Skiing: Slalom through the boundaries of normality

Bright lights, loud silence, Japanese pizzas: skiing in the Arctic Circle is a strange experience, writes Stephen Wood.

Unless you are very lucky or very rich, you will have travelled here via a big-city southern airport, Oslo, Stockholm or Helsinki; and they seem ordinary enough places. But fly the extra 500 miles to an arctic airport, and even before you've reclaimed your baggage you can tell that the journey has taken you through the boundaries of normality.

The first shock, of course, is the icy freshness that hits you as you leave the plane, an experience to mirror that of arriving at a summer hot-spot. The second is the bright lights and loud, loud silence. You have arrived at night, because that is as hard to avoid in the winter as daytime is in summer; yet everything is bathed in 1,000 watts of light - because in an area that's at least dark-ish from October to March, municipal lighting is powerful stuff. Add the sound-absorbing characteristics of a thick layer of snow, and the effect is like that of walking on to the set of a silent movie.

It all gets better - and stranger - in daylight, when you can see the awesome landscape, big enough to lower the sky, and feel the cryogenic effects of the climate: the defensive slowing of the metabolism, and the thickening of the blood, which together with the silence make the arctic north a great place to - well, to chill out.

Dundret, which is 40 miles inside the Arctic Circle in Sweden, adds its own local peculiarities to those big themes. Don't be surprised if you are unfamiliar with the name. Outside Scandinavia, the hill at Dundret is well known only among two groups of people: the world's best skiers, and the Japanese. Competition skiers go to Dundret because its ski area is open for six months of the year, from November to the end of April.

The Japanese go there because the previous owner of the hotel at Dundret promoted the resort heavily in Japan; because the northern lights are a big attraction; and because - so one Japanese visitor told me - they like the cold, the darkness and the solitude, which provide such a contrast to life at home. (He added that domestic flights there are so expensive that a package tour to Scandinavia costs little more than a trip to northern Japan.) More than 12 per cent of the nights booked at Dundret's hotel are for Japanese visitors.

I went there because I couldn't wait any longer for a weekend's skiing. But, unfortunately, Dundret has had a bad season so far. The snowfall has been light, and the weather hasn't been cold enough for artificial snow-making. So although several ski teams had been phoning from Austrian glaciers for snow reports in Dundret, the availability of only two pistes and two lifts (not including the one from the ski area back up to the hotel) had put all of them off coming, apart from the Swedish team.

The Japanese, however, were there. And not just holidaymakers: there was a racing team, too, if only one from Japanese universities, rather than the elite racers. And Scandinavia's top young female slalom skiers had turned up, for a series of races down Dundret's most challenging run.

With a resort height of 823m and only 12 pistes, Dundret can't exactly rival the Trois Vallees in France. The piste on which the sturdy young slalomistes were racing is only 1,500m long, with a vertical drop of 340m; and calling it black is an exaggeration. But it's great fun: a narrow, lumpy section at the top drops down on to a steep pitch, followed by an easy S-bend long enough to induce complacency; then, suddenly, there is a succession of sharp ridges over which you can see nothing ahead - until the last moment - except for a few hundred square miles of forest, and the lake towards which you seem to be plunging.

A second black run (in truth, no more than a difficult blue) was the other one open: this is a wider, faster track, on which the Japanese racers were going for speed in a most un-kamikaze way, since they were clearly not going to kill themselves, or anyone else. I stopped to admire their technique, and their outfits: I'm not sure whether baggy Hawaiian-print shorts worn over leggings will ever catch on in Europe, and I'm convinced that the garment one Japanese holiday-maker was wearing - with "Pleasant System" and "Sports Afield" written across his bottom - will not.

I also stopped to admire the view. Saturday was a clear day (though not a clear night: if there were northern lights, they were beyond the clouds), and the sunset was sensational. In the strange time-frame of an arctic winter, sunset comes soon after lunch; and despite the floodlit pistes, the ski-lifts close down at 3pm, having opened only five hours earlier. Which leaves plenty of time for apres-ski activities.

What should I do on the long winter evening, before the dinner and dance at the hotel? I chose to visit the living museum of Sami culture, and then to go down an iron-ore mine. Both were weird and wonderful, in equal measures. I spent an hour in a traditional dwelling of the Sami - not "Lapps": that's the Swedish name for the area's indigenous people, not their own - discussing with the museum's young curator their symbiotic relationship with reindeer, as the animals themselves snuffled around the compound outside. Then I rode around in a truck inside Malmberget, the "ore mountain", with the mine's guide, Alf Appelquist, who took me on a two-and-a-half-hour vertical drop 175m below sea level to a huge mincer that can turn granite to dust, and should certainly feature in the next James Bond movie. I was very late for dinner, but I didn't mind.

The dinner was a grand affair: good wine, a cabaret, all the trimmings. It cost about pounds 35 a head. The power of the pound has made even Sweden less expensive: beer in the ski-area cafe cost a bit more than pounds 1, coffee a bit less, and a good pizza in the hotel was pounds 10 with wine, salad and coffee. Eating Neapolitan food in the Arctic Circle, with the menu spelling out pizza ingredients in Japanese? That's strange. But Sweden, cheap? Stranger still.

Stephen Wood paid pounds 171 (including taxes) for an SAS return ticket from Heathrow to Stockholm Arlanda airport. From there, Skyways' flights to Gallivare airport, about seven miles from Dundret, cost from pounds 130 return (advance booking). Dundret resort (00 46 970 145 60) offers three-night weekend packages at pounds 214 (based on three sharing a lodge), including a Stockholm-Gallivare return flight. A one-day ski pass costs about pounds 14; ski and boot hire, pounds 13.