Just add SALT: Norways new Arctic arts and music festival

September 12, 2014, 11:00 pm

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At a year-long arts festival in northern Norway, Will Coldwell finds that its nature that remains the headline act
See more stunning pictures of the festival

It has been some hours since sunset on the island of Sandhornøya, just inside the Arctic Circle, and Im standing on the beach with a near-naked Norwegian, debating the temperature of the water Ive just jumped into. I was told it was 14C, I say. Well, a friend told me it was just nine, he replies, adjusting his underwear. Shivering, we settle for 11 about average for an icy plunge pool before sprinting back to the sauna as my feet go numb in the sand.

Its the opening weekend of SALT, a year-long arts festival in remote northern Norway. Consisting of a series of striking architectural structures (including the worlds largest sauna, naturally), a site-specific art installation and a programme of contemporary music, the project is almost as dramatic as the landscape that surrounds it.

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Art in the Arctic: SALT festival, Norway in pictures

September 22, 2014, 9:51 am

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SALT festival is a unique arts festival that takes place on the beach of a small island in the Arctic Circle. These photographs reflect the remoteness of the site, the creativity that is on display and the spectacular landscape that surrounds it all
Read the article on the SALT festival

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Uncovering the secrets of John Franklins doomed voyage

November 1, 2014, 5:05 pm

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Ryan Harris had been searching for the wreck of the lost ship of John Franklin for six years. Now, having finally located it, he tells Robin McKie what the find may reveal about the doomed expedition to discover the North West Passage

Ryan Harris has spent six summers working in the Canadian Arctic hunting the two most sought-after wrecks in marine history: the lost ships of British explorer Sir John Franklin. In those years, on remote islets to the west and south of the frozen wastes of King William Island, Harris and his team have found tantalising items including pieces of iron embossed with Royal Navy markings, which clearly came from 19th-century sailing ships.

Everything suggested these could be parts of Erebus or Terror, the ships in which Franklin sailed, in 1845, to find the fabled Northwest Passage between the North Atlantic and the Pacific before vanishing with all his crew. However, the precise location of the shipwrecks eluded Harriss team, despite their trawling more than 1,600 sq km of seabed with sonar detectors between 2008 and 2013.

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Polar bears in Alaska – in pictures

December 12, 2014, 8:47 am

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Photographer Steven Kazlowski spends four to six months a year capturing the real life of the region’s polar bears at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in North Slope, Alaska

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Ice hotel opens in Swedish Lapland – in pictures

December 15, 2014, 7:20 am

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The 25th Icehotel has just opened for the 2014/15 season in the village of Jukkasjärvi, Swedish Lapland. Carved from 1,600 tonnes of snow and ice, the hotel features 16 artist-designed suites, a bar and theatre.

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More to Finland than the northern lights

December 27, 2014, 10:59 pm

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You may get lucky with the aurora, but Finnish Lapland also offers snowshoe hiking, glass-domed igloos – and even a Christmas wish with Santa

In Finland, fantasy can be more reliable than reality. That’s why, despite the fact that 160,000 tourists travel to Lapland every year hoping to see the elusive northern lights, the Finns have installed a dead cert: Father Christmas. Come cloud or snow, solar wind or solar silence, he’ll be on duty in Santa’s Village with a warm smile and a beard fluffier than a reindeer’s tail.

For me, Santa can wait. I touch down in Rovaniemi, 520 miles north of Helsinki, on a clear night, so there’s every chance of seeing the fabled aurora. The locals seem as used to overexcited adults as they are to children. In the Arctic Circle Wilderness Lodge at Vaattunki, my host, Marko Mustonen, levels with me in deadpan Finnish fashion: “Maybe you’ll see them. Maybe you won’t.”

