Sweden: a land of forests, midnight sun, ice hotel and explorations

Roger Boddaert

Special to the Village News

The Scandinavian country of Sweden is like the shape of California, with about 10 million inhabitants, including immigrants from many countries around the world.

Located in the uppermost portion of Europe, Sweden is the land of woodlands, lakes, rivers, cold winters, and the land of the midnight sun with a culture unique all unto its own.

I have spent many of my youthful summers living in Sweden in the province of Jamtland, living on my grandparents' farm while learning a more simple, wholesome farm lifestyle with fond memories of yesteryear.

Sweden is a forested landscape, and the timber industry is one of the mainstays in a society that tends, nurtures, and cares about the sustainability of its forests and nature.

In our Swedish travels throughout the countryside, my wife and I decided to explore a little further north from our home base and took the train up to the small northern town of Jukkasjarii in Lapland to visit the famous Ice Hotel.

After a seven-hour train ride through the forest landscape, we came to the famous Ice-hotel that exists outside of the town center of Kiruna.

This Nordic ice hotel began in 1989 with a unique idea and is rebuilt every year for a novel experience to see and venture through a wholly constructed building with giant ice blocks weighing 4,000 lbs. Just think about the size of a large bale of hay, and you can envision the size of these frozen building blocks for this unique architectural ice structure.

The nearby Torne River freezes thick and is close to the building site where the ice blocks are harvested. Extra-long chain saws cut these giant ice cubes from the frozen riverbed and then lift them out of the frozen river with tractors and cranes for storage in large, refrigerated ice barns for the following year's construction of a brand-new ice hotel.

Each year, the ice hotel melts in spring through the short summer months, and creative ideas are brought forth for another winter season design to rebuild the new hotel once again.

Think of giant Lego blocks, but huge ice blocks instead that are structurally assembled in the hotel's construction of hallways, bedrooms, bar, chapel, carved ice sculptures, chandeliers dotted around every corner which are backlit with colorful LED lighting. It's like an ice art museum.

Our tour guide explained the intricate building features of this single-story complex and showed us the many creative aspects that were fascinating to see in its creation.

One of the highlights was the ice bar, complete with the bartender, who would blend the house schnaps special drink of lingonberry juice and a shot of Absolut Swedish vodka. This generally would keep you a bit warmer by a degree or two, and this unique drink is called a Wolf Paw. In the bar are tables, sofas, bar stools all carved from ice, and you sat on reindeer skins to keep your lower end comfy.

The beds are ice blocks in the private bedrooms and layered with thick reindeer skins that you lay on. After saying night-night, you tucked yourself into an insulated sleeping bag, and as the drawstring closed around your head, you were encapsulated into a mummy bag-like sleeping cocoon.

Once laying down, the night attendants would cover you with more reindeer skins as an additional protective shield while attempting to sleep on these giant ice blocks. Remember not to remove the layers of your long winter undies, sweaters, parka, scarves, woolen caps, and earmuffs that give you another layer of insulation for warmth and pleasant dreams.

If I may add, it does not hurt to have a couple of Wolf Paw schnapps before retiring for the night and after saying your prayers that you will survive the frigid nighttime experience of a lifetime.

There was even an ice chapel, complete with pews and a minister available if you would like to book a wedding ceremony or renew your vows with your loved one.

As we followed the educational ice hotel tour, I noticed a red fire-extinguisher tucked into a small nook of the hallway. I asked our guide the significance of this, and she replied that it was a part of the local building code, with a smile.

But if you want to spend the night, the reservations are about two years out, and around 70,000 visitors come a year to this popular tourist destination, but many make it a day trip. Many tourists arrive in the wintertime to experience the colorful northern lights of the Aurora borealis, which is a phenomenon to behold.

After leaving the ice hotel, we booked an outdoor adventure and took a long dog-sled ride complete with musher deep into the dense forest to an old log cabin for a meal of hot stew and warm glogg, and it warmed our tummies.

The long narrow sled held Git, me, and a huge Asian man as our bumper seat in the front. We all were wearing bright headlamps to guide our way through the narrow, dark and densely tree-lined sled trails, and it was a magical trip.

The nearby community of Kiruna sits upon a vast iron ore mining industry below the ground. And after decades of excavations of the iron coal, the town is slowly sinking, and cracks on the surface are appearing.

So, what do you do? You just relocate portions of the town to another stable location about two miles east of the center of the existing city.

While in Kiruna, I visited the local tourist bureau and saw a complete model of this grand endeavor for relocating some of the existing town. So, when you think about the building of the Egyptian pyramids, the Suez Canal, the Eiffel tower, or the skyscrapers of Dubai, what's the problem, you ask?

This herculean relocation project involves many buildings, century-old churches, stores, lodgings, restaurants to be reconstructed some miles away from portions of the sinking community. It is estimated to cost the mining company some two billion dollars and will take years and major engineering which the Swedes are good at.

Oh yes, our world is changing in many ways, and can we adapt? So, keep the spirit, be kind to one another, and count your daily blessings.

I hope you have enjoyed some of the photos scattered around my story, and perhaps you too will visit Scandinavia, and I say "tack," meaning "thank you."

Roger Boddaert, The Tree man of Fallbrook, can be reached at [email protected].