Joanna Tsai had a good time in the ice hotel in Jukkasjärvi in the far north. But for the genuine Lappland experience, she would recommend going elsewhere.
Despite what you may think, it’s not hard to survive a night in the Ice Hotel. Although it’s as cold as hell (or more accurately, hell frozen over), the ice beds are topped with thin mattresses covered with reindeer hides. And they give you a really large sleeping bag that is good in -50C weather.
You can choose from a one or two-person bag, but the two-person bags have only one breathing hole. I thought about what I would do if I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, wondering if it would be obvious if I peed in the hallway, but it didn’t come to that, thank goodness.
The approximately 30 very-expensive-to-stay-in art rooms are designed and built by professionals – can you make a living carving ice? The rooms are gorgeous, with interesting themes ranging from Art Deco, polar bears, and the latest Tron Legacy movie. They and the rest of the ice portion of the hotel are made with two kinds of ice- opaque manmade ice and natural ice from the nearby river.
Shockingly, the hotel makes and ships the ice glasses to the Ice Bars around the world AND stores ice for next year’s hotel in a warehouse during the summer. The ice isn’t thick enough to ‘harvest’ until the end of the winter and the quality of this ice is special (eg. the right conditions exist to make clean, bubble-less, and translucent ice). The environmentalist in me cried, but then again, the hotel doesn’t use any heating in the winter…
The evening at the hotel was nice. My friends and I tried the nice hotel restaurant, which had some typical meats of the area and Sweden (eg. elk and moose).
The hotel was very quiet, so we took over the ice bar and ripped up the dance floor into a snowy powder – our ice glasses held more and more over the course of the evening. My favorite decoration in probably the whole hotel was a neuron carved out of ice in the ice bar – I’m a proud dork.
All in all, it was a fabulous weekend although looking back on it, it was bizarre that we didn’t see or meet one Sami person (that we know of).
You’d think that for a people who used to be called Lapplanders (although that’s supposedly now politically incorrect) that we would’ve seen at least one, especially out in the woods…
Maybe you have to go farther out in the wilderness to find them and the reindeer herds after all the years they were oppressed by the Swedish government in the past.
Also, I think it’s bizarre how different one’s experiences can be depending on where you are. That seems obvious, but for our tourist experiences, the dog sled and the Ice Hotel were very different. The main reason for this is probably the price and the experience they’re marketing, but it’s unsettling that paying more money can totally change your perception of a place just thirty minutes away.
