One of the things which people kept bringing up, when I mentioned places I wanted to see in the world, was the Icehotel in Sweden.¹ It has this kind of weird totemic resonance. People were excited to hear I was visiting in a way that they weren’t when I mentioned India or Turkey or Thailand.

That’s a pretty good argument in favor of their advertising team, at least. Everybody’s heard of it. There are copycat experiences around the world — Canada, Switzerland, Romania — and they’ve got bars² scattered around the world which have themselves spawned copycats. So in a lot of ways, they’ve been wildly successful.

Being a resort, it’s more expensive than I’m comfortable with, but I found a couple like-minded friends I could split the cost with, and headed up north. And I’m glad I did.

The first thing to understand is that Kiruna has historically been a summer tourist spot, not a winter one. It’s long hosted hunters and fishermen along the Torne river, when you have long, lazy, 20-hour days. To hear the guides at the hotel tell it, the Icehotel was started in 1990, by someone looking for a way to attract visitors during the slow season. They weren’t having much success until a shortage of rooms for an exhibition of ice sculpture in town forced the locals to find someplace to host some overbooked guests — only to end up housing them in the unheated conference center igloo.

I’ve no doubt that’s roughly true, although there’s a long way to go between “hosting a couple tourists in a spare igloo” and “building a full-size replica of your hotel for a BMW commercial in South Africa.” Now it consists of a year-round set of a couple dozen rooms and a bar (the “ICEHOTEL 365”), along with a number of fully heated cabins and the temporary Icehotel, constructed every year at the beginning of the winter season and allowed to melt each spring, to be recreated (with different artists) the next year.

In general, they recommend you come up for about three days, and spend two days in one of the heated cabins and one day in one of the cold rooms at either the start or the end of the trip. The cold rooms are pretty bare bones; the showers and bathrooms and lockers are all in the activity center³ so you’ve pretty much just got a platform made of ice, with a mattress and a reindeer fur over it. When you’re ready to sleep, you pick up a sleeping bag⁴ and a liner and wander over to your room. They recommend layers, but I started with jacket, T-shirt, pajama bottoms, and socks and had shed all but the pajamas before I got to sleep. My friend, in the sleeping bag next to me, unzipped his about a third of the way. It gets pretty warm.⁵

In the morning you get awakened with a cup of warm lingonberry juice. I felt mostly okay; the sleeping bag can be pulled closed, cocoon-style, so the only thing exposed is your face. So I had a bit of a sort throat (I assume from the cold air overnight) and I’ll still gladly opt for a warm four-poster bed over an ice slab, but it was worth trying, if just the once.

If the ice rooms get all the media, the bulk of the experience is really the outdoorsy stuff. There’s the usual mix of authentic and semi-authentic and straight-up touristy stuff.⁶ It’s all fairly expensive,⁷ but a lot of it is ridiculously fun. I booked in for one thing each day, so when we arrived we were met at the airport and loaded onto a dogsled for about an hour’s ride back to the hotel.⁸

The second day I had blocked off for evening snowmobiling under the northern lights. You hop on a snowmobile and zip around the woods for a couple hours, finally ending at a cabin⁹ where you spent a leisurely hour eating stew and cake and drinking kokkaffe.¹⁰ But if you were lucky, you arrive just as prime viewing time for the Nothern Lights hits.

We were lucky. It was a near perfect night, and just as we arrived for dinner the lights were starting to shimmer. I took a photo on my phone¹¹ and stood out for a while, then went into dinner. By the time we were finishing the lights had reached the peak of their activity, and I ran outside to just stand out on a frozen river, staring up at the sky, and watch them wash over the Arctic Circle. I took a couple more photos,¹² then it was time to hop on the snowmobile and head back to the hotel.

The final night I booked a reservation at the fancy restaurant in the hotel. I know it’s silly, but it was a 12-course dinner around a curved wooden bar where the chefs prepare to food in front of you. They made a point of using seasonal, local ingredients¹³ so you’d have things like a salad of winter greens served on a smear of onion, cooked down and reduced to a thick paste which tasted sweet and unctuous and not at all sharp or bitter. And they liberally shared wines with the meal, champagne and reds and whites ending with a dessert wine and an ice wine. It was overindulgent, and a good way to cap the experience.

I don’t usually splurge while traveling. I’m starting to do that a little more — booking cruises with my father, say, because I otherwise don’t get to see him — but even then this was a little out of my comfort zone. I’ll be doing penance¹⁴ by bouncing through Southeast Asia and cutting back on my expenses for two months.

But it’s easy to get caught in a spiral where every decision you make for your own comfort can be criticized. Why go to the theater when you could watch TV? Why eat out when you can microwave ramen at home? Why take vacation when you could work?

Too much of that and you burn out pretty quickly. So I guess I’ll stay stuck in the middle, trying to balance living simply and frugally with this pressure I feel to see and do and experience everything. Maybe I’ll find it someday.

Next: Oslo (OSL) to Bangkok (BKK)
Prev: Birmingham (BHX) to Stockholm (BMA)

Footnotes

¹ Or, as their branding would have it, the ICEHOTEL

² ICEBARs, properly

³ Also a sauna

⁴ Rated to -20°C, apparently. The ambient temperature hovers around -5°C.

⁵ Until you have to use the restroom at 3am, that is.

⁶ Sleddogs aren’t exactly native to the region, since they don’t mix well with reindeer, which are.

⁷ Captive audience and all, although there is a grocery about a kilometer down the road if you’re looking for cheap eats.

⁸ One nice feature is they give you the complete snow gear: snowsuit, boots, gloves, hat, and balaclava. Yes, you end up with the fashion sense and mobility of a toddler on their first snow day, but it works.

Fun fact: racing huskies are trained to poop on the trot. I guess you get used to it.

⁹ Yes, in the woods. No, it wasn’t stocked with dismembered bodies, unless you count the moose in the goulash they served.

¹⁰ Literally just unfiltered coffee boiled on the wooden stove

¹¹ Shockingly, the “Night Vision” mode on my new cell phone takes great photos.

¹² Breathtaking ones, considering the source

¹³ Often fresh-caught fish or locally shot moose — Sweden’s not that vegetarian-friendly in the traditional cuisine — but I did just fine on the vegetable menu.

¹⁴ Probably not quite the right term