Travel Diaries: The Northern Lights

When I touched down at Oslo airport a week ago I noticed that all the Norwegians coming through customs seemed to be carrying an awful lot of booze. Perhaps they needed it to warm their cockles during the long and icy winter months that claim the Scandinavian landscape every year? Or maybe it had something to do with the almost perpetual darkness that envelops the northernmost climes of the country, using alcohol and the escapism it affords you to while away the twenty plus hours a day spent under the shadow of the earth, as it’s rolls through space to the rhythm that gave birth to time.

The answer lies in the less surreptitious and happily veers away from the notion of seasonal alcoholism. In fact, it would be hard pressed to surrender to the bottle in Norway without re-mortgaging your house; the booze, like everything else, is so bloody expensive! You can expect to pay no less than ten of your hard earned British pounds for a single beer, a price considered more than equitable in Norway, and this is in a regular pub comparable to your Nicholsons or Tadcaster sponsored venues one finds on the average British high street. The jump from £2.45 to the peculiar price of £3.03 for a pint of Taddy’s at the Earl of Lonsdale on Portobello Road, now seems more like charity than annoyance when compared to the kilos of saffron and bars of bullion you need to grab a swift half at the ‘Reindeers Head’ in Tromsø. Needless to say the first week of 2013 was somewhat dry; there are very few beers worth that amount of money. (The £14 I spent on a whopper at Burger King was a sound investment however).

Onto the reason for our trip, then: the Northern Lights. For a couple of years now my darling girlfriend and I had been reading in various publications, through the medium of chance, that the winter of 2012 / 2013 would have the highest level of solar activity over the arctic circle for at least a decade. A mere grain of sand in the deserts of time that make up the life of our planet, but for us mere mortals a fair old chunk, the time was now. We booked our flights, cabin and car on the 29^th of December, and on the morning of the 3^rd January we were off to hunt arguably the most impressive of the ‘Seven Wonders of the Natural World’.

Touching down in Tromsø under the cover of darkness we slid to our VW Polo in the car park and consulted the map as our vehicular lifeline battled to warm up in the -15⁰C temperatures. Warmer than I thought it would be having spoken to the Siberian lady who helps my mother with the cleaning once a week, who’s family in northern Russia endured a -45⁰C Christmas day just a week earlier. With our window to the arctic free of ice we drove out into the white.

Once out of Tromsø, the largest city in north Norway yet with a population half the size of Bedford and around the same as my local town of Bishops Stortford, we circled a fjord and journeyed under another through a long and winding tunnel, emerging the other side onto a road of dangerously packed ice smattered with a deceptively reassuring layer of snow. After an hour driving through a blizzard we arrived at our lodgings at Malagen Brygger, a picturesque collection of red cabins built atop stilts on the banks of a dramatic fjord. Reception had closed earlier so we were forced to follow a set of clues left on the door by the owners that led us to a small lock box on the adjacent wall, I struggled with the combination like a panicked contestant on the ‘Crystal Maze’, my bare fingers shaking in the cold, eventually Jackie got out to help me as I grew more and more frustrated with the incredibly simple mechanism. We drove the final hundred yards to our cabin, eager for refuge and the warmth within.

I’ve always been a little sceptical when booking accommodation abroad, a horrific experience in Olu Deniz in southern Turkey several years ago sowed the seeds of perennial doubt. I had booked a two week holiday with an ex-girlfriend in a hotel that was painted the same colour as a pack of Opal Fruits, complete with clientele that ranged from a black cab driver and a woman that I hope wasn’t his sister, to a man who must have worked in sewage maintenance deduced by the perpetual smell of faeces that wafted around him in an effervescent orb. The tattoo on his chest reading “No Regrets” in Olde English said it all.

My initial apprehension was brought about by the price of the cabin, which, unlike everything else in the rest of Norway, was extremely cheap. At around £150 per night for a three bed cabin complete with living room, balcony, kitchen, bathroom, wood burner, and, under floor heating, it was an absolute steal. The whole place was wonderful, so much so that Jackie spent the first half hour wandering around letting out joyful noises to illustrate her approval; and not a pack of Opal Fruits or oxymoronic tattoo in sight!  

The next day we ventured up to a frozen lake half a mile inland from the fjord, “The ice is thick enough to land a plain on” our friendly host Nina had told us proudly when we introduced ourselves earlier on at reception. To put it to the test we jumped onto a push sled, a real favourite with Norwegian children, and I tried my best to propel Jackie into the middle of the lake, my feet slipping out from underneath me every time I tried to exert a tiny amount of forward thrust. Defeated, we disembarked and made snow angels instead.

A night of self-catered pizza and endless episodes of ‘Storage Wars’ on cable TV ensued, a ridiculous American show where people bid on repossessed containers in California and then pawn off the contents to the soundtrack from a Country and Western brothel. Just when I thought this couldn’t get any worse it was totally eclipsed by a fashion reality show called ‘Runway Wars’, which Jackie forced me to sit through (guilty pleasures only extend so far), which had one contestant in it that was camper than the bastard love child of Alan Carr and Liberace. He described his collection like, and I quote, “A woman walking out of a Fragana painting, into new age rock star meets Hasidic gentleman”. A serious look to go for, I wouldn’t recommend taking it on lightly.

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The next day we drove to the most north-westerly point of Sommaroy to walk to the top of a hill, of course by the time we got there it was dark, having been dusk for what seemed like five minutes, so we walked instead to the very edge of the land and looked out towards the arctic across the emerald shallows into the black abyss beyond. The next land mass in the distance Alaska; separated by billions of tonnes of ice and thousands of miles of night, lit only by the ethereal dreams riding the Aurora.

