Having just returned from my trip to Swedish Lapland I decided that I had to share with you my experience of the phenomenon which everyone hopes to see when they travel to Lapland and that is the northern lights!!
Now as everyone knows, the northern lights do exist but due to weather situations or not the correct light, not everyone gets the chance to see them. However, luckily enough for me I wasn’t one of them.
It eventually got to our last night where we were doing the northern lights snowmobile tour. I had kind of given up on the thought of seeing them due to the rest of the time I’d been there being cloudy and having been told they hadn’t been seen for 3 weeks so thought I’d just make as much as I could out of the ride. Just before we left for the tour, our leader pointed to the sky and up above us were some very faint green lights. We all went silent but you could feel the excitement in the air. We were just hoping that the lights would turn into something stronger whilst we were in the wilderness and we’d get a really good show. As soon as we started snowmobiling I loved it. It was my turn to drive first and going through the snow forests and over frozen lakes it felt so magical and even more so as it was a couple of days before Christmas. After about 20 minutes we stopped in the middle of nowhere and turned off our engines and lights to see if we could see any movement in the sky. Unfortunately we couldn’t see anything happening. It was then my friend Ellie’s turn to drive and as she was going along I looked to the right of me and I could see the start of some light movement beginning to happen. A little way ahead we all stopped again and turned off our headlights. It was amazing. The lights were getting stronger and turned into a beautiful green where they made almost a semi-circle shape across the sky. It was an incredible experience to stand there and watch it happening. It was alien like as if there was another world coming up in the darkness. We stood watching it until it faded and then went onto a wilderness hut where we had a delicious dinner and just as we finished the dinner we were told there was another display so we all ran outside to have a look. This time there were two shapes either side of the sky and I think everyone was still in shock and completely amazed that we were standing there and we got to see them. It was truly magical. I’d recommend to everyone who is going on a trip to the Icehotel to book this excursion because even if you’ve given up hope of seeing the northern lights, you never know what will happen.
To whet your appetite the Joanna Lumley programme where she heads off in search of them is repeated again on the 29th Dec 2008 on BBC2 at 18.15.
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