MightyHeaton.com

How trusting is Iceland? Their prime minister’s home number is listed in the phone book.

For those who have never answered constituent phone calls before and don’t appreciate the magnitude of that gesture, how about this: Icelanders don’t use bicycle locks. They park their bikes around Reykjavik, then retrieve them later. Nobody steals them.

I gather that most theft in Iceland is entirely accidental. I met a girl at my hostel who attended a concert the previous weekend, where someone took her jacket. Given that everyone was drinking at the time, she is convinced the theft was inadvertent, because the coat-burglar didn’t bother taking her purse, wallet or phone.

Hitchhiking is still done here. Which makes sense. With a population of 300,000 for the entire country, it’s a virtual certainty that whoever picks you up is a friend-of-a-friend. You just couldn’t be a serial killer in Iceland. Plus fuel costs are ludicrously expensive. I spent $40 just going from the airport to my hostel and back. If I’d known hitchhiking were a valid option at the time, I would have.

The facts above help explain Iceland’s idyllic nature. My theory is that isolated communities of affluent hot people have no incentive to commit petty crime. Why would you? If everyone in your town was a healthy-looking upper middle class blonde, what violent crime would you be tempted to undertake? Would you rather rob a liquor store, or go sit in a big steaming spa with your aforementioned wealthy, attractive flaxen-haired neighbors? Reykjavik is not likely to spawn riots. Ever.

And if you make a country far, far away and ludicrously expensive to visit, then only affluent tourists will ever pop up. London, Madrid and New York attract all walks of life; I wager that the poorest demographic of people who visit Iceland for more than a day are dentists. There’s a good reason I didn’t dawdle; my burger-fries-drink lunch combo at a fast food joint cost $15.

Astoundingly, this is the cheapest Iceland has ever been. Two years ago, before Iceland’s banking sector fell apart like a wet cardboard house, the value of their Kroner was about twice as expensive as it is now. Presumably in 2005 if you wanted to buy a burger-fries-drink combo you would kidnap a small child and use their ransom money for lunch. Which would be remarkably easy to do, given how trusting these people are.

Here’s another example of their trusting nature: When considering my return trip to the airport, I noticed that the bus company had a gap of three hours in its schedule. Which meant I could either wake up at 5:00 a.m. and amuse myself at the airport for three superfluous hours, or I could cut it close with only a half hour’s lead to get through security. So I spoke to my hostel about this and, in jest, said “Can you call the bus company’s corporate headquarters to see if they’ll redesign their fleet’s itinerary specifically to suit my needs?”

And they did! They called up the bus company and chatted with someone (presumably the CEO, but I’m not sure– maybe the prime minister) then set the phone down and gravely informed me that they were unable to restructure the company for my benefit.

I made very little effort to learn any Icelandic. A couple of years ago a volcano belched ash and lava all over Europe and grounded air traffic across the continent for a fortnight. (I remember at the time being vaguely condescending about the incident, as if improper volcano maintenance resulted in the disaster. Having now visited the country I think they probably did the best they could.) The name of the volcano is Eyjafjallajökull. How on earth do you pronounce that? I still don’t know.

Now consider that Iceland has words like Eyjafjallajökull and is only spoken by less than half a million people on the entire planet. In the Anglo-sphere we have American English and British English and Scottish English, and Indian English and even twangy Australian English. I read somewhere that there are even pockets of English-speaking communities in Alabama. So we’re used to being able to decode a wide range of accents branching out from the mother tongue. Conversely, with 300,000 people on one island, you don’t have much room for accents. So if you flub a syllable of Icelandic, they have absolutely no idea what you could possibly be talking about. Don’t bother.

I was only in Iceland for one full day. That’s not enough time to see Eyjafjallajökull, although someday I would like to. (More specifically, I want to pee into an active volcano, just to let all the gods of molten earth and seismic death and airplane delays know that I am an Alpha Male.) However it did afford enough time to visit the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is one of many Icelandic geothermal pools. Rather than hitting up pubs after work, Icelanders strip down and soak in bubbling cauldrons heated by underground molten lava. The Blue Lagoon’s water is warmed from a fissure deep below the surface, where the great tectonic plates of Eurasia and North America bump together, forever kissing and grinding beneath Reykjavik.

The Blue Lagoon is otherworldly. To get there you have to drive forty-minutes across the great extinct lava flows which cover most of Iceland in black, porous rock. The landscape is barren, marred only by clumps of stubby grass, and occasional optimistic houses dotting the ocean front with bright blue and red roofs. Lava flows settle across the land in bizarre fashions; they form cracked domes, as if a giant beneath the earth had punched her fists upward. Perhaps that’s what happens to land when glaciers retreat and the earth heaves upwards like leather on a fat man’s vacated sofa.

Past all of this weird Arctic landscape is the Blue Lagoon. Its water is hot and flushed out every forty hours, eliminating a need for chlorine. It is the color of blue milk. Steam perpetually rises from the surface, smelling ever-so-faintly of sulfur. The milky blue water is laden with silica, which has over time coated the entirety of the pool in a bone-white enamel, so that every surface is slick and hard as glass. Occasionally you will step on a rock, pick it up, and observe that it is gathering a glossy white coat, as if the pool is assembling teeth in its shallows.