After a day of exploring Iceland's stunning glaciers and volcanic coastline, I met a director of Iceland Express in Reykjavik last week; a beautiful island, we agreed. He told me he hoped his airline's lower fares from Stansted might see a boom in a certain type of visitor: namely, the stag party. I nearly choked on my pint.
Why invite the dogs of hell to those pristine shores? Just as we used to dump toxic waste in the Irish Sea, we dispatched stag parties to Dublin until the grieving locals cried enough was enough. I've been at the Eurostar terminal in Brussels on a Friday afternoon to see an army of staggering Brits in fancy dress disembarking for action; and Amsterdam doesn't bear thinking about. Hungary and other new EU members will soon discover this dubious advantage of easy access from Britain.
But stag parties in lovely, eco-friendly Iceland? For snowmobiling, quad biking, outdoor activities, the director protested. Right - and a cup of cocoa and an early night.
To be fair, in the 15 short years since beer was legalised over there, the locals have developed a reasonable binge drinking culture of their own, judging from the crowd still swigging cans the next morning in Reykjavik. So a few marauding foreigners will fit right in. At least, at £6 for a pint, bar owners will be well compensated for the carnage.
Never mind the Bermuda triangle...
On the plane from Iceland, I was soon feeling peckish (and I hadn't even been on a stag do). Left cold by the tasteless salad wrap on sale, I turned in desperation to an old reliable: the duty-free Toblerone.
How on earth did this weird chocolate affair become a staple of international travel? It's hardly the most convenient thing to slip in your hand luggage, let alone eat, veering wildly in size between huge teeth-breaking slabs and fiddly mini-pieces of melting mess that you can't peel the foil off. Yet for decades travellers have been picking them up with the cut-price spirits and 200 fags, possibly in a guilty attempt to make duty-free fun for kids too.
These bars get about. Mine was made in Switzerland for an Australian registered company for import to Spain and Argentina, and here it was jetting to and from Iceland in a six-pack on an air hostess's trolley.
The people at Kraft were too busy plotting global domination to explain just how they'd tied up this lucrative market. But they did confirm that duty-free stores are the largest purchaser of Toblerone - which, given that there must be hundreds of sweet shops on land for every one in an airport, is a strange fact. Does altitude affect our taste buds, or do unwitting punters think those gold packs are cheap cigarettes? This demands further investigation.
Hard work, holidays
A new survey claims that 83% of us suffer severe stress before going on holiday. I can only applaud Lloyds TSB for publicising the kind of problems some of us have to cope with on a regular basis at work. Few are the colleagues who sympathise with pre-holiday trauma, which we now learn ranges from packing to bikini waxing.
And I can reveal that it doesn't stop once you're away. Here are my own independently researched seven deadly sources of holiday stress:
1. Sand, getting everywhere.
2. The fear of accidentally making a joke at a US airport.
3. Buffet or a la carte?
4. Why am I the only person on this tropical beach taking malaria tablets, and where did I put them anyway?
5. The National Trust.
6. Am I getting sunburnt - or worse, going home without a tan?
7. Unwrapping a Toblerone.
As a regular holidaymaker, the travel editor's burden is a heavy one. Let's hope this survey makes a few people sit up and smell the sunscreen.
