Written by Serge Semenyura
In a nutshell
You do not need to stand in a field staring at the sky. The Northern Lights can be watched from a glass bed, a dog sled, a reindeer sleigh, an icebreaker, a hot tub, or a frozen lake while wearing a dry suit and floating on your back. Some of these are on our tours. Some are not. All of them are extraordinary. This is the list.
For a complete guide, visit our Northern Lights Travel Guide.
I am going to start with the ice floating, because it is the one that makes people stare at me across the table.
You put on a dry suit. A guide cuts a hole in a frozen lake in the Finnish wilderness, sixty kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. You lie down on the surface of the ice, and they push you in. The suit keeps you completely dry and surprisingly warm. The lake holds you. You look straight up. If the lights are out, they are directly overhead. The silence is total. The only sound is your own breathing.
I have been outside in Lapland for thirty years. That is still the most silent experience I have ever had.
Hei. I’m Serge Semenyura, founder of Scandi Travel. I have been showing people the Northern Lights since 2010, and in that time I have learned that how you see them shapes what you feel. Standing in a field is one way. It is not the only way. Here are the nine best.
There is a poem Finnish schoolchildren learn: Eino Leino’s Nocturne, written in 1903. It is about a long summer night, a corncrake calling across the fields, and a love that has been lost. The last lines say something that does not quite translate: the feeling that even the most beautiful night costs something, and that this is exactly why it is beautiful.
I think of it often when I watch the Northern Lights. The experience only works because you are cold, because it is dark, because you drove two hours to find clear sky. The discomfort is not separate from the wonder. It is what makes the wonder possible.
1. From a glass igloo: the lights come to you
The glass igloo is the one that started everything. Finnish engineers designed it in the 1980s for astronomer guests who needed a warm place to sleep while keeping the sky visible. The thermal glass keeps you at around 22°C inside while the temperature outside drops to -30°C or colder. You lie in bed and look up through the curved roof at whatever the sky is doing.
Most glass igloo stays include an aurora alarm: a call or a knock on the door if the lights appear while you are asleep. Every guest tells me they plan to stay awake all night watching. Nobody does. Then the alarm goes off at 2am and nobody complains.
Our 12-Day Northern Lights and Scandinavia Tour includes a glass igloo night in Finnish Lapland. It is the night guests talk about most afterwards, consistently, every year.
2. By husky sled: the most Finnish way
Twelve dogs pull you through a forest that has not seen another human being in weeks. The sound is the panting of the dogs, the crunch of snow under the runners, the soft jingle of the harness. Then the tree line opens, the sky appears, and you are moving through it.
In northern Lapland, the chance of seeing the Northern Lights is about every other clear night, according to the Finnish Meteorological Institute. The husky safari takes you far enough from any light source that even a faint display becomes visible. When it is not faint, you stop the sled.
The first time I watched the lights from the back of a sled I fell off. Nobody noticed because they were all looking up. This is, I think, the correct response.
Our 12-Day tour and 8-Day Lapland tour both include a husky safari as part of the program.
3. By reindeer sleigh: the older way
Slower than huskies. Much slower. The reindeer moves at its own pace, which is not your pace, and after approximately ninety seconds of trying to hurry it along you give up and accept that this is how things are going to be.
The jingling of the bells is real. I want to say that because people always assume it is theatrical. It is not. The bells have been attached to reindeer harnesses for centuries to help herders track animals in the dark. When you hear them moving through a silent forest at night, with green light beginning to build overhead, it is one of the most specifically Laplandic sounds that exists.
The reindeer, for their part, do not care about the Northern Lights at all. They have seen this before. They will see it again. This, I find, is rather calming.
4. On the overnight train: watching from your bunk
The Santa Claus Express departs Helsinki in the evening and arrives in Rovaniemi the following morning, having travelled the length of Finland through the night. In winter, the train passes through some of the darkest, most aurora-rich skies in Europe.
You do not need to do anything. You lie in your bunk, and if the lights appear outside your window at 1am, you watch them from there. Nobody is asking you to stand in the cold. Nobody is chasing clear sky by car. The lights either come to your window or they do not, and either way, you have crossed Finland in your sleep on a train called the Santa Claus Express. It is not the worst way to spend a night.
The viewing is best from the upper bunk on the east-facing side of the train. I have thought about this too much.
Our 12-Day tour uses the Santa Claus Express to travel from Helsinki to Rovaniemi. The overnight journey is built into the itinerary, not just a transfer.
5. On an icebreaker: the loudest option
The Sampo icebreaker in Kemi, on the Gulf of Bothnia, was originally a working vessel of the Finnish state. It is now one of the most extraordinary tourist experiences in Scandinavia. The ship moves through ice that is up to a meter thick. The sound it makes is not subtle. Ice does not break quietly.
