from the leaves of the Ilex paraguayensis plant and drunk through a straw; graciously, she passed me her handy traveling gourd, and I found that I liked the bitter elixir.
I also liked Mendoza, the capital of Mendoza Province, where I spent the day before my mountain tour roaming delightful avenues lined with gnarled plane trees, wide irrigation channels, and tile sidewalks meticulously cleaned every morning with kerosene. In the town’s old section (partly spared from frequent, disastrous earthquakes, like the one that virtually leveled Mendoza in 1861), I took in the ruins of a Jesuit mission dating from 1638 and a small but well-designed archaeological museum, followed by a mouthwatering steak at a shady alfresco grill.
I could have seen the sights of Mendoza in one day. But I wasn’t quite ready to get on another bus, so I spent the next day visiting the highly mechanized Penaflow winery south of town. I also checked out the central market and marveled over the liver, brains, tripe, and a green squash the size of a baseball bat, then frittered away the afternoon in the Plaza España. Of all Mendoza’s many parks, this seemed to me the loveliest, with walkways and benches made of tiles bearing pictures of heraldic shields, sailing ships, and Spanish castles.
That night, I boarded the bus for Córdoba, traversing the arid countryside west of the Sierras de Córdoba through the wee hours. If I had wanted to spend 20 hours rather than 11 on a bus, I could have left in the morning and seen more, but I still had the 10-hour trip to Buenos Aires before me and didn’t want my limbs to atrophy. On board, a stewardess served us a dinner of boiled mystery meat, potatoes, and jug wine, then screened an American police flick while I sank into my deeply reclining seat. I would have slept were it not for my seatmate, a salesman who peddled tapes to discos across Chile and Argentina, snored loudly, and spoke English—too often and too well. When he saw that I was reading a novel by Isabel Allende, cousin of Chile’s deposed socialist president Salvador Allende, he told me to watch out, or people would think I was a communist.
Around dawn the next morning, we crossed the Sierras, blanketed in trees and thick fog, and then descended toward sprawling Córdoba and the pampas beyond. Bleary-eyed, I made a reservation at the tourist office in the bus station for a room in a modern hotel that had a private bath and included breakfast.
I was getting the sniffles by the time I reached the hotel, and in a cold drizzle, Córdoba seemed grim, as well as noisy and congested. Still, I rallied to tour one of the oldest cities in Argentina, founded in 1573 and for decades thereafter far more vigorous than Buenos Aires, although its architecture is by and large modern now. The buildings on Calle Obispo Trejos that house the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and Colegio Nacional de Monserrat are Spanish colonial gems, as is the Córdoba Cathedral on the Plaza San Martin, with an impressive three-tiered dome and an exterior that looks like a melting lemon ice cream cone. Next door is the city’s handsomely restored Cabildo, where I found a fascinating exhibit on the great bullrings of Spain. Best of all, though, was the display of antique fanals—glass-encased baby-Jesus figurines surrounded by dried flowers, fruit, paste jewels, and other colorful geegaws—at the Museo Historico Provincial Marques de Sobremonte.
At noon the next day, I took a seat on a Chevalier bus bound for Buenos Aires. This one didn’t show movies or serve food, so I carried a large bottle of mineral water and a package of dainty, crustless ham and cheese sandwiches, kicked off my shoes, and watched the pampas roll by. The flat fields of sunflowers and corn, grain elevators, and fly-speck towns looked so much like those on the North American plains that I kept having to remind myself I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Across the aisle from me, a sweet elderly couple sipped mate. Then, as we approached the federal capital, the loudspeaker announced our imminent arrival with Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “New York, New York”—which made me laugh out loud as I put my vagabond shoes back on.
The Swedish word for people who come to the Icehotel, 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to spend the night is tokig. It means “crazy.”
The room temperature is 23 degrees. The walls, beds, chairs, light fixtures, even the glasses used in the bar, are made of ice. You can’t unpack your clothes because they’d freeze, and the thought of getting out of your sleeping bag to go down the hall to the toilet is enough to keep you awake all night.
Those inconveniences aside, every winter, thousands of people come to Swedish Lapland to sleep in a hotel of snow and ice. The number of rooms varies from year to year, as does the décor, because in the spring the building melts into the nearby Torne River, to be reconstructed in the fall as the spirit moves the ice artists.
The Icehotel—something of an international concept, having spawned similar frozen hostelries in Japan, Norway, Canada, and Romania—was the brainchild of Swedish entrepreneur Yngve Bergqvist, who wanted to find a way to attract winter visitors to a frigid and remote but singularly beautiful place. It began as a humble igloo housing a 1989 art exhibit, where a handful of intrepid souls spent the night and woke up raving about the experience.
In 1994, Absolut Vodka of Sweden came here to shoot ads featuring supermodels like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell posed in scanty haute couture on minimalist ice chairs and staircases. The campaign was so cool and so successful that Forbes named Absolut the number one luxury brand in the world, ahead of Tiffany and BMW. People from Tokyo to Berlin started wondering how they would sleep and what they would dream about on slabs of Swedish ice.
On a plane to Stockholm in January, I told the buttoned-up business man next to me that I was headed north of the Arctic Circle. He loosened his tie and said, “You’re not going to one of those ice places, are you?”
From Stockholm, I flew more than 800 miles north to Kiruna, an iron mining town beneath Sweden’s highest peak, 6,965-foot Kebnekaise. There, a bus waited to take my fellow travelers and me 10 miles east to Jukkasjarvi, set among snow-coated pine forests and lakes. With a population of 700, it has almost as many sled dogs as people. Along with boisterous 30-something Brits, who outnumber all other nationalities and age groups attracted to the Icehotel, there were Japanese, Germans, and Danes, as well as a few honeymooning couples who planned to spend their nuptial night in a suite of ice.
The sun was setting in delicate Easter egg shades of blue and pink when I arrived about 2 p.m. (In the middle of winter the sun rises about 10 a.m., I later discovered.) The temperature was minus 22. Where the snow had been left unplowed, it came up to my knees; the air was so dry that it scoured my lungs with every breath; my feet were cold, my cuticles were cracked, and my hair was a static electric mess.
I checked in at the reception building. Parked at the door were kick sleds that look like chairs mounted on skis, used for moving luggage and sightseeing in the village. There were Absolut Icehotel ads on the walls, blooming amaryllis in the windows, Swedish minimalist egg chairs, and a wood-burning stove around which people in snowsuits clustered. The receptionist told me to go immediately to the adventure center next door to check out winter gear like theirs.
I got stout lace-up boots, ski gloves, a funny fur hat with earflaps, and a snowsuit under which I was advised to wear several additional layers, starting with thermal long johns. So attired, I looked something like a clown made out of balloons. I squeaked when I
