate tourists. And wouldn’t that be nice?

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September 15, 2022August 4, 2026

I Didn’t Believe in Elves Until I Did

by Marianne Eloise

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5052 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2022-09-08 14:56:20 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-09-08 14:56:20 [post_content] =>

I found my dead father's house on Airbnb. It looked nothing like it.

Recently, while looking for an Airbnb in my hometown for an upcoming visit, I found my dead father’s house.

Bewildered, I scanned the listing. Could this really be the same house where I’d scrambled eggs for him every morning and watched his favorite movies on TCM every night? The new owners had stripped the place of its shabbiness, though I wondered as I read whether they'd been able to do the same with its termites. Back when I’d lived there, an unusually ballsy mouse had ruled over the kitchen, where one side of the fridge stood on bricks because otherwise it tilted to the left from the warped tile floor. When the mouse startled me one day, calmly eating an English muffin on the countertop when I went to make coffee, my father had rolled his eyes at my scream. “That’s Mister Jingles,” he said with exasperation. “Be nice.”

The house was no “castle,” as the ad’s headline claimed. Each of its rooms was a quarter of the size that the wide-angled photos made them appear to be. Photos of the kitchen diligently cropped out the bottom left corner of the fridge, where the bricks held it up. Yet, brightened by a ring light and stuffed with the same West Elm bric-a-brac that furnishes every Airbnb, it did look like a plausible getaway. “Nobody lives here full time,” bragged the ad. “You can make yourself at home” for $145 a night.

“Nobody lives here full time”—that opposed the entire ethos of Airbnb as it once was, when it presented itself as a cheaper alternative to hotels and a win-win for everybody who used it. Founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky say the idea for Airbnb came to them when they were struggling to afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment in 2007—they crammed in a few air mattresses and charged guests $80 a night to sleep on them. A year later, they turned their “Air Bed and Breakfast” into a business.

Supposedly, the idea was always for the experience to be somewhat personal, on both hosts’ and travelers’ sides. Travelers could see a new place from a lived-in home base that lent the trip some local flavor; hosts could make money off their spare rooms while offering a little hospitality. But as Airbnb’s popularity exploded, so did its problems. Tourist-heavy neighborhoods became Airbnb hubs where long term residents could no longer afford to live. Landlords converted rental units into more-profitable Airbnbs and stopped renting them to tenants. Cities’ attempts to regulate the app’s presence have proven difficult and feeble. And, of course, as more homes became full-time Airbnbs, those Airbnbs got worse.

The average Airbnb used to be friendlier than a chain hotel room. The aggressively anodyne watercolors and unopenable windows of a hotel gave way to the warmth of a real person’s home. But a real home also comes with real hassles. Guests at a hotel can leave the room as messy as they want; guests at an Airbnb have to clean up after themselves and leave the place roughly as they found it, even though hosts collect a “cleaning fee” on each reservation. The hassles were only worth it for as long as Airbnb remained the cheaper option.

And while, in 2022, data suggests that Airbnbs are still cheaper, the gap is closing quickly, and not just in terms of cost. Anecdotally, Airbnbs have been losing all personality for years. My dead father’s house—correction, my dead father’s “castle”—looks just like the “artist’s studios” and “boutique lofts” that proliferate every city on the app. Add some moose antlers to one wall and it could be a “peaceful ski lodge”; throw in a hammock and it could be a “beach house paradise.” But such hifalutin terms fail to justify Airbnb’s skyrocketing prices. When guests pay $145 a night to stay in my father’s castle, do they coo over the brass-plated vases on every surface, or do they scream at the sight of its long term resident, Mister Jingles?

Alongside the spendy soullessness of these units, the annoyances have continued to mount. Because people really did live in most early Airbnbs, they came stocked with cookware and basic amenities. Hosts who actually lived in their units were also intimately familiar with them, and could answer questions about what to do with a sticky key or whether the cat was allowed on the fire escape. The increasingly impersonal nature of Airbnbs has turned them into hotels with none of a hotel’s conveniences and even more pointed surveillance. Paranoid about their liability for everything from accidents at their guests’ family barbecues to long-term guests’ ability to claim squatters’ rights, hosts have cut corners and set unreasonable limits. For example, I am presently writing this from an Airbnb with an in-unit washer/dryer that’s padlocked to keep guests from using it.

Airbnb is still the most plausible option for guests who will be staying somewhere for a while and need a place to cook, or people looking for a place where traditional accommodations aren’t possible. Even towns that are light on tourism and don’t have many hotels usually have at least a few Airbnbs available—like the one where my father once lived. His “castle” is one of about a dozen Airbnbs in his far-flung suburb, and it’s by far the priciest one. In more remote locations like this, Airbnb sometimes retains some of its old charm. But in the case of the castle, I scroll through photo after photo of beige furniture and wonder what’s lost when homes are turned into working sites of capital.

My father died in 2018, and I liked to visit his house on Google Earth in the months after his death. I’d drag the photo of the building in circles with my cursor, trying to peer into windows. Here was where he held my head in his lap after I left my husband, patting my hair until my mucous-inflected sobs dried up; here I botched our meatloaf dinner and he laughed, said we could go to Popeye’s instead. I would imagine that we were in the Google Earth photo, nestled into that sweet dilapidated cottage with our junk food and our mouse, watching a movie, out of sight of the camera but very much at home.

Google posted photos of the place in 2012 when he lived there, a month after he died in 2018, and in 2019. As time goes on, the little pink house looks less and less loved. The vivid azaleas and carefully pruned dogwoods that lined the front walk in 2013 gave way to hostile overgrowth in 2018, all to be abandoned to a completely bare lawn by 2019, when the house’s current owner took over. The dogwoods and azaleas are long gone now, seemingly not just cut down but obliterated by the roots from the earth. The grass is perfect. The house is no longer pale pink, but a whitish color that is no color at all. It has been transformed from a home into a rentable castle.

It could be an Airbnb in Vancouver, Woodstock, or Miami. It could be anywhere, could belong to anyone. Nobody lives there full time. You can make yourself at home.

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September 8, 2022August 4, 2026

What’s Lost When a Home Becomes a Working Site of Capital

by Rax King

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