After a comfortable night in the hostel parking lot and the luxury of long hot showers we were ready for our Ice Hotel tour. So at 10:00 am we strolled down to the large TeePee near the rivers edge to meet our guide. He was inside making coffee for the group over an open fire. The group turned out to be just Nina and I so we basically got a private tour.

Our tour lasted a couple of hours and we got a wealth of information about the history and operation of the Ice Hotel and I could fill a book with information. So let me just give of few of the more interesting tid-bits.

  • The Ice Hotel started by accident in the 1989. An Igloo was built on the ice of the nearby river Torne to house an art exhibition. A group of Norwegian soldiers who arrived in the town without hotel reservations (to find all the accommodation take), stayed in the Igloo for a night and were surprised to find it was comfortable. This started the idea. That Igloo broke through the river ice and sank within a week of construction. Hence all future Ice Hotels were/are built on land.

  • The construction of the present day Ice Hotel uses 30,000 tons of Snice (mixture of ice and snow) and 2500 blocks of ice cut from the Torne River. The ice blocks are 2 meters long 1 meter wide and almost a meter thick. The ice blocks are cut from the river in March of each year and stored in a huge refrigerated warehouse throughout the summer for the subsequent years build.

  • The temperature inside the Ice Hotel is approximately -5°C. But in the Ice Bar the temperature sometimes gets higher because of the number of people congregating there. Drinks in that bar are served in drinking containers made of ice.

  • There are now Ice Bars (run by the Ice Hotel) in London and Stockholm. They are housed in refrigerated rooms.

  • If you are interested you can by ice (in any quantity your wallet can tolerate) from the Ice Hotel and they will ship it to you anywhere in the world.

Following the tour we got back on the road headed towards Narvik, the Norwegian coast and those famous Fjords. The drive was pretty, even spectacular. past lake after lake, backed by snow patched mountains, and set off by bright summer sun.

Once down onto the coast we found a large gravel parking lot on the beach front for our nights camp. There were a few permanent looking caravans parked there that looked like they were selling souvenirs to passersby, and throughout the afternoon a number of vehicles dropped by and people went swimming or cooked barbecues on the beach.