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Travel tips: sun rise in Svalbard, and deals of the week

February 7, 2015, 10:00 pm

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See the sun’s first appearance in six months on an archipelago near the North Pole, plus free Landmark Trust visits and a new family-friendly hotel in Sardinia

Why go?
The end of winter is always a cause for celebration in Svalbard, and never more so than this year when the sun’s first reappearance above the horizon – after a long, dark absence of six months – will coincide with a total eclipse (20 March, svalbard2015.no). The archipelago, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, offers unspoiled Arctic wilderness, but doesn’t come cheap. Though airfares are lower since Norwegian Air started flying there (norwegian.com) the cost of living is high. But for many, a trip to this glacial outpost, where polar bears outnumber people, is worth saving up for.

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Boundless review – Kathleen Winter’s original take on the travel memoir

February 8, 2015, 4:30 am

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The Canadian novelist explores an epic inner and outer voyage through the Northwest Passage

After the success of her 2010 novel about an intersex child, Annabel, the Canadian author Kathleen Winter has turned her hand to nonfiction in her account of being writer-in-residence on a boat journey across the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a legendary (and hazardous) voyage she undertook in 2010. Travelling with an assortment of passengers including biologists, archaeologists and the musician Nathan Rogers – son of Stan, who wrote a song about the eponymous passage– her book is as much an exploration of her own past and psyche as it is a breathtaking series of vistas and encounters.

The literary sub-genre of “writer discovers truths about themselves while on a journey” is well-worn and often dull, so Winter deserves credit for unusual and often amusing anecdotes about her trip, not least an account of her haplessly buying an Inuit doll for a hundred dollars in an attempt to fit in. Her keen novelist’s eye brings immediacy and vibrancy to many of the encounters, and if some of the extended sequences of dialogue with her fellow voyagers feel like a literary conceit rather than literal reportage, they are nonetheless fresh and enjoyable.

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Weatherwatch: Snowburn in the frozen fjord

March 11, 2015, 2:30 pm

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The British army officer and Arctic explorer Frederick Spencer Chapman was in Greenland on 28 March 1933. “Face very sore today. I always suffer more from sun and snowburn than from frostbite. Glorious day, 11°F, no wind and burning hot. We all set off towards the glacier at the head of the fjord,” he wrote.

He told his story in Watkins’ Last Expedition (1934), in which the leader of the Greenland expedition, Gino Watkins, disappeared in 1932 while in his kayak. “High cirrus clouds dapple the intensely blue sky above the main glacier of Kangerdlugsuatsiak [in east Greenland]. This great river of ice is several miles wide where it meets the fjord in a chaotic vertical wall a hundred feet high, reflecting all imaginable shades of blue and green. The glacier winds its way mysteriously into the hills with many tributary glaciers joining it.

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Branson offers £100,000 ticket to the heart of a space spectacle

December 29, 2007, 3:27 am

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Flights launched in Arctic will be first to take people inside the northern lights

It looks like a cut-price version of the set of a Bond movie. Blocky, 60s-style white consoles face a large wall-mounted video screen, each covered in dials and buttons with words like "pump on", "fire" and "liftoff" written on them. Only the slightly shabby appearance of the place and the metre-high inflatable rocket in the corner indicate that this is not the home of cat-stroking villains but a place of academic study.

The operations room of the Esrange space centre near Kiruna in the far north of Sweden is one of a handful of places in the world that perform space launches. The facility, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic circle, is used by the European Space Agency and others to launch rockets and balloons for studying the upper atmosphere and the effects of microgravity. It also serves as a monitoring station for numerous satellites that orbit between the north and south poles.

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Sweden's highest ski lodge

November 20, 2009, 4:06 pm

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Staying overnight in a ski lodge inside the Arctic Circle allows access to an empty, off-piste paradise most skiers can only dream of

It's difficult to embrace the quiet beauty of a place when you're shifting through it at mach 10, skidoo engine roaring in your ears, cheeks whipped to burning in the cold. But as the dying sun cast its light across the thousands of snow crystals thrown up by the wind, the ensuing rainbow which hovered above the Låktatjåkko Mountain Station compelled silent attention. Nestled 250km north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland, it's a place where you can let yourself believe in magic.

