A de luxe wedding in Lapland
Britons Clare Panter and Rodney Hill travelled to Kakslauttanen to tie the knot in a fairy-tale ice chapel
By Mari Manninen in Kakslauttanen, Sodankylä
Oh dear. This marriage is not exactly getting off on the right foot.
It is 13:15 on Thursday afternoon. In an hour from now, Clare Panter and Rodney Hill are supposed to be tying the knot in an ice chapel built for the purpose in Kakslauttanen, north of Sodankylä.
However, the happy couple-to-be have only just touched down at Ivalo Airport, and they are both pale with fatigue.
Clare, 26, and 29-year-old Rodney have been on the road and in the air for more than 24 hours already. First they missed their flight from Manchester because of traffic jams on the way.
When they finally made it to Helsinki-Vantaa, a mere 1,100 kilometres from Ivalo, the evening flight north had already left. The couple stayed overnight at the airport to await the morning connection.
Fortunately, things are not quite as grim as they look: the wedding has been postponed until Friday.
In the taxi from Ivalo towards Sodankylä, the bride looks worried.
There is snow lining the sides of the road, but what is falling from the sky looks suspiciously like rain.
"The ice chapel hasn’t melted, I hope?” gasps Clare Panter.
No worries. In Kakslauttanen, just south of the Saariselkä ski-resort, all is in order. The log cabin village built in the middle of the forest has specialised in foreign tourists and particularly in arranging exotic wedding ceremonies.
Last year, around 70 tourist couples were joined together here, the previous year around sixty, and in 2005 about fifty couples were matched.
For the most part the people getting married have been from Great Britain, but in among them there have been couples from Australia, Holland, Italy, and France.
They want to tie the knot in an exotic fashion, surrounded by snow.
And they are also ready to pay for the privilege. The couples arriving in Sodankylä are relatively well-heeled, or alternatively they have saved long and hard for a wedding with a difference.
Panter and Hill calculate that the wedding gear, the trips from England to Lapland and back, the cost of the ceremony itself, plus three days honeymoon vacation in the log village will cost around EUR 11,000 between them.
In the couple’s view this is not actually so very much. The wedding would have cost a fair bit more if it had been arranged as a big bash in England with friends and relatives invited to the reception.
In Kakslauttanen, the couples can tailor themselves the sort of wedding programme they want: the ceremony and the necessary paperwork (EUR 1690), the use of the ice chapel for the duration of the wedding vows (EU 525), a ride to the chapel in a reindeer-drawn sleigh (EUR 200), a performance of Lappish joik singing (EUR 270), rental of Lappish costumes for the couple (EUR 388), a bridal spray (from EUR 140), and a wedding supper (EUR 73 a head).
Special requests are also considered and met.
“One couple this winter wanted Santa Claus to come and recite a love-poem”, says Sanna Leinonen, the Kakslauttanen wedding cordinator.
This winter a good many couples have also wanted to spend their wedding night in the Queen Suite lodge (EUR 624/night). This is what Panter and Hill have chosen, too.
The suite is dominated by a red-upholstered four-poster bed. A small bottle of chilled champagne stands on a bedside table, and from the impressive tub in the bathroom you can gaze up at a blue ceiling dotted with stars.
“Incredibly beautiful”, sighs Clare Panter, clearly smitten with the place.
“We came here because we wanted a different kind of wedding”, says Rodney Hill.
Panter is a cook by profession and Hill a structural engineer. The couple found the Lapland wedding village on the Net, on the pages of an English travel agency, quite by chance.
“I wanted a fairy-tale wedding. To be the Snow Queen for a day”, says Panter.
In the yard of the luxury lodge it is quiet as a mouse, even though the log cabins are built one next to another.
The couple giggle. Having their feet sinking out of sight into deep, soft snow is a completely novel experience.
Sanna Leinonen was not fazed by the news that the couple’s arrival would be delayed. These things happen, and she has become used to more or less anything, and she knows that the magic of the Arctic Circle winter will put a smile back on the customers’ faces.
Just as it did with a wedding party from Scotland, whose luggage disappeared en route, or at least did not arrive with the guests.
The visitors scampered about in their kilts from one cottage to another in -20°C.
Then again, there IS a limit to the lure of the exotic.
One bride who had ordered a husky-sled ride to the altar arrived in tears. The over-enthusiastic dogs had toppled the sled over on its side on the way from the cottage to the ice chapel.
But the staff at the wedding resorts in Northern Lapland have another rather more prosaic worry.
Lapland’s wedding tourism boom is being threatened by a shortage of people qualified to cary out the ceremonials.
There would be more couples arriving from abroad than Northern Lapland’s one registrar and a few local judges can marry.
For Kakslauttanen is not the only place where one can get wedded this far north.
The wedding travel model has spread elsewhere in the region. When just 25 foreign couples were married in Northern Lapland in 2001, last year the number was already 130.
And nearly all of the weddings take place in the winter.
