Travel

Foreign travellers commandeer a public roadside toilet, turn it into a storage locker

By Staff

A public lavatory or a storage locker? The smell and the toilet should have alerted the travellers to the intended use of the green shed. Photo/Halla Eyþórsdóttir Facebook.

The Icelandic Road and Coastal Authority has recently added public lavatories along the Ring Road and at popular destinations around Iceland. The facilities, erected at 30 different locations, are intended to deal with the growing numbers of travellers and the lack of public lavatories at most destinations.

Questionable use of a public toilet

However, when an employee of the IRCA showed up to clean the toilets at the parking lot by Fossárbrú bridge, an abandoned bridge over a river in Berufjörður fjord, one of the toilets had been locked with a small padlock. Halla Eyþórsdóttir, who discovered the padlocked toilet was at first unsure what to do, but decided to break the lock, as it had clearly not put up by the IRCA or other legal authorities.

“Last night when I came to clean the lavatories I was baffled to discover one of the toilets had been padlocked shut by someone. I was unsure what to do, but I decided I had to cut the lock to enter the toilet. When I opened the door I discovered the toilet had been stacked full of luggage.”

Halla posted photos of the scene to Facebook. The backpacks and suitcases which had been stacked inside the toilet probably belonged to a couple of travellers who were lying sound asleep in a rental car parked nearby. “This is not ok,” Halla adds in her Facebook post.

One person who commented on the post wondered why Halla didn’t flush the luggage down, while others suggested she should have confiscated the baggage or charged the travellers for storage.