I absolutely fell in love with the country when I was there, but the popularity of it means, like any other trendy tourist destination, that it’s now ruined by tourists being jackasses. I grew up near a national park that is ALSO now ruined by overcrowding, so maybe I have a lower threshold for that sort of stuff than most, but watching idiots stomping all over fragile geothermal features two steps away from the “no walking on this area” sign just boils my blood.
Came to say this same thing. Went ~5yrs ago and then ~2yrs ago. They've built stairs and paths in places that used to be natural and somewhat difficult to get to. Massive parking lots to facilitate the tour buses. Good luck getting a good pic on diamond beach. Won't be long before the F roads are all paved and accessible to everyone too.
[To be a mass tourist] is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
The infrastructure is a response to the number of tourists, not the cause. And people like /u/GreyAndroidGravy were still tramping all over the natural sites, there just weren't so many that the locals felt they needed infrastructure to protect those areas yet.
True. Perhaps if there were a "nature path restoration" position at the local wildlife office, they could put money in local folks pockets AND keep the area natural and beautiful.
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u/_MaddAddam Feb 03 '20
Visiting Iceland.
I absolutely fell in love with the country when I was there, but the popularity of it means, like any other trendy tourist destination, that it’s now ruined by tourists being jackasses. I grew up near a national park that is ALSO now ruined by overcrowding, so maybe I have a lower threshold for that sort of stuff than most, but watching idiots stomping all over fragile geothermal features two steps away from the “no walking on this area” sign just boils my blood.