In Search of Northern Lights

After our experience with ice lake driving and the car, we thought it best to make our way out of Jukkasjarvi and head on for the most northern village in Sweden, Karesuando.  This town is on the border with Finland - in fact it's Finnish counterpart is called Karesuvanto - and the towns are separated by a bridge crossing a river. 

Anyway, I don't really know what we were thinking, heading off into the wilderness of northern Sweden without a whisper of a room reservation, but we did it, because we were aiming to find northern lights again tonight, and of course you need a cold, cloudless sky.  All afternoon we'd been surrounded by clouds and so we kept heading to the Northeast, which looked relatively clear. We arrived in Karesuando well after dark, and set off in search of the hostel we'd seen mentioned in the guidebook. The only problem was, when we eventually found the hostel, we discovered that it is only open in the Summer. Now what you have to understand is that Karesuando is literally a "don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it"-sized town, and as such there was only one other hotel - and it too was closed. The nearest town (other than Finnish Karesuvanto) was literally a few hundred clicks away... what were we to do? We drove into Finland to look for something - but couldn't find a hotel (and anyway, we didn't have any euros), so it was starting to get a bit panicky. We pulled into a grocery store to ask about any other forms of accommodation in town, and were told about a motel over the road. This being our only option, off we went, and managed to get a large room with a TV and kitchen.

Jun cooked up a fabulous meal and then we decided to go out and look for northern lights. There were lots of clouds over Sweden, but in the distance Finland looked clear, so we crossed the bridge and headed off into Finland.  We headed as far out of the town as we could, trying to find the darkest part (and clearest sky).  I'm glad we did too, we were treated to the best display of Northern lights that we'd seen yet on this trip. I've heard before that the northern lights can appear as if they were dancing across the sky - and I have to say it certainly did look like that. They were literally changing shape as we were looking at them.  We had a lot of fun trying to capture them on camera, but boy was it cold! At one point I saw that it had hit -16 or so outside... my fingers were so cold it was painful!

We stayed out for an hour or two and then headed back to the motel. I went to bed, but the bed was an old camp bed, and the mattress was a foam one like the old one at Mum and Dad's - it had certainly seen better days.  You lay down on it and sunk into the middle, the sides folding up and enclosing you in like a strange cocoon. I tried to sleep, but I woke up at 3am in absolute agony, so I packed up my sheets and went into the living room, lying down on the sofa. We'd been told that there was only one other guest at the motel, a long term resident, who would be no bother. So what was he doing yelling out at the top of his lungs at 3am in the morning? Then he started walking up and down the corridor outside, stomp, stomp, stomp - for no apparent reason.  It was actually pretty scary.  Suffice to say I didn't get much sleep that night...