Day 3 - Kirkenes Snow Hotel

Day 3 dropped us off at Kirkenes at 9:30am, a small but historic mining town of 3300 people, early in the morning. Kirkenes doesn't get the gulf stream so it's colder here and the waters turn into ice along the coast.  That night we were going to sleep in their Snow Hotel which is rebuilt every year with different patterns on the walls. Very cool. It's maintained at a steady temperature of -4 degrees C.

We spent the afternoon wandering about as we had to wait for the bus to pick us up at 6pm.  We got into town at 11:30am so there was a lot of time to kill.  We were going to go King Crab fishing initially but it was cancelled.  Eventually we got onto another tour operator (one man show) for the next day so that was fantastic otherwise we would have had nothing to do in this small town.  That took about an hour to sort out (done at 12:30pm!) so we had some lunch after that and wandered about some more.

Town of Kirkenes taken from a scenic spot (which was covered up by piles and piles of snow!)

Zoomed in view.

More of the town.

A bed taken in one of the rooms of the Snow Hotel (taken with camera flash).  There are 20 rooms in all, 2 corridors with 10 rooms, 1 on each side.  Each room is different with different wall artefacts.  The area connecting the 2 corridors is an ice bar and the entrance is connected to the ice bar.  And instead of a door to a room you have curtains.

Bear paw in one of the rooms, no flash used.

The ice bar where our guide served us some tasty cloud berry juice.

Room located at the end of the corridor.

Crab in ice!  This was part of the wall in the room with the ice bar.

One of the corridors.

Lauren sitting on one of the ice furniture.. it's coooooold.  Natural lighting in background.

Me next.  Different chair.

We had a 3 course meal with reindeer sausage wrapped in pancake as starter.  We had to cook our sausage by the fire in the restaurant.

The restaurant from the outside.

Some of the interior of the restaurant.

After dinner we caught some of the northern lights.  It was simply awesome, the sky was clear, there weren't many people around, not many lights and seeing the lights dance magically was a sight to behold!  I took some photos too, here are the best ones.

More lights.  The house is a shed containing our clothes for the night, i.e. sleeping bag.

In case you were wondering, the toilets are located in a different building.  We were only allowed to bring a small bag of extra clothes with us.  Each of us slept in a sleeping bag and wore layers of wool or whatever we brought to sleep.  I slept okay except my face was freezing and I woke up probably a few times but I did get sleep after covering my face with my beanie.  So I can say I slept in -4 degrees C with nothing but a sleeping bag!  All in all, an experience to remember :)