Sleigh It Like Santa

A winter spent in the FinnishLapland can tick off all childhood dreams, and some grown-up ones too.

- Lubna Amir

When asked to write a short bio, my world hardened, no-stars-in-her-eyes colleague, L, wrote, “[she] fantasises about a bucket-list journey to witness the aurora borealis someday.”

In Finland, there’s more than one way to witness the Northern Lights: lie on a plush bed in a heated glass igloo; don a ‘survival suit’ and float in an icy lake; chase the lights across the sky in a chartered airplane, or on the ground in snowmobiles and husky sleighs; rush down a snowy slope in a glass-roofed cabin on a sledge. Then there’s the least fancy method: dress in your warmest woollens and drive to a spot where the artificial light is at a minimum, and wait for the celestial show to begin. No matter what you choose, in the Finnish Lapland the odds are ever in your favour—the lights are visible for almost 200 nights a year.

It’s March—still winter in Finland. Three days back, I’d landed in Helsinki with a group of five other journalists, and we’d travelled to Levi, a ski town north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. The only thing on our minds was the lights. The aurora borealis is unpredictable. We had not seen the glorious flashes in the two days that we’d been in Levi and uncertainty has kept us on edge. There are, of course, a slew of alert systems designed by tourism boards, handy weathermen and enterprising tour companies. You can sleep soundly after setting a Northern Lights alarm tracker—the lights are best visible close to midnight—or you could go on the hunt on the day of the strongest predictions. We, however, had only one night left in Levi, and a designated tour time—9 p.m.—that is early for the lights to be seen, if it all.