2-Day Ice Cave & South Coast: Glacier Hike and Glacier Lagoon

I recently went on a Troll tour to the south coast of Iceland. Over the two days, we spent around 10-12 hours driving. Our guide decided to use this opportunity to give long monologues on his opinions on race and gender. The tour guide talked multiple times about how he didn’t like to take Chinese tourist groups (despite there being some on our tour). Their main reason for this was that they didn’t talk to him and he felt like there was ‘no sign of life back there’ and that ‘they don’t know how to use seatbelts’. The guide also made several derogatory jokes about women. He lamented that his ex-girlfriend would spend his hard-earned money on bras and joked that it would have been better if he had just held her breasts instead. The guide also spoke about trans women, saying that ‘it’s the trendiest thing in Iceland right now’, and it was confusing that you have to use their ‘weird pronouns’. He went on to tell an anecdote about when he had misgendered a transgender woman called Sara and imitated her voice (cartoonishly deep), remarking ‘you are not Sara, you are a man’. I found the guide's comments offensive and very inappropriate for the tour setting, and I stayed back at one of the stops to give this feedback to him in private. I then discretely took a picture of the number plate so I could identify my tour when submitting a complaint to Troll Tours. When I got back on the bus, the guide brought up his iPad with a zoomed-in picture of the number plate. He announced to the whole bus that someone was going to make a complaint, saying "I've been kind enough to take a better, higher-definition photo that they can use". He continued to make similar jibes towards me throughout the rest of the tour. I was hopeful that when I reported this to Troll Tours that they would take this seriously; however they proceeded to dismiss my experience, implying that my friends and I were the problem. I'm writing this review to try and prevent others from going through the same horrible experience that I have done.

I am really disappointed in this company. During our tour the weather was terrible (nothing the company could do about that) but we made it to Kirkjubæjarklaustur before we reached a road closure. At this point we should have seen seljalandsfoss, þorvaldseyri, skógafoss, and reynisfjara. I have included a picture of a map. The green dot is where the tour turned around and the four blue dots are the places that we should have stoped at but didn’t. I also included a photo of the drivers guide which shows where we should have stoped. The driver had this guide yet didn’t stop at any of these locations. The biggest issue we had was lack of communication. The driver gathered us at around 1800 from the Kirkjubæjarklaustur stop we were at and told us that we were heading back to Reykjavik and that we needed to find our own hotel. This caught a lot of us off guard considering that accommodations were listed under what is included with the tour. ( I also added a picture of this for reference). The bus driver refused to talk to us after this. All of us were unprepared to be looking for a hotel and considering it was a last minute thing most hotels overcharged us. The bus driver just dropped us off in random parts of the city and all he said was and I quote “Good luck, hope you find a hotel”. This was at around 2200. The company could have handled this better. I think everyone in our tour would have been okay with waiting for the road to open back up and the very least the company could have done was find us hotels instead of just randomly dropping us off. I want to add that there were at least two female solo travers as well as my sister and I that got randomly dropped off and this is a safely concern that the company didn’t care about. So in order to recap at this point we saw nothing that we were promised to see and we got dropped off in the middle of the night without accommodations as promised. I also added a picture of where it says that if the tour is canceled due to weather that we would get a full refund but the company only gave us a partial. Now considering we had to pay for an overpriced hotel and we wasted two days in Iceland (considering how late we got dropped off we couldn’t book another tour) this partial refund is out right offensive. If anything we should have gotten a full refund and the company should have paid for a hotel for the night. Nothing that was promised us we got. We didn’t see anything, we didn’t get accommodations, breakfast, etc. On top of all this our driver had a bad attitude from the start. About 2 hours into the drive, he started talking about wanting to head back to Reykjavik (way before we even hit the road closure at around 1600). We realized that the speaker didn’t work in the middle to the back of the bus but the driver didn’t care. He then told us what time we should be back from our lunch break but no one could hear him. This caused about four people from our tour to get back late to the bus. He yelled at them in front of everyone and was disrespectful. (Our lunch should have been 45 minutes but it was 20 minutes which compared to how many tour buses stoped at that location for lunch it was an unreasonable time frame.) No one should be talked to like the way he talked to them. At another stop he yelled at a different woman for bringing food on the bus even though she stated multiple times that she wasn’t going to eat it on the bus. He also refused to drive a woman to her bus stop near her hotel and told her as well as other people to just get off the bus even though it wasn’t their stop. Overall the company handled this horribly and the bus driver who said he was a contracted should be fired. The bus drivers name was PG.

Timos Theologis 先生是我在冰岛南部二天一日游的导游，他开车十分安全，并且是个有耐心人，尽管他看起来没那么多话但是实际却是个细腻的人。我在这趟旅途的感受非常好。 如果还有下一趟旅行希望可以再见到他