France-tastic

A pure, quiet, cold world coloured in nothing but white and pale blue, the snow damping all sounds and the snow reflecting what little light the Arctic sun gave.

Photos of this post can now be found here! The photos in this post were ripped off various internet sites!

Spending 2800 kronor (roughly €280 or AU$560) a night on a room without your own bathroom or even a door might not be everybody's idea of good holiday value, nor might sleeping in -5 °C temperatures or drinking in a bar where the bartender keeps the juice in the fridge to keep it warm sound like a lot of fun. But it was!

The ICEHOTEL near Kiruna in the far north of Sweden is an absolutely magical place, and it gets a very enthousiastic recommendation from Alex and me. Yes, Sweden is far away, and it is certainly expensive and cold up there, but this place is so different to any other place you'll see (including imitation icebars in cities including Stockholm, Milan, London, and even Sydney), and well off the oft-trodden path between London and Rome, and so amazingly spectacularly beautiful and awe inspiring that pictures definitely don't do it justice. (Disclaimer- the author is receiving no cash for these comments, but would be most happy to.) Seriously, next time you are wandering North in the winter time, go and check it out!

The hotel basically functions like a kind of museum during the day. All the rooms are open to the public between 10 and 6 pm, and you can wander around and look at all the rooms and common areas. Some of the rooms (the suites- doulble the previously mentioned prices!) are decorated by ice-sculptors and artists from all over the world, each room in a unique style.

One of my favourites was a normal room, which contained a mini-house built out of icebricks, with a doorway entry, a sitting room with benches made out of ice, and a ceiling high enough to stand comfortably, and the bed on the upper floor, up a spiral staircase also made out of ice, above the sitting room. Just amazing. Other rooms were more simply decorated with ice sculptures and statues, and sometimes amazingly intricate snow carvings. One quite creepy room had a big pile of heads carved out of snow! Another had Escher images carved out of ice, with the contrast against the perfectly clear ice given by packing some of the shapes with snow. The non-suite rooms (ours!) were much more plain, just small rooms with walls and roof made out snow, and a bed made out of ice, with a matress and reindeer skins on top.

The central hallway was a magnificent passage lined with huge, clear, slightly bluish columns, a room you could just imagine the white witch from Narnia sweeping through, towards her throne. Even the crystals in the chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling were carved ice!

The ice for the hotel comes from the adjacent Torne river, and is carved out of the river each February, when the ice is at its thickest and best. They fence of a section of the river, and plow the snow off to encourage deeper freezing, since snow insulates the river from the cold air and prevents deep freezing- and it must be frozen down to well over a metre. The ice from this river is recognised as the best in the world and is exported to such far flung places as Brazil and the Sahara desert! The amazing clarity and lack of air bubbles or cracks comes from the fact that the river is rapidly moving as it freezes. The ice is then sawn out in huge blocks and stored in a -5 °C coolroom over the summer, until building of the hotel begins each October.

The ice is easily clean enough to drink from, once it is sawn into 10 cm cubes and holes are drilled into them and the holes filled with delicious and highly alcoholic (to stop both the drink and the drinker from freezing of course) mixtures by the Absolut Icebar bartenders on top of his or her ice counter, that only needs a bit of a scrape down come clean-up time! Then you can sit down on an ice seat at an ice table and enjoy your drink- with gloves on! Alex and I sampled several tasty concoctions, figuring we needed all the help we could get before settling into our cosy room, including a fiery Absolut pepper, apple and lime mixture!

Then it was time to don our long johns and brave the night! Armed with a sleeping bag rated to -20 °C, we had a surprisingly good night's sleep, and were awoken to a glass of hot, sweet and delicious lingonberry juice, before setting off for a tasty buffet breakfast in a balmy 20-something degree heated restaurant. Bliss!

We took heaps of photos, but the little camera cable is still on its world tour, hopefully to be landing in Paris quite soon, when I'll put up a monster photo post!

To summarise- the icehotel is absolutly amazing and we loved it!