White-knuckle ride

Zoe Williams5 April 2012

We arrived in Stockholm, which was possibly two degrees colder than London. "Aha," I mused, "that will be why they told us to bring seven thermal vests and an array of wool pants."

In that I was quite wrong. Until we reached Kiruna, I didn't know the meaning of the word "cold" (or chilly).

A trip around Lapland was not about being warm enough; it was not about cool Swedish design and all their ingenious ways to store tea towels; it was not even about the Ice Hotel, with its amazing beds fashioned of pure ice.

It was about pegging through Lappish countryside that nobody outside a reindeer-herding family has ever seen, on snowmobiles that you can actually do stunts on (well, accidental stunts), in utter darkness (but for three hours a day), at minus 25 degrees (give or take a windchill factor). I was chased through the streets of Genoa with tear gas and a water cannon this year, and at no point did I feel as brave and full of British phlegm as I did in Lapland.

It was truly hardcore; it was also, by a million miles, the most exciting mini-break I've ever been on. To enjoy it, you do need to be the kind of person who likes a might-I-die? style experience - but then, I never thought I'd like it, till I accidentally tried it.

So, anyway, we started at the legendary Ice Hotel, which is very pretty, but has really only stuck in my imagination as the place I met my first snowmobile. It must have been 4pm when we arrived, and 7pm when we set off again, but concepts of "dark", "pitch black" and "staring into the abyss" don't have much currency in a season with only three hours' daylight.

A snowmobile is like a motorbike on skis - it is extremely powerful. "I think too powerful for the novice," said Bjorn, in a bid to boost confidence and morale. I practised for 20 minutes, which was long enough to fathom just how much I was going to suck at this business, before we left, with a chirpy Sami guide, Nils, at the front, and the lugubrious Bjorn at the back, coursing through the Lappish wilderness, heading for some reindeer commune called Ovre Soppero.

It was really, properly, scary; a deep, visceral fear that was in no way alleviated by Bjorn's pearls of snowmobiling wisdom. "Not to sit like a marshmallow on the mobile!" he said, when I went into a tree. "Not to go to sleep on the mobile! Stay awake on the snowmobile," he said, when someone fell asleep. He said a lot of really obvious stuff, Bjorn - so when he said something amazing (like when he pointed to the wing mirror and said, "Here, you can check your face for frostbite"), or very deep (like "Modern life is very disappointing; everybody is chasing the next item. Nobody is happy"), he sounded all the more wise. By the end, he was like some kind of oracle.

What excellent time we made (40 miles in six hours). We were greeted at 1am with our third meal of purest reindeer (that is, stewed reindeer, reindeer steeped in reindeer blood, reindeer sausage, reindeer marrow and reindeer liver, not forgetting the reindeer soup and the smoked reindeer). Some of it is tasty; some of it tastes like ... well, I forced myself to have two bites, just so I could describe this properly. It doesn't just taste bad, the way Pedigree Chum might taste bad. It tastes morally bad, the way your brother might taste, if you'd killed him for food in some survivalist situation, and rescue arrived in the middle of your first mouthful.

Reindeer, it transpired the next day when I met some, are extremely badtempered, which might go some way towards explaining how they taste. Their grumpiness was tempered, offset even, by the amazing friendliness of their herdsman who - if the translation was correct - had not seen a female under 50 his whole life. We sat in a tent, eating reindeer soup. "And now, we are all sitting very, very close together," said Lars, "and it is very, very nice! Very nice!" That was amusing, though I'll admit that I was on a bit of a hair-trigger, laugh-wise. The temperature was minus 17 degrees, sitting still. On the snowmobiles, with a windchill factor, well, there was quite a bit of checking for frostbite.

The rest of the day was mostly snowmobiling, though by now we could stand up on our machines, and dive about, a lot like James Bond. The triumph would have been tempered if we'd noticed that we could all do it, even the most pathetic of us - however, we'd broken each other's tail lights the day before, so it was like being all alone in a land of white, the most daring snowmobilist the world has ever seen. That was, in fact, more cool than seeing the Northern Lights, which were fun mainly for the poetic effect they had on Bjorn ("I come up here alone to watch, yet I never feel lonely, because there is so much in nature to fascinate. Listen to the perfect silence," he said. I listened. "Who's nicked my Snickers?" was the only sound, for miles around.) And on the final day, we reached the top of the world, in time for two hours of a perfectly pink sun, which turned the snow pink, and yea, made the whole world look like a picture of heaven, drawn by a five-year-old girl.

It's the kind of sight that you shouldn't rightly see without going back to the beginning and having a completely different life. This sounds spoilt, but I was getting round to thinking that everywhere beautiful - Tuscany, New Zealand, the Lake District, you get the picture - was more or less the same, give or take a bit of sunshine. This was a completely dazzling, otherworldly experience. It looked like the moon, only more, er, cool.

Honestly, it was worth all the cold and the tricky terrain. I think even the person whose contact lenses froze into his eyes would agree.

Way to go

Zoe Williams travelled to Lapland with Scantours (020 7839 2927): the four-night Sami Experience costs from £1,370, including one night's B&B in Stockholm, one night in a cabin and one night in a Sami tent on the tour and a night in the Ice Hotel (all full board), equipment, clothing and flights. Season runs until 27 April. Further information from the Swedish Travel and Tourism Council: 00 800 3080 3080 (freephone) or 020 7870 5600.

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