Låktatjåkko, or Låkta, is a tiny annex of the petite ski resort of Bjorkliden, just north of Abisko national park, accessible only by skidoo or touring skis. On the shores of Lake Tornetrask and dwarfed by the legendary Lapporten Gap, the U-shaped gateway to Lapland, Bjorkliden is a resort surrounded by epic scenery. Trains rattle past it from Kiruna to the better known ski destinations of Narvik and Riksgransen, meaning anyone who gets off will pretty much have all 24 pistes to themselves. Small and charming, it has one ski shop, one restaurant, one bar, one hotel and 80 beautiful self-catering cabins. Almost everyone is Norwegian or Swedish; Bjorkliden was a well-kept secret from British skiers until 2007, when Discover the World started offering packages to the destination. The main targets may be families and beginners, but the area also offers up a world of unexplored off-piste, heli-skiing and powder up to your thighs as late as May. Yet if it weren't for the local tipple being called Wolf Paw, you'd be forgiven for thinking life was pretty chilled in Bjorkliden.

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Getting there: Arctic Sweden

January 30, 2009, 9:34 am

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Discover the World (01737 218800) offers a seven-night Saab Lapland Explorer package from £1,640, based on two sharing, including return flights from London to Kiruna, two nights' accommodation at the Icehotel, two nights in Bjorkliden and three nights at Finnholmen Bryggehotel, all on a B&B basis. It also includes five-day rental of a four-wheel-drive Saab 9-3 Turbo.

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The rich list: holiday like a billionaire, for less

January 21, 2011, 4:05 pm

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If you're spending it like Beckham, private islands, penthouses and outer space are within reach. Here's how to take the holidays of the rich and famous, on a budget

It could be you. Your numbers might just come up. And if it's a EuroMillions Rollover, you could be into the holiday territory of the super-rich.

The budgets are rarely bigger, the locations more pristine and itineraries more extraordinary than for the clients – mainly billionaires and royalty – of a company called Based on a True Story (020-7100 6991, basedonatruestory.co.uk)). Its trips start at around €200,000, rising to €2m if you include private jets and superyachts. Holidays have included nights in a cast-iron bed on a private precipice over Victoria Falls, and closing Burmese airspace so a private jet can fly to a superyacht in the untouched Mergui archipelago.

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A hotel like no other in Arctic Norway

November 5, 2010, 5:05 pm

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A trek to a ship-hotel frozen into the ice in the middle of the Arctic wastes makes for the trip of a lifetime – as long you can keep your feet warm

It's an idea so simple, so beautiful, that you can't believe it was not thought of before. Sail a ship into the Arctic as the winter freeze grips, let it get trapped in ice, then run visitors out there by dog sled or skidoo. And if that vessel is special – like a two-masted tall ship – all the better: the trip becomes something imbued with adventure, redolent with the traditions of Shackleton and Nansen, something to conjure up faded sepia images of the Fram and the Endurance, of explorers with icy beards, and heroism on the limits of human endurance. This is what Basecamp Explorer has done.

Flying in to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard from Tromsø in northern Norway, I am gripped myself, with the sheer excitement of it all. Behind me a group of men with fur-lined hoods are trading extreme travel anecdotes. "So we built a barrier with skis to keep the bears out..." "There were narwhals all around the ice floe..." But for me there are no such stories. I'm a hot country person – always have been. This is a first taste of the Arctic and, before I even contemplate anything as extreme as narwhal-besieged ice floes, I want to know if I could handle the conditions. I have – I have to admit – two very large doubts, both of them size nine and already encased in three pairs of socks.

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Boundless by Kathleen Winter review – in the footsteps of John Franklin

March 14, 2015, 12:00 am

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A journey to the Northwest Passage inspires banal meditations on … whatever comes to mind

Over the last 20 years nature writing has enjoyed a huge resurgence, taking over where travel writing left off. While in the 1980s everyone was trekking to the Himalayas with a Moleskine notebook, by the noughties they were staying home and staring at a flat Fenland sky. The late-millennial success of work by Roger Deakin and WG Sebald paved the way (or perhaps laid a trail of breadcrumbs) for the huge commercial and critical success of Robert Macfarlane’s landscape trilogy, which culminated in 2013 with The Old Ways.

