Lapland's friendly fire

LIZ Johnston was nervous about her solo trip to Lapland to stay at an ice hotel after an elegant couple in Helsinki made no effort to contain their mirth.

Don't throw stones ... opt for a glass igloo that has power to provide much needed heating

I WAS nervous about travelling alone to Finnish Lapland to stay at an ice hotel. In the airport bus from my Helsinki hotel, an elegant couple made no effort to contain their merriment when I announced my destination.

"Why?" they roared. I had asked myself the same question.

At the departure gate I was the only passenger not laden with skis and wearing bulky, brightly coloured clothing designed to stand out in a snowstorm.

My borrowed Drizabone was looking pretty cool, but not in a good way.

At Ivalo Airport a cab driver pointed me towards a big yellow bus.

I hoped he had told me it would take me to the Kakslauttanen Hotel and Igloo Village.

Dropped by the side of the road I slithered my way through snow and ice to the log cabin reception centre.

The temperature gauge outside the door read minus seven degrees – quite warm for Lapland, where minus 30 is usually the winter minimum.

"Will my igloo have power," I asked nervously. The answer was yes and no. Traditional igloos have animal skins, glass igloos have power.

Then, joy of joys, I was given a key to a log cabin with an open fire and electric heating. The igloos at Kakslauttanen are an optional extra.

At 1am I left my cabin and walked through the blue light of an early spring Arctic night. I passed the ice igloo village, but guests had already fled back to their warm cabins.

I had abandoned any thought of sleeping in one of those when I noticed the ceiling was beginning to melt, sagging ominously over the bed. The Ice Chapel and dining room, also melting, were deserted and two rows of glass igloos glowing yellow on a rise behind the resort looked like newly landed spacecraft.

About 6am I walked back to my cabin in a world now turned primarily pink. A white rabbit scurried ahead of me, squirrels ran up snow-laden tree trunks, birds were waking and 200 huskies were in a fever pitch of barking as their handlers arrived to hitch them to their sleds.

If it never got any better than this, I loved Lapland. But it did get better.

The dogsleds were booked out, so I settled for a reindeer sleigh ride.

Up close reindeers aren't always cute. The one behind me had pink warts all over his nose, which he kept shoving into my sleigh in a bid to get ahead of my beast. In between windbreaks he sucked at snowdrifts and made a few futile attempts at overtaking our Sami guides and the reindeers in front.

Kakslauttanen works closely with the indigenous people, the Sami.

There are 75,000 Sami living in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia and about 500 of the 6500 Sami in Finland live near their sacred lake of Inari, 80km from Kakslauttanen in Europe's biggest wilderness (an area about the size of England).

They herd reindeer, fish and, to a lesser extent, engage in tourism by operating excursions and making and selling traditional handicrafts in wood, bone, antler, pelt, leather and pearl and tin thread embroidery, lace weaving and other textile work.

The families I met were happy to talk about their culture and were patient with my awkward efforts to get into layers of Arctic clothing, bait a fishing line and and dangle it in a hole in the ice.

On the way to the lake I avoided the speedy self-drive skidoos, preferring to be dragged along behind one of them, warm in several layers of the provided cold-climate clothing and snuggled under layers of animal skins, some still fresher than I would have liked. Taking a Sami excursion is an easy way to see one of the world's harshest and most beautiful regions, but it is no theme park.

No one could come up with phony re-creations of the cold, the snow and ice, the people, the crazy barking huskies and the reindeers. No one could re-create, or even describe, the silence of a Lapland wilderness, sometimes broken by the passing wind of a nearby reindeer. A fellow traveller said: "It's so quiet here my tinnitus has come back."

He thought he had long ago recovered from having been too close to the stage at a Sex Pistols concert.

Sunday Herald Sun