Last snowy-landscape shots from the Snowhotel Kirkenes, in Norway’s Finnmark county. Above, we’re looking out from the lovely big windows in the dining room over the frozen, snow-covered fjord that runs south from the harbor, on which we also did our King Crab outing that day. At the bottom of this post, for those interested, is a panorama of the compound in which you can see, at the far left, a conical-roofed cafe building which is next the sled dog kennels (shared in our prior post from Kirkenes), then the larger modern glass & brick structure that houses check-in and tour-group visits (tour groups do short trips for the King Crab, Husky Sled Dogs, etc.), then the heated modern lodge hotel building with rounded roofs up the hill from left to right, then the large bulk of the actual frozen Snowhotel itself (where we slept on our ice beds), and at the far right the building with restaurant, sauna, changing and warming lounge reserved for overnight snowhotel guests.
The Snowhotel Kirkenes sits, of course, in Norway’s northernmost Finmark County. And houses both reindeer (whom one can feed) and huskies (whom one can pet).
This post is my reminder to any of us sweating in northern summers that we wanted more sun, back when the days were short and snow blanketed the ground e.g. during our flight from Kirkenes down to Oslo back in January 🙂
There are windows in all these shots from the Snowhotel Kirkenes – starting with a photo of the frozen fjord taken from the dining room mid-morning after we arrived and checked in. Note that the photo at the very bottom, which looks rather late-night, was taken 3:26 pm. On January 26, so I think they said five days or a week after the sun returned to Kirkenes. 🙂
Final ice sculptures from inside the Snowhotel in Kirkenes. The idea of this series arose from ice, snow, ices sculptures and waterfalls I saw during my Swiss train travels last November, then carried forward with these ice sculptures. Probably letting the series sleep again, til I either photograph another fountain as nicely as I did to start this series, or see more ice sculptures somewhere. Water really is one of those things one should stop to appreciate now and then, though, eh? 🙂
No, that ice bear is not staffing the actual reception at the Snowhotel Kirkenes – that happens in a brick and mortar type building with heating, computers and so on. But this is the entrance the actual place you sleep on your actual (literal) ice bed. (Ice = water = source, as a reminder of this weird little series I’ve begun.) When I first showed you Kirkenes, I promised a photo of said ice beds. But it turns out I neglected to photograph the actual beds themsevles- sorry. I really thought I’d done so. Allow the various other ice furniture shown below to spark your imagination, along with the instruction manual from the (regular building, heated) changing room. For orientation, the ice sculptures below are just inside the entrance in the snow mound you see at the bottom. That mound is the thing itself, but to be clear: one only sleeps in the room; one does not linger in it during the rest of the non-sleep time of one’s stay. One instead catches King Crab or hangs out in the heated guest lounge drinking hot tea :-)…or feeds the reindeer, pets the huskies or sits by the outdoor fire, all of which we’ll show you in future posts.
Today’s one of only two this year when Kirkenes, Amsterdam, Sydney and Nairobi will all get more or less the same 12 hours of day and night each. These last shots taken before we got off the boat on January 26th were taken a week after the sun first popped back over the horizon up here…and of course, for a couple months on either side of June 21st, it won’t pop below the horizon, giving it 2x as much sunlight as Nairobi (nearly on the equator) will get that day. Happy vernal equinox, fellow northern hemisphere residents :-).
King Crab catching on the frozen fjord, our early-afternoon (about 1:30pm, these photos) outing before our overnight on the ice beds (still to come, here) at the Snowhotel Kirkenes, in Finnmark County, Norway.
Our coastal-Norway cruise wrapped up early Sunday in Kirkenes, a town closer to Murmansk than to any other large-ish city I know of. It’s at 69N degrees; the arctic circle starts at 66N degrees. The above photo, taken shortly before noon, and two minutes after the take-off photo below right so at whatever altitude our plane had gained by that point, shows you the sun managing to peak both through some clouds, and over the horizon. We knew that at ground level the sun had only begun to peak above the horizon the week before we arrived in Kirkenes, and in general the most we had during the three full days we spent inside the arctic circle were maybe five hours of long dawn / dusk light (the same, with the sun actually above the horizon and maybe peaking through clouds) for a couple hours in the middle of it. It messes with one’s head and sense of meal and bedtimes, when full dark lasts until 9am and resumes by 2pm 🙂
(so much world, so little time....) 