Even if you don’t care for this sort of thing, you’ll have an idea how it works: the narrator takes a journey, mostly on foot and often in the steps of an earlier writer. All around is evidence of the violence done by man’s slack stewardship of the earth: ancient forests have been chopped down, mill ponds filled with old fridges, animals evicted from their habitats. Along the way we are introduced to various local wise people who know a thing or two about ferrets or the morning sky or making lobster pots using bits of old thatch.

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Readers' tips: Lapland and the Arctic Circle

November 21, 2011, 3:45 am

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There's much more to Lapland and the Arctic Circle than Santa. Been there readers share their top tips, from sea skiing in Canada to watching the northern lights from your bed in Finland

• Add a tip for next week and you could win a digital camera

There can't be many places where the scenery is quite as dramatic as Senja, where jagged mountains plunge into fjords. Hire a car and drive round the island – with each tunnel you exit, and each new fjord view, you will think it can't get any more astounding, but it does. Even better, there are hardly any tourists – most go to the nearby Lofoten Islands. Get in touch with Bent at Senja Mountain Lodge (senjalodge.com): he'll take you off-piste skiing, climbing or snowshoeing.
Rebecca Day

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Fresh from the freezer: gourmet food in Greenland

November 9, 2012, 2:45 pm

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Could Greenland, with its old reliance on whale and seal, become a gourmet destination? Its inventive new chefs think so, but will a frozen Tim Moore agree?

Despite the best efforts of the Vikings, who chose its inviting name to hoodwink prospective settlers, no one expects Greenland to be lushly hospitable. Its bleak magnificence had been laid out beneath my plane window for half the morning: a frosted, monochrome enormity of granite and glaciers two-thirds the size of India, fringed with slightly more inhabitants than Hereford.

All the same, stepping out into the still, bright morning at Kangerlussuaq airport, the brutal reality of life at minus 40C came as a shock. My nostrils crinkled as everything up them instantly froze. Then I breathed in, and Dracula punched me in the throat.

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Chasing Ice: glacial melting in the Arctic - in pictures

November 27, 2012, 2:00 am

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Chasing Ice, a documentary by the producers of Academy award-winning The Cove, tells the story of James Balog's mission to capture visual evidence of the effect of climate change on our planet. Since an initial trip to Norway in 2005, Balog has used time-lapse cameras in brutal Arctic conditions to conduct an Extreme Ice Survey to provide proof – in breathtaking footage – that these colossal glaciers are melting before our eyes

Chasing Ice premieres in the UK on 3 December. Watch a film extract from Chasing Ice Continue reading...

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Arctic turn: following the route of the Northwest Passage

September 20, 2013, 1:00 pm

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Finding a 'Northwest Passage' through Canada's icy seas was once the ultimate challenge for explorers. Kari Herbert sails the thrilling route on a new 11-day 'cruise'

"Remember, this is an expedition, not a cruise," declares our leader Boris Wise.

Projected on the wall behind him are a series of maps of the maze of islands of the Canadian Far North. These aren't just any maps though; these are real-time satellite charts, specifically detailing the extent and density of sea ice in the area. For the past five days they have been the focus of intense scrutiny.

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On the trail of sea urchins in the Arctic Circle

September 21, 2013, 9:00 am

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Arctic diver Roddie Sloan was about to abandon his beloved urchins to study engineering, but then he got a call that would change his life...

"Our urchin diver is a Scotsman who came to Norway for the love of a woman, and stayed for the cold, pristine waters of his new region of Steigen. If it lives in the north Atlantic and I want to cook it, Roddie will find it and it will arrive at Fäviken neatly arranged in a little box, whether it's edible or not."
Magnus Nilsson, chef, Fäviken, Sweden

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