DUTY FREEZE.
In the absorbing world of extreme cold, Absolute Zero weighs in at around -273.16 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, molecules simply stop moving. So forget about wrapping up warm, you’re already dead.
At a mere -20, as indicated on the thermometer hanging outside the Jukkasjarvi Ice Hotel reception today, my molecules simply go into a huddle, have a bit of a chat about things, and then refuse, point blank, to get out of bed. I’m wearing so many clothes that, given a quick lick of white paint, I’d pass muster as a perfectly serviceable Michelin man. Yet any extremities left exposed to the elements immediately take on the texture and hue of porcelain, and I’m terrified of anyone bumping into me lest vital bits should snap off and plink, unsolicited, to the ground.
In truth, however, I consider myself lucky. I’ve been here before, and it was much, much colder: At -32 degrees the hairs in your nose freeze and stick together (you can try this humorous handicap to breathing at home; just cram each nostril full of deep frozen tinsel). Moreover, at a far from unusual -40 rubber becomes somewhat brittle, and attempts to pull away from your overnight car parking space elicit a moment of purest cartoon; the wheels obey the steering, but the tyres tend to stay put. Needless to say, those caught short in such conditions are ill-advised to sneak off behind a bush for fear of becoming inadvertently frozen in place…
The diminutive community of Jukkasjarvi huddles 125 miles inside the Arctic Circle beside the Torne River, near the Swedish mining town of Kiruna; an urban sprawl so ugly that, were it a new-born baby, the midwife would undoubtedly have slapped its mother instead.
Check in at the Ice Hotel takes place in a modern wooden building sporting a roaring fire and several dozen utterly despondent looking Japanese couples. Their sombre mood may be attributed directly to the heavy cloud trundling overhead: It seems that the Japanese are Northern Lights fanatics, believing that a child conceived under this astonishing natural phenomenon will be blessed with unnatural beauty. Here, deep within the Arctic Circle, the Aurora Borealis comes out to play with anything but monotonous regularity in winter months, so clouds of any kind are considered most unsporting and today the place is awash with lower lips you could perch a pint on.
Indeed, recognising that (as I am about to rediscover) you’d have to be mad as a balloon to spend more than one night trying to sleep in a deep freeze, The Ice Hotel has littered its grounds with comfy timber huts into which you may subsequently de-bunk. And many of these have giant windows built into bedroom roofs to ensure eager couples can respond promptly to the first flicker of charged ion particles cavorting across the skies.
Tonight, however, I can contrive no escape from impending Bibendum on Ice status, and an enthusiastic young Swede ushers me to a communal locker room and administers both sleeping lessons and bags. “Don’t wear too many clothes in you sleeping bag” he intones. “Or you will be colder.” How so? “Just a pair of dry socks, thermal leggings and a sweater” he insists. Is that all you wear yourself, then? I ask, smelling a rat large enough to take the lead in a
Hollywood ‘B’ monster movie. “Oh, I have never slept in there” comes the sing-song retort. “I only started work here today. Now, if you need anything at all in the night just ask me. I will be here until at least 9.30pm…”
From the outside, a first glimpse of the Ice Hotel, frankly, disappoints. Essentially resembling a giant, amorphous snowdrift, a crystal clear entrance wall of ice blocks punctuated by reindeer skin clad double doors is the only clue as to the interior’s Middle-eastern-dictator-grandiose igloo pretensions.
Arne Bergh, ice sculptor and now Art Director, who has been involved in all 13 iterations of the Ice Hotel since a gaggle of die-hards first spent the night in an ice art gallery built on the Torne River in 1989, explains its construction. “Much of the building is made of ‘Snice’ -a water and air mixture blown over formwork, which freezes to about two thirds the density of ice. But for the entrance wall, columns and other details, we harvest giant ice blocks straight from the river, and glue them together using hot water. The Torne is the world’s cleanest river, and running water makes the best ice; no bubbles, so it’s very clear. You can immediately see the difference in materials” he enthuses, pushing open the main entrance door…
Seductively lit by discreet, diminutive low voltage lights, the main hall is astonishing. Vast, transparent columns glowing the palest blue support a smooth, white, vaulted ceiling beneath which a Norse God sized dining table and chairs of solid ice gleam in the reflected glory of an exquisite ice chandelier, each artfully carved facet of which is lit by spindling fibre optics cable.
