Coming In From The Cold
Brrrrr. Even I, who as people will know me will tell you can happily walk around in a t-shirt in sub-zero temperatures, has had cause to feel a bit chilly in the last week. It occurs to me that I forgot to mention that the holiday was five days at the Icehotel in Swedish Lapland. Above the Arctic Circle, spending one night sleeping on a block of ice and the other three in 'warm accomodation'. It's a slightly extravagant experience, but seriously, if you can manage it, do it.
We flew from London to Stockholm then connected to a domestic flight to Kiruna, which is around 15 minutes drive from Jukkasjärvi, where the hotel is built afresh each winter from ice carved from the Torne River. Each year the 'suites' in the hotel are redesigned by a different group of artists, each of whom lays out their room according to a different theme or principle. Ours was Japanese themed. You can't use a room in the Icehotel like a normal hotel room where you leave your clothes hanging in the wardrobe, for obvious reasons, so you only take possession of your room at night when you want to go to bed. From 10am to 6pm every day, every room is open to the public. So on our last morning we went round them all taking photographs. As we'd forsworn our thermals in order not to be uncomfortable on the journey home, by the time we got the hell out of there we were *frozen* - we stepped outside into a landscape of snow and ice, but with the sun shining suddenly we were back in the warm.
Other stuff we did: A 'moose safari' to look, unsurprisingly, for moose, a number of which we saw; a snowmobile excursion which took us over frozen lakes, through forests and down snow-covered trails, and a nighttime equivalent to see the Northern Lights. This last was a big worry, because the conditions were rubbish for it, but at the very last minute, as we were about to set off back to the hotel, David was the first to spot a shimmer in the sky that had the entire group entranced for the next fifteen minutes.
Snowmobiling, by the way, is David's big new passion, and devoted boyfriend that I am, I gave up my turn to do the driving so that he could.
We also hired a car and drove straight across the Torne. Even frozen as solidly as it was, there's something unnerving about that experience.