Another day, another snowstorm; welcome to Lapland. Orange lanterns hardly lighting up the darkness of a new day whilst icy wind blew in my face on my way to the kennels. It was time to get the kids dressed again, and they were extremely excited today. The colder it was, the more painful my nose would get, the more excited the dogs turned. Today we would be receiving a large group with travellers all the way from Thailand that started the trip extremely nervous but returned extremely excited. I’m telling you, dog sledding is for everyone if you just give it a chance, something this beautiful is simply not meant to be disliked. I was a little less excited today because the cold went straight trough my 5 layers of clothing to the bone, and I felt like crawling back under my warm blankets. Waking up really was harder with the darkness hanging around, and I really did have a lack of vitamin as my lips were painful and my eyes swollen-sleepy. Luckily it always took me about an hour to get rid of this lack of sleep / sunlight / vitamin because by then the beauty of this life just overwhelmed the lack of all important irreplacable ingredients in life. Mindset, that was called, and travelling learned me to twist and turn that into the direction that made me adjust to the new surrounding. But today, this one was extremely cold.
- 38 we hit, and I just couldn’t get warm and whenever I got the chance I quickly dove into the little cabin besides the dogs where a heater was making overhours. This was the first (and last) day where I did want time to go fast, until my ears were triggered by an interesting sound. It was not the normal ‘aaah’ sounds the people seeing the dogs made, nor the excited ‘oooh’ sounds coming from people that got jumped or peed on by a naughty dog, it was the sound of seeing something impressive, something unexplainable and strange. So immediately my chronical chill disappeared and I entered the cold air again. The sudden smack in the face from the bright polar sky did not matter, as I was too focussed on finding the source of this excitement. And I saw my colleagues, already guided by their cameras, staring at the sky. Of course immediately the northern lights popped up in my mind, unaware that it this bright day just started and the night was still a far 3 hours away. What my eyes saw before my mouth could ask was what seemed like the doorway to another dimension, there in the straight orange blue frozen sky.
The sky itself was as always like a painting where an artist splashed its blue, yellow and pink paint around in creative ways, creating this candy-cotton sky slowly transferring to blue, from blue to darker, from darker to the night hanging above. But there where the darkness started, a hole of light appeared. It must have been a cloud, because if not for that it would be a hole in the sky, which actually would have made more sense. The cloud was too flat, to vague, and free of any edges, like a big blur. Its colour was so white it hurt the eyes to look at if for too long, it was way too bright for the rest of the sky. It did not fit here, the blinding light with its blurry, foggy edges that had an emerald green edge to it. this emerald was as vague as the rest of this cloud, this whole, and seemed to have left some traces in the sky. I absolutely could not place this mystery in this land of mysteries, but I just smiled gratefully for having witnessed another one. The world out there continued, the cars kept driving and the people kept walking, but here, in the sky, many still mysteries were unravelled. Little rumour ended up in us spreading a story these were the northern lights, only to be seen during day time at its most powerful being, yet after the necessary research with our frozen fingers, it turned out to be something not that irregular in an extremely beautiful shape: a stratospheric cloud.
I will try to keep it fun and simple unlike the complicated article I read, or just google the images to see the many beautiful shapes this cloud takes. These clouds appear in the winter stratospheres at a relatively low height. The cloud exists of extremely frozen drops of water and nitric acid (don’t ask me) or, a bit more cute, can exists out of ice crystals. As they lay so low they actually catch the sunlight, reflecting its colours to the ground, for all us excited little people to see. And excited we were, my heart jumped out of my chest when I saw in my Dutchland we spot them too, but I would never have known its true origin if not for this adventure. Feeling proud and smart with another cool discovery this extremely cold day wasn’t over yet, as we would be paying a visit to Levis Eifel tower, one of the few man-made attractions in the region; an ice hotel. I always wanted to visit one so warm of excitement and my 4 layers of clothing we left the van where Paivi let us out, so we could have our little sightseeing. The ice hotel seemed like a pile of ice from outside, with a very warm and welcoming orange light pointing out its entrance. We appeared in a surprisingly warm, wooden hallway, before we bought our tickets and a heavy metal door was opened before us.
A world of white appeared, but not white like outside. It was a dull, sleepy kind of white that made my eyes chill, as they reflected a dreamy kind of blue bursting through the glass of the icebar in the corner. Yes, an actually bar made of ice looking so perfectly undamaged I wanted to eat it. They even presented a little tiny row of (icemade) shot-glasses, filled with water which was pretty funny. What was funny too was that it wasn’t cold here at all, it was a nice 6 degrees which was incredibly comfortable after the extreme minus temperatures so far. The slightly muted kind of white that filled up the floor, walls and ceiling, felt nice for my snow-blinded eyes, and it was surprisingly non-slippery at the stairs. It did have that perfect crunch beneath my big boots like ice is supposed to be doing. Yet an ice-hotel is not literally ice, imagine the mess and the injuries; it is basically icy snow and therefore solid and not slippery. Soon the corner of my eye drew me towards a tiny room behind a porch, and absolutely everything was made out of ice. The room was round and high and existed out of seats made out of ice, but then actual smooth, perfect, undamaged, ice-ice, like icepeek ice. They were slippery, but so perfect I want to eat them again. In front of us there was a beautiful big altar that looked like the doorway to heaven which its blue light behind it and the perfectly carved shelf on the wall. I now realized the whole room was decorated with artistic scratches and drawings on the walls, ocean-themed that perfectly fit the blue gaze in the room.
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