To one side, an Absolut Vodka bottle shaped doorway leads through to the bar, itself carved from solid river ice, where you may sample all manner of dubious vodka flavours ‘in the rocks’. The only problem with solid ice glasses being their tendency to head rapidly south out of the un-gloved hand with all the alacrity of a miscreant bar of soap.
There’s even a chapel, where brides who don’t mind goose pimples on their goose pimples are regularly to be seen slithering up the aisle, safe in the knowledge that, for one more night at least, their virtue is more than likely to remain intact…
And so to bed. And I can’t help noticing that the Swedes have gone a tad soft on the tourists since my last visit: Where once a bed comprised of nothing more than a giant block of ice piled American breakfast pancake stack high with reindeer skins (famed for their perfect insulation properties), there is now a proper base with mattress and pillows.
This year, the Ice Hotel boasts some 50 rooms, with 10 additional suites decorated in ever more outrageous manner by artists invited from around the globe to try their hand at ice sculpting. A Roman suite comes complete with Doric columns and an ice chaise longue, another is so crammed with fat columns lit the deepest, ocean blue there’s barely room for the bed, a third is dominated by a giant, hollow egg in which you’re supposed to snooze… Perhaps the most impressive is an ice carving of Freya, the Scandinavian pagan Goddess of Fertility who flies about on a sleigh drawn by giant cats, around her neck the famous brooch said to help women in labour. Sadly, I
can’t seem to find a giant St. Bernard sculpture, complete with barrel of brandy guaranteed to help men shivering in sleeping bags.
Bagged up, then, like a maggot in a face-pack, breath tinkling merrily to the ground like confetti at a polar bear’s wedding, sleep seems out of the question. So, with no arms available, is reading by the light of special no-warmth-on-offer candles, unless you can persuade your companion to hold your book in their teeth. No hemlock is required to bring numbness to the senses either; the -10 cold, although many degrees snugger than the outside world, is already making a decent fist of that.
Still, I must have dozed off, because suddenly it’s 6.00 am and a Swede with no idea of the extreme hazards of assaulting someone boasting brittle eyebrows with overt bonhomie first thing in the morning proffers a glass of hot lemonade and the offer of an open air sauna, before beating a hasty retreat.
Happily, the day dawns bright, clear and warm enough for the Ice Hotel staff to fret about their livelihood melting away before their eyes. Good news, however, both for a potential Japanese population boom tonight, and me, who is to spend the day aboard a dog sled.
A sled team normally comprises 12 dogs attached, by a veritable cats cradle of rope through which they are endlessly chewing, to a wooden sled lashed together with strips of hide, rather than screws, to allow flexing over rough terrain. But today, Thomas -about as in charge as anyone ever can be of a pack of terminally over-excited dogs- has just 11; his top dog is injured and he’s trying to train a new leader, in whom he does not have enormous faith.
Indeed, at one point shortly after we set off, overt canine dithering causes Thomas to dismount for a pep-talk up in the bows. Thus encouraged, the dogs instantly hurtle off again, leaving Thomas stranded on the snow and us rudderless. Mercifully, as the sled rips by he sticks out a casual hand and swings back on board. These dogs, cross-bred huskies often disconcertingly sporting one blue and one brown eye, are running fools. They’ll run flat our for 6 hours a day, most comfortably when it’s between -15 and -20 degrees. The only way to stop a team is to literally throw an anchor off the back of the sled. And, even exhausted, they’ll be barking and yelping to be on the move again almost immediately.
Despite the fact that today’s conditions are positively balmy by husky standards, a stiff breeze whips snow off the lake beds into a biting fog, upsetting the otherwise sublime tranquillity of our progress through vast, silent pine forests, the only sounds the faint patter of paws, the burp of snow beneath runners and the gentle creak of sled timber bindings.