The full experience includes boarding the ship at dusk, sailing out into the frozen gulf, and then, at some point, being invited to put on a thermal dry suit and get into the water. The broken ice surrounds you. The ship is somewhere nearby. And if the conditions are right, the Northern Lights are overhead.
The icebreaker adds something that no field or glass igloo can provide: the feeling that you are genuinely, magnificently out of your depth.
Our 7-Day Lapland Northern Lights Tour includes the icebreaker cruise from Kemi.
6. Ice floating: the most Finnish option
Back to the beginning.
Avantouinti, the Finnish tradition of cutting a hole in frozen lake ice for swimming, has been practiced here for centuries. We do it in winter, after a sauna, because the contrast between heat and cold is considered profoundly restorative. Scientists now confirm what Finns always knew: cold water immersion reduces inflammation, improves circulation, and appears to do approximately everything good for you. We did not need the studies. We had the tradition.
The ice floating experience in Rovaniemi is avantouinti’s gentler cousin. The dry suit means you do not actually get cold. You simply lie on the surface of a frozen lake in the Taiga Arctic Forest and look up. The wilderness around you is complete. The quiet is absolute.
I have done this six times.
I recommend it to everyone and warn nobody about what it actually involves, because I think the surprise is part of it.
7. From a boat on the fjords: the Norwegian perspective
Tromsø offers catamaran tours that take you out onto the fjord at night. The advantage is the reflection: on a very still night, with strong aurora overhead, the light reflects on the black water below. You are, technically, surrounded.
The fjords at night in winter are unlike anywhere else on earth. The mountains go straight into the water. The sky is enormous. I saw a green curtain overhead and its mirror image below once, on a private boat north of Tromsø, and have been trying to recreate it ever since.
8. From a hot tub at -20°C
This exists. At certain glass cabin resorts in Finnish and Swedish Lapland, your accommodation includes a private outdoor jacuzzi on a deck facing open sky. The water is heated to roughly 40°C. The air outside is -20°C. You sit in the water with snow settling on your head and the Northern Lights overhead, and you feel slightly ridiculous and completely unable to move.
At Levin Iglut in Finnish Lapland, the glass-enclosed suites come complete with a private terrace and outdoor jacuzzi, according to TripAdvisor. This requires a level of personal confidence I did not have in my twenties. I have it now. I recommend it without reservation.
9. Svalbard: 78 degrees north, in total darkness
Svalbard is not a tour I run. I want to be clear about that. But it belongs on this list because it is the furthest the concept of Northern Lights viewing can be taken without leaving the planet.
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago at 78 degrees north, roughly 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole. From mid-November to late January, the sun does not rise at all. This is not kaamos, the Finnish polar twilight. This is genuine polar night: weeks of complete darkness, punctuated only by moonlight and the aurora. Because it is dark continuously, the Northern Lights can occur at any time of day. You could see them at 11am. The polar bear population outnumbers the human one. Every person leaving town must carry a rifle.
I have been once. I would go back.
What all of these have in common
None of them are comfortable in the way that a hotel lobby is comfortable. All of them involve cold, or darkness, or a degree of surrender to something larger than you. The hot tub is the closest thing to comfort on this list, and you are still sitting outside in Lapland in the dark.
There is a line from the old Kalevala poems that I always come back to. Not a direct quote, more the feeling they leave behind:
Winter is not something to survive.
It is something to go into.
The darkness is not the enemy of the experience.
It is the point of it.
In Finnish, we have a word for this understanding: talvinen rauha. Winter’s peace. The particular stillness that only arrives when everything is frozen and the world goes quiet. It is in that quiet that the lights appear. Every single time.
Choose your way!
Glass igloo or icebreaker. Husky sled or frozen lake. Hot tub at -20°C or a train window at 1am. The Northern Lights reward every one of these equally, in their own way, in the dark.
Our 12-Day Northern Lights and Scandinavia Tour includes five of the nine experiences on this list: the glass igloo, the husky safari, the reindeer sleigh, the Santa Claus Express overnight train, and the wilderness aurora safari deep into the Lapland dark. Our 7-Day Lapland Northern Lights Tour adds the one experience that exists nowhere else in the world: the Sampo icebreaker, the dry suit, and the Gulf of Bothnia breaking open around you.
For a tailor-made itinerary built around the experiences that matter most to you, contact us. A personal offer within 24 hours.
For the complete guide to timing, locations, and what affects your chances, visit our Northern Lights Travel Guide.
Hei hei from me and the team at Scandi Travel. Serge Semenyura.
