Wood’s First Rule of Budget Travel applies here: where there is runaway inflation, there are great deals for travelers with hard cash. So in January, I boarded a flight from Dubai to Kish, an Iranian duty-free-shopping and holiday resort in the Persian Gulf. The island is tiny—small enough to circumnavigate by car in about half an hour. Unlike every other part of Iran, Kish requires no visas from anyone, including Americans. I hoped to find a place where foreign and domestic currencies converged, and where Iranian tourists could tell me a little about what their rials could still buy them. Historically, Iranians have gone to Kish to buy goods from overseas and to relax in the sun. But a collapsing currency means that overseas goods have become significantly more expensive, even if the sunshine is still free.

From Dubai, I flew on the Iranian carrier Kish Air, aboard an MD‑82 jet packed with foreign holidaymakers. We arrived safely, though upon takeoff from Dubai, I had wondered how a country barred from getting new American-made airplane parts maintained an old American-made airplane. The other passengers were mostly Filipinas on leave from jobs in Dubai. Kish, they told me, had emerged as a preferred holiday destination for those too poor to go all the way home to the Philippines. After just a short flight, they could live like queens for a week, having toiled as scullery maids for a year or more without vacation in Dubai. On the island, they lounged in modest rented apartments, drank juice by the sea, and biked among the palm trees. At the airline office at Fish Roundabout, a traffic circle in Dubai, I had asked Filipinas who had visited Kish previously what I should bring for my trip. They all said dirhams—the convertible currency of the United Arab Emirates, pegged to the U.S. dollar—and nothing else. Cash was king in Kish: with just a little bit of it, everything you could really want for a weekend jaunt would be available for a pittance.

At Kish’s single-runway airport, under the owlish stare of a portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the women were led aside to a bin of scarves and formless blue tunics, so anyone who arrived in risqué attire could cover up before meeting the male immigration officers. When I got to the front of the line, the officer planted a big wet kiss of an entry stamp in my passport and waved me through to the baggage claim with nary a question. I exited the airport into the warm gulf night and headed straight to my hotel, the Parmis.

The first sign of rising prices was the hotel rate card. I had agreed over the phone to pay 370 dirhams, or about $100, for a night at a five-star hotel, including breakfast and lunch. (I had originally been told that the hotel had no vacancies, but when I asked again in English, with the implication of payment in foreign currency, a room materialized.) The rates for Iranians were quoted in Iranian rials, and to me—I had not been in Iran in more than three years—they looked not high but simply wrong. A zero in Persian writing is represented by a dot, and here I saw dots leading far off to the right, as if someone had left an ellipsis on the rate card instead of the full price. The Iranian price was 1.8 million rials. I asked the desk clerk whether prices had gone up, and he smiled and said “Up, up, up!,” with his hand gesturing to the ceiling or to God. “Not so bad,” he added, optimistically. Not for him, anyway—the decline of the rial had made it harder for Iranians to vacation abroad in places like Dubai and Istanbul; many were keeping their trips affordable by coming to Kish instead. The crowds were most apparent at meals, when the hotel buffet overflowed with Iranian tourists trampling each other to get at the last bit of chelo kebab.