The registrar, based in Kittilä, and local court judges from Sodankylä drive hundreds of kilometres to chapels in the middle of the forest or perched on the slopes of fells.
They have to do their other work in the evenings, and they do not get paid for overtime.
“We have wanted to help the local tourism entrepreneurs”, says registrar Torsti Patakangas in explanation of the readiness to go an extra yard.
In December, Patakangas had a tourist wedding to officiate at every day of the month.
The officials would not actually be obliged to carry out their duties outside of the magistrates’ office or a district court.
In certain parts of Lapland - an area that is the size of a good many entire European countries all by itself, the judges do not get in the car to do wedding gigs, and as a result the tourism entrepreneurs cannot offer wedding packages at all.
Parliament down south in Helsinki is right now examining a draft bill that would provide a larger group of magistrates and district court and municipal administrative court personnel with the right to officiate at a civil marriage ceremony, and in an emergency even others with a legal training.
When Friday dawns, every thing is go for Clare Panter and Rodney hill’s big day.
Even the weather is a knockout: the sun is shining and it is a decent but not bone-chilling five degreees below.
Actually "dawn" is the wrong word, since the nearly newly-weds have some difficulty getting out of bed, as they catch up on the lost sleep of their long journey here.
The couple only really show signs of life when some Russian champagne is delivered to their suite.
Clare Panter slips into a brown full-length evening gown. Underneath her skirt she dons the underwear bought especially for the wedding - not the something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue stuff, but a pair of sturdy and sensible long johns, as it promises to be a cold one in the ice chapel.
Then she steps into a long white fur coat and puts on a white fur hat.
The bride really does look like a snow queen.
The couple slip and slide their way from the cabin to the sleigh and snuggle in underneath reindeer skins.
The two reindeer, named Vintilän Noviisi and Hassukainen, set off at a trot to pull the sleigh towards the chapel, a distance of around ten minutes by this form of transport.
Exotic-wedding tourism is not yet a really big business in the Lapland travel market.
And not really even in the wedding travel hub of Kakslauttanen. The seventy-odd weddings carried out last year accounted for only a small fraction of the 15,000 annual overnights in the log cabin and igloo village.
But for all that, the knock-on economic effects of weddings are already quite substantial hereabouts.
They provide a handy source of income and employment for several local professionals: florists, photographers, hairdressers, reindeer-sled drivers...
International wedding-, travel-, and women’s magazines have written dozens of articles about the Kakslauttanen marriages. This is the sort of advertising exposure that would be quite impossible to buy.
The holiday village in particular and Lapland in general have taken on a romantic mantle. As well as people coming to say “I do”, the place is starting to attract an increasing number of honeymooners.
The glass-roofed and heated “igloos" built next to the log cabins on the site are especially popular with Japanese couples.
They regard it as very romantic to sleep - and more - under a winter starlit sky and with the Aurora borealis swirling overhead.
Tourists often pick up a souvenir in the form of “Aslak’s Rutting Sock” - condoms with a fairly graphic image of a couple of reindeer getting it on.
They are among the most-sold souvenirs from Kakslauttanen.
The British couple’s reindeer-drawn limo arrives at the chapel.
When the groom steps off the sleigh, his patent-leather shoes let him down rather dramatically.
He slides on all fours, bottom first, down the slope to the chapel entrance.
The couple are in stitches with laughter.
When the door to the chapel of snow and ice is opened, the bride lets out a gasp of quite sincere astonishment.
Ice-sculptures glisten and twinkle in the large, gleaming-white hall.
The couple step purposefully forward along reindeer hides strewn on the floor towards the altar of ice.
Behind it stands Lars Lindh, wearing a thick winter overcoat. Lindh has come up from Sodankylä, and he is a laamanni, literally a “law-man” - the term harks back to the Scandinavian and Icelandic Middle Ages, and is today used to denote the chief judge of a district court.
Lars Lindh launches into the familiar litany in English: “The purpose of marriage is...”
In less than two minutes, bride and groom have said their “I dos” and exchanged rings and a lengthy kiss.
The bride is brimming up with tears.
Then they drink some warm juice made with berries and take all the necessary photos in the chapel.
“An absolutely lovely, lovely wedding”, says the newly-minted Mrs. Hill.
At their wedding supper in the restaurant at the Kakslauttanen cabin village, the couple dine on rich salmon soup and reindeer filet in front of an open fire.
In the neighbouring private dining room they are awaiting the arrival of another British wedding party, eight people in all, on their way over from the ice chapel.
Later in the evening, the Hills plan to go skiing or snowshoe walking, in both cases a first for them.
One hopes it is not excessively exotic after all that champagne and a bottle of Merlot.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 16.3.2008
Previously in HS International Edition:
Weddings could be Lapland tourism industry´s next trump card (5.3.2008)
MARI MANNINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
mari.manninen@hs.fi
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A de luxe wedding in Lapland
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