Seeking the Aurora Borealis in Northern Finland - Part 1
Friday, December 28, 2012 at 3:09PM When the organising company told me that our direct flights to Kuusamo had been cancelled by mistake and that we would be flying via Stockholm and what’s more there would be a four hour minibus transfer to Oulanka at the other end, I thought seriously about cancelling the trip. It was expensive, it was over New Year, and I had booked it rather on a whim on coming back from Cuba in September and discovering that the disruption in my life continued. Being away at New Year, a long way away, somewhere where the physical demands of the trip would force me to think of nothing else than dealing with the extreme environment I was in, seemed a sensible if slightly uncompromising option. It also, as a by-product, fulfilled a couple of my never-too-late objectives: to step inside the Arctic Circle and to see a proper display of the Northern Lights. I’d seen them once before, in Iceland in 2006 when I’d managed to drive for an hour down a motorway in the wrong direction and having turned around arrived at my hotel on the Snaefellsnes peninsula with just minutes to spare before the restaurant closed. Having shared a bottle of (very expensive) wine with my travelling companion which we finished very quickly (note, expensive anywhere in Scandinavia does not necessarily correlate with ‘good’) and having spent about 6 hours in one position in a very small car, post dinner we were keen to stretch our legs and play about in the snow. Stepping outside the triple-glazed warmth of the hotel and into the razor-sharp cold of the night we were joshing around until I looked up and said, “hang on a minute, why does the sky look so weird?”
We both stopped and in the quiet stillness turned our gaze upwards and realised, in a slightly dim fashion, that we were seeing the Northern Lights. It was not a fabulous or momentous display, just a mild glow of green and yellow bands tripping across the sky but it drew us in and kept us there until our hands and feet could take the cold no more.
This New Year, in Finland, far further north, with solar activity more pronounced, I hope to see the Northern Lights skipping and shimmering across the Arctic sky in a far longer and more intense display. I have my fingers crossed.
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read about my own trip to iceland