We arrived in Tromsø to join a Northern Lights tour in the hope a professional could lead us the right direction, although this year is blessed with high activity it had been particularly low for the past few days. After two hours’ drive inland towards the Finnish border into the heart of rural Finnmark, we disembarked at a fjord-side beach and looked to the North. In the sky above us was a faint white arc of light moving slowly across the water, I’m not sure that I actually would have recognised it without instruction from Maximo, our Italian guide, however we got down to the water’s edge and set up the tripod in hope of capturing even a little of the natural phenomena we had travelled so far to see. Twenty minutes later and they were gone.

I was glad to have seen them, but I wasn’t filled with the elation that Jackie was at having ticked this box we had talked so much about over the past couple of years. Perhaps because I spent most of the time figuring out how the hell to open my lens, change the ISO, set the timer, worrying about the single battery going flat, and being surrounded by three coach loads of tourists all gawping at the ski waiting for the all-important picture to hang on their wall between the framed snaps of the Taj Mahal and Macchu Picchu (both of which I’m staring at now whilst tapping my keyboard). It wasn’t the peaceful experience I had imagined.

We arrived back at our cabin at 3am and fell to sleep immediately.

Rising at 8am I collected my things under a haze of sleep, donned my ‘onesie’, and headed out to the car to drive two hours south to the base camp of our reindeer excursion. The reindeer ride itself was extremely peaceful, and although we didn’t cover more than a mile in the hour we were being pulled through the snow it gave us time to relax on the warm hide and look around at the dramatic surroundings. Our guide was a Sami reindeer herder who took the job as guide in winter to subsidise his income and support his family. His story was that of a purist, far from the industrial ideals of the money driven westerner, he had taken a job at a factory when he was a young man but couldn’t stand being inside and away from the herd. In his own words his “body was in the factory, but his heart in the mountains”. He decided to quit and moved back into the wilds where for three months of the year he drives his 500 strong herd of reindeer up into the mountains, 400 miles from the nearest road, and tends to them there by himself. He said he talks to his reindeer and tells them things he can tell no human, that they are great listeners and it keeps him sane. He did then go on to mention that once you start talking to trees however, there is something wrong and you should probably head back to civilisation.

After a fascinating history lesson, and confirming that the Sami do indeed have over 600 words just for snow, we were taken into a traditional tent called a Lavvu to have reindeer soup and sweet cinnamon flat bread, the perfect end to another day in the Arctic Circle.

North Norway in winter is a land of stark contrasts; austere landscapes battered by the elements collide with mirror flat lakes in a state of eerie calm, blizzards rage then minutes later they seem like a distant memory as the blue light of dusk, or is it dawn, washes over the horizon followed closely by whisperings from warmer climes and lands touched by the light of the sun.

The next day, our last, we spent relaxing in front of the wood burning stove honing my new fashion style, a mash up of Bon Jovi and Matisyahu, whilst eating a combination of everything we had left in the fridge. I didn’t quite get the ratio right in the wood burner so I spent a good chunk of the day in my underwear in our own personal sauna. In the evening Jackie and I agreed to make once last effort to see the Northern Lights and walked up the hill to the frozen lake where we went kick sledding on the first day. As we drew closer we could see a fire burning in one of the huts and upon arrival came across a young Canadian couple and their two children, the youngest, a five year old girl called Dilly, immediately started throwing snowballs at me. She was a little too small to wage an Arctic war against, and the snow balls disintegrated before they made contact so I wasn’t too worried about being taken down. The best way to defend against an onslaught like that, learnt through entertaining at many children’s parties, is to pick them up and hoist them aloft. Or alternatively let them know you have a pony at home and they will then become your best friend, deciding, without hesitation, to leave the bosom of their loving family on the off chance of a ride! The offer still stands Dilly.

We were invited in to the hut to sit around the fire and share in their hot chocolate, cookies, and spicy chips (crisps to us Brits) that were distributed by my new best friend from a bag the same size as her. I managed to melt my boots by getting them too close to the flames but I wasn’t bothered, I had chocolate and popcorn. Bradley, the Dad, showed me how to set up my SLR properly, and with a pre-warning delivered by a Northern Lights iphone App we ventured back outside for the greatest show on earth.

The sky lit up as though the angels were dancing in the heavens, dipping down and weaving across to the North then driving out to the west in an Arc of vibrant green. My camera picked up blues and reds in the mist of particles that weren’t visible to the naked eye, I let it do its thing, shutter open for thirty seconds at a time as Jackie and I stared in awe at the otherworldly show playing out before our eyes. No bus load of tourists, no indiscernible white wisp paling into the darkness. These were the Lights of legend, Lights that gave birth to myth and fable, Lights that stole away sailors of old and led them through their incandescence into the ancient Norse realms of Thor and Odin. This is why we were here, why we had come this far toward the roof of our planet; everything else, the reindeer sledding, the warmth of our cabin, the fjords and the forest and the world of ice around us, all paled into insignificance when overlooked by this pure and extra-terrestrial phenomena, lighting up the heavens like a slow burning flame from somewhere far greater than here. It was a humbling experience, evoking the kind of juvenile excitement that is usually only afforded to the young and impressionable. I felt extremely small, but it also gave a warm feeling of contentment and a great sense of what it is to belong.

As far as we were concerned the trip was now complete, another one of life’s great experiences fulfilled and my thirst for adventure slaked … for now.

The next twenty four hours were spent in transit, waiting on snow locked runways and sleeping on cold marble floors in Oslo airport in an attempt to save money on a hotel room the price of two weeks rent in London, the prospect of being able to see the sun spurring me on. Of course when we landed at Gatwick it was raining and grey, but on the plus side, the beer is considerably cheaper. I think I’ll head down the pub and plan my next trip, the Southern Lights perhaps?