Thomas tells me that, despite the uncanny silence of our progress, we’re unlikely to come across a moose because we are, after all, effectively taking a pack of wolves for a walk. The moose and the wolf do not get on. In fact, when heavy snow forces the moose population to stick to the trails, encounters twixt moose and dog reveal the former to be surprisingly aggressive, and those sweeping antlers to be rather more than just for show.
One particular moose that won’t be giving the dogs any trouble today, however, is the one we’ve just had for lunch. Stopping at a small hunting cabin beside a frozen lake to stamp the warmth back into our toes, Thomas and his daughter drum up a moose stew in surprisingly short order. The taste is something of a cross between beef and venison, and absolutely delicious.
I can’t tell you what an Alaskan husky eats for lunch, but a requirement of 8000 calories per day (four times that of a man) constitutes an awful lot of Bonios. A decidedly unwholesome side effect of said appetite all too literally strikes me on our return journey and, having swapped paw power for the thrills of a snowmobile, I’m inclined to vote the noisy blue fug of two-stroke Ski-Doo exhaust emissions fractionally more acceptable than the husky equivalent.
Recognising that guests might just draw the line at eating with ice cutlery, the Ice Hotel has a conventional restaurant nearby, though some dishes are, naturally, served on ice plates. Though the limited menu reflects a stay of only two days by most tourists, the food is very good. It’s Donner kebabs tonight. Or perhaps Blitzen, or even Rudolph; all reindeer taste the same to me and, frankly, not a patch on moose.
Tonight, the Ice Hotel theatre is staging a production of Hamlet, complete with interval music played on the most exquisite ice instruments. Two cellos and a double base sound almost perfect, if a little brittle, in tone. The flute, with a tendency to melt every time it is played, proving harder to keep in tune.
The theatre, built for the first time this year, is a painstaking replica of the original, Shakespearean Globe, right down to the absence of the one ingredient essential to convivial theatre going in the Arctic Circle; a roof. Sadly, the Swedish idea of inclement weather has ravaged the structure somewhat early this year, melting the surrounding boxes to the point where they’ve had to be closed off.
With the chill creeping inexorably north from solid ice benches, it’s hard to concentrate fully on the performance. Particularly since the play is performed in Saami (formerly known as Lapp), a language understood by less folk on the planet than it takes to populate, say, Truro. However, abetted by solid ice accessories including a glistening, gem-like Yorrick skull, the production looks glorious with the Aurora Borealis now blazing overhead and the Japanese contingent of the audience crashing, en mass, back to their chalets…
By the time you read this, the Ice Hotel will once more have vanished without trace from the banks of the Torne River. The beauty of rebuilding a new hotel every year being that, firstly, no one has to make the beds, and secondly, you can conjure an even more breathtaking construction next time. I shall, nonetheless, continue to caution against such frigid opulence as an ideal honeymoon location.
FACTS:
Transportation.
Domestic flights (85 minutes or the night train from Stockholm to Kiruna, which is a 15 minute drive from the Ice Hotel. Transfers may be arranged by car, bus, snowmobile or dog sled.
Ice Hotel Accommodation.
50 rooms including 10 suites sculpted by different artists. Sleeping bags, sheets and reindeer hides supplied. Morning hot fruit drink followed by sauna and breakfast buffet at the Jukkasjarvi Wardshus included.
Warm Accommodation.
30 bungalows, including a number of ‘Aurora houses’ with double beds and skylights for viewing the Northern Lights.
Equipment / Clothing.
warm clothing such as snowsuits, winter boots, hats and gloves available for hire, as are cross-country skis and snowshoes. Luggage storage is available adjacent to the Ice Hotel.
Activities.
Kick-sledding, snowmobile safaris, cross-country skiing, Northern Lights safari, fishing, hot saunas, Saami Culture, dog sledding.
Reservations.
Icehotel, SE-981 91 Jukkasjarvi, Sweden.
tel: +46 980 668 00, fax: +46 980 668 90
info@icehotel.com
Further Information.
www.icehotel.com