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.

The next morning, I wandered around the shopping