When I think about my long weekend at the Arctic Bath hotel in Sweden, it is the sounds, rather than the sights, that fill my memory. The dull thud of snow slipping from the roof. The crunch of ice underfoot as I walk gingerly along a river path that has been frozen for months. The muffled plop of a falling icicle from a birch tree. And my heart thundering in my ears as I lower my swimsuit-clad body, inch by excruciating inch, through the hole cut in the ice that covers the hotel’s plunge pool.
In an attempt to distract my attention from my feet, which feel as though someone is sticking pins in them, Jennie Astridsson, the hotel’s spa therapist, keeps a loud count of how long I’ve been submerged in the 4C water and reminds me to breathe. When you’re this cold, the most common reaction is to hold your breath, she explains, before casually admitting that she finds it quite easy to stay under for four minutes. But that, I tartly retort, is after a lifetime of practice. I’m African. I’ve never been frozen alive before (other than when, for a foolish dare, I dived off a boat in Alaska to swim to an iceberg). So, I breathe, I wince. And, when two minutes 45 seconds is up and I can’t bear it a second longer, I lurch my iced limbs out and inch my spongy, numb feet across the burningly cold snow and into the sauna.
In the searing heat of the pine-clad cabin, my body starts to return to life. After about a minute, my head feels as though dozens of little sparklers are flickering in it. I can sense blood flooding into my eyes. My legs begin to tingle, like they are being tickled with feathers. After ten minutes I have so many glorious sensations bombarding my brain that, as I sit cross-legged in the 70C dry heat, eating frozen grapes, all I can do is giggle.
Once I have experienced that heady rush, as with all good things, I want to do it again and again. After three days I feel that not only has my body changed, but my mind too. That’s because, Astridsson explains, my joints are more supple from doing yoga in the sauna and my innards stimulated by the oxygen and endorphins flooding in and out due to the extreme contrasts of heat and cold. She says that my brain has been stimulated in new ways too. I have also experienced friluftsliv, which loosely translates to “open-air living”, a Scandinavian philosophy that focuses on the fact that humans are meant to be outside in nature, which makes us feel better.
This back-to-nature philosophy informs the wellness regime of the Arctic Bath hotel and its design. Set on the Lule River, south of the Arctic Circle, the hotel was built to reflect the natural world around it and to be in touch with it. Although six of its wooden rooms are set in a forest, with expansive views from their 20ft glass fronts, the other six are minimalist wooden cabins that float on the river, either side of a doughnut-shaped central living area that resembles a giant beavers’ lodge – a mass of crisscrossed logs sticking up into the wintry sky. It’s eccentric and yet oddly in keeping with its surroundings, an unexpectedly successful mixture of 21st-century design and raw nature.
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Thankfully, we are staying in one of the spacious wooden forest houses (in winter, we learn, the floating cabins act like amplifiers that boom as the ice flow crackles and buckles all around). They’re the dream combination of airy, but cosy; warm, homely A-frames from which to gaze out at the frozen white wilderness while relaxing in elegant armchairs or a big bathtub as flames from a wood stove flicker in the soft wintry light.
That is, if you have time to lie around. With only three days here, that isn’t on our agenda. Instead, between daily dips in the ice pool, we stride out into the wild, giggling like children as hundreds of tiny, snowflakes fall on our heads. We explore the little streets of the hamlet of Harads, with its gingerbread-style clapboard houses; we hike to the TreeHotel, where wondrous rooms are suspended in trees; and take a gentle two-hour snowshoe walk to see black swans and white hares with Hakan Hjort, an outdoorsman-cum-photographer. At night we feast. The food is like nothing we have eaten before and has been devised by Kristoffer Astrom – known in Sweden as “the Sami chef” – and the creative Belgian chef Maarten De Wilde, who forage or source their ingredients within a 40km radius. There is Swedish “champagne” made from birch sap, mashed potato infused with sweet haywater, slow-cooked reindeer with smoked mushrooms, and cloudberry ice cream. All are rich and fragrant, and embellished with local flowers and herbs, and each of the five courses comes with a glass of expertly paired wine.
Nine months later, as winter draws in again, and new direct flights to Lulea are on offer, I yearn to go back to crunch in the snow, spot swans and sip the champagne (although it might be fun to wait until summer and test a floating cabin); the endorphins from swimming under a midnight sun, looking out at wildflowers, I’m told, are just as heady as those from an ice pool.
Lisa Grainger was a guest of Visit Sweden (visitsweden.com) and Arctic Bath (arcticbath.se), which has cabins for two from £839 a night, half-board. SAS flies from Heathrow to Lulea via Stockholm (flysas.com)
