I’d always dreamt about seeing The Northern Lights, one of nature’s greatest planetary light shows, but the web is full of stories of people who’ve make the trip north to witness them only to be frustrated by cloud cover and dull skies.
For the truth is the Aurora Borealis don’t perform to order or appear every night, so booking a holiday for the sole purpose of seeing them is always going to be a gamble. So when we were planning our trip to catch the elusive Northern Lights, we combined it with a week of winter sports. Our destination was the World Cup ski resort of Levi, about 110 miles inside the Arctic Circle in northern Finland.
As we flew north on our Monarch Airlines jet to Kittila, with Inghams as our tour operator, I had to feel sorry for the elderly, disabled couple alongside me who were flying for one thing and one thing only. They wanted to see the lights and assumed they’d be able to switch them on at will. I kept my mouth shut and inwardly prayed that the gods of the heavens wouldn’t disappointment them.
Levi is handy for the airport, just a 15-minute coach ride away. So it took us no time at all to get to our room in the Levitunturi Spa Hotel, a big complex amid the pines on the edge of town. Cheekily, we’d upgraded to a suite with our own sauna. It was modern, spacious and swanky, decorated in red and black, and it suited us perfectly.
The village itself proved to be rather more functional, less cuckoo clock pretty than Alpine resorts but a lot easier on the eye than I thought it was going to be. Some ancient log cabins in the trees nestled side-by-side with modern apartment and hotel blocks, some of them facing the village’s principal pistes. With Graham having quit downhill skiing during our holiday in Ischgl, the week was going to throw up a mix of experiences while we waited for night to fall and the Northern Lights to dance.
As he chilled out, I took the bus to the South Slopes for some alpine action on the largely blue runs but the skiing experience turned out to be very different to the Alps. The mountains in Finland are modest in comparison and the landscape much flatter, consisting of rounded hills, pine forests and many frozen lakes so the pistes are shorter and less varied. It was also bitterly, bitterly cold during our stay. High up top, trees and bushes were few and far between and those that had survived the ravages of the weather were wrapped from top to toe in ice and snow, making them look like deformed snowmen. The views were stunning but it was, at times, bleak and uncomfortable. And I discovered that skiing alone can be a pretty miserable experience, even with the sun shining and few others around to dodge. After spending a handful of hours up on the hills, I began to wonder whether I would ever ski again.
Back with Graham, we organised a few days of cross country skiing guided by patient and friendly instructors. As we discovered in Ischgl during our first attempts at the sport, cross country is tough and exhausting but makes for great exercise and is a marvellous way of discovering the countryside. Levi has zillions of miles of pistes but poor Graham gave himself some bruised ribs when falling on a downhill stretch, and I wondered whether that would put Mr Risk Averse off any future outings.
On another day we went for a walk in the woods, aiming for a warming lunch in a mountain restaurant a few miles beyond the village. But on a short climb up the slopes I soon found myself up to my waist in snow and we had to turn back on ourselves to escape the drifts.
The Sami are the native people of Levi and northern Scandinavia and they’re now well and truly part of the tourist trail. Their way of life, languages and culture are profiled in the Samiland exhibition at the Levi Summit Centre halfway up the mountain in the centre of the village. It’s part of a UNESCO effort to keep alive the memories and traditions of indigenous people around the world.
I was astonished to find that the Sami were persecuted well into the 20th century even in hip, touchy-feely, left-leaning Finland. It’s a bit of a dry exhibition but outside we walked among some traditional Sami buildings, including kotas (or tepees), turf huts and wooden storage rooms, and round a small enclosure for friendly reindeer.
And then we joined a touristy reindeer safari, a rather sanitised Sami experience on a farm outside of town. Fluffy dogs scampered around as we wrapped up warm in our sleigh, staring at our reindeer’s backside, before trotting off with several other beasts and sleighs on our trip across the frozen lake and into the woods. The landscape was stunning, frozen, magical and memorable but it was freezing cold despite all the blankets and my legs went dead. Still, the untended reindeer followed the tracks as efficiently as trams and got into a bit of a race with each other on the trip home to a well-deserved meal.
Afterwards, I noticed all the chunks of reindeer meat hanging from the rafters in the cold air and chatted briefly to one of the Sami farmers. He told me how his reindeer roam free in the local forests during much of the spring and summer and are then rounded up in the autumn. Some will end up on a one-way trip to the abattoir. He couldn’t tell me how many reindeer he had, but maybe his were among those I’d eaten in Levi’s restaurants. And very delicious they were too, with creamy mash potato and red berries.
Overall, the food in Levi was pretty good – other than the awful buffet muck they served up at our hotel – and the variety of restaurants impressive. One night we gorged on giant pieces of seafood at the King Crab House, which was very good indeed.
What the hotel failed to deliver on its buffet (the a la carte menu was a lot better), it certainly delivered on facilities. The spa and pool offered everything from a water slide (the closest I’ve ever come to an enema), to a range of therapies and the obligatory nude sauna and steam room. An outdoor heated jacuzzi and pool contrasted with the freezing air temperatures.
Of an evening, nightlife in the village was decent enough and several bars kept us entertained in between our search for the Northern Lights. There was the obligatory Irish pub, Oliver’s Corner, which we visited a few times, as well as the more Finnish and youthful Pub Holmola. But what about those northern lights? As the week went on I was beginning to despair of the weather forecasts, which predicted cloudy skies with monotonous regularity. Did we find them? There were certainly a few hints… Find out in part two.