Be Inspired Northern lights /
39
Leading
lights Seeing the Northern Lights is on most client’s bucket list. But how do you go about selling something that can’t be guaranteed? Mark Stratton finds out
View the northern lights from a glass igloo in FINLAND
A
s if the frozen lake at Inari, criss-crossed by ski-tracks, wasn’t beautiful enough during daylight. By night, in anaerobic blackness, the show begins. I’m lucky because it’s a cloudless night, although my thermometer is reading a biting -10ºC when I leave my cosy cabin, swaddled against the cold, around 9pm. I scrunch in the snow around the lake’s edge, my breath condensing like a puffing steam-engine. I aim for a wider view of the horizon away from the surrounding pine-forests. Although, within a short while, as my eyes adjust, aurora borealis – the Northern Lights – appears around me. Mostly, they are green lights. At first, a band of streaks begin shapeshifting into a phantasmagorical display. This collision of solar charged particles and atmospheric atoms goes haywire. I see an eerie silvery rectangle form while a celestial shower resembles a firework display Guy Fawkes could never replicate. At times, the whole velvety darkness wobbles as the green streaks reassemble in different quadrants across the sky. After two absorbing hours, setting
up long-exposure shots from my camera tripod, my fingers are icenumbingly cold. The aurora will be seen throughout the night but for now the warmth of my woodburner beckons.
Time to shine To see aurora borealis, head to the high latitudes within the Arctic Circle, where solar activity is at its highest close to the North Pole and made visible by winter’s lack of daylight. The most popular region to witness the aurora is the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway and Finland, plus Iceland, as they share long dark winters. Aurora is an experience of a lifetime but it’s worth advising the weather gods need to be on your side because cloud cover will obscure them. Hence a stay of three or four nights gives visitors higher odds of seeing them. Now is a good time to attract families for the February halfterm and there are many funky ways to experience the lights: from a dogsled driven by huskies to overnighting in a glass igloo. “After almost two years with no opportunity to travel, people seem to want to push the boat out, especially
on bucket list trips like the Northern Lights,” says Andrea Godfrey, ProductManager of Regent Holidays. “We’re seeing a surge in bookings for Northern Lights trips, to Iceland predominately, followed by Finland and Norway. Now that fully-vaccinated Brits can enter Sweden, we are receiving requests for 2022,” says Godfrey. “We’re seeing a demand too for upmarket hotels, like The Retreat in Iceland, and private excursions, such as super-jeep trips into the wild”. Finland: “Finland is undeservedly overlooked as a Northern Lights destination, but you are as likely to see the aurora from here as you are from its near neighbours,” says Alistair McLean, MD of The Aurora Zone. “The Finns are at the forefront of aurora hunting, guiding, and accommodation. There are more glass igloos and cabins with huge north-facing windows in Finland than all the other destinations combined”. The Aurora Zone offers its own threenight ‘glass igloo escape’ in Finnish Lapland at Saariselkä, from £1,545pp. Visit Finland, meanwhile, is hosting a B2B ‘Five Countries’ workshop on February 8, 2022 in the
sellingtravel.co.uk
Northern lights V9.indd 39
11/2/21 05:56 PM
