Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

We’re not experienced hoteliers. We’re in Kiruna because we like it, and we needed to find a way to make a life here. When we set up the b & b in the spring we had no idea how it would go. There are no bed and breakfasts in Kiruna – just hotels and hostels – and the concept of a b & b isn’t so well known.

After a couple of months and a slow trickle of guests we discovered there were other sides to this experience than the ones we were expecting. Yes it was good to have paying guests, and we learnt how to improve our systems so we were a bit more efficient getting rooms ready, washing and ironing, and managing the booking and administration. We made some mistakes. Fortunately we had some very understanding guests when things went wrong (a double booking, for instance, was a low point…).

But more than we’d expected, we’ve really enjoyed meeting the people who have come to stay. They don’t, of course, all share our particular interests, but it’s been interesting learning about what they do and don’t find exciting here. Some people come before a tour – walking, sled dogs – and then come back afterwards, and we hear where they went, what it was like, see the photos. Other people come here and don’t have any plans – they just go out and play in the snow and look at the sky.

It’s been difficult to keep our own lives going during all this – our focus has been so much on the b & b. We never thought just two rooms – a maximum of five guests – would be so tiring. We’re still having to learn how to keep our lives in balance with it all. There’s a tendency to focus on guests having a good time, and then wonder why we never go out ourselves. You can’t split yourself into too many directions, and running a b & b in your own home means you can’t, and shouldn’t want to ‘get away’ from the work.

At the moment we’re having to face the fact that we can’t meet absolutely everyone’s needs. When we started we were happy to help people with anything. We still want to be like this, but inevitably some people began thinking all our ‘extras’ were their right, and making demands on us which we couldn’t live up to. We also had our first malicious review. Another low point… discovering you can be anonymously slandered on Trip Advisor.

Our favourite moment since we opened must be when very late one night a group of Russians let themselves in to our hallway (the door was unlocked) and we heard them speaking in Russian while we were half asleep. They spoke no English and we no Russian, but somehow we worked out that they needed rooms for the night, and there was much hilarity as they sat on the sofa and watched us making beds and trying to find out what they wanted for breakfast. Then at breakfast, one of the party – later revealing herself as a concert pianist – serenaded us on the keyboard with an ABBA medley.

It isn’t just the northern lights that are magical up here. The sky has a clear ethereal blue colour. It always makes me think of watercolours, pale translucent colours that blend into the whiteness of the landscape. The colours of midwinter are understated. At first you think it is monochrome, but then you begin to notice delicate shades of blue and pink in the landscape.

December is officially a month of no daylight at all, but it is quite light in the middle of the day for a couple of hours, even in midwinter, because the twilight is bright. It is a luminous uplighting, lighter than experienced further south because of the flat top of the earth. It is a lovely soft bluish light.

When the sun begins to return it throws up pink and orange spots on the horizon and colours the skies pink for hours. Dawn and dusk last a very long time. When we first came here, expecting to hate the dark months of winter, we just sat all day staring out of the window, gawping at the skies. When the sun returns it just peeps over the horizon and then sinks not far from where it came up, all in the southern sky. Then within a few days it is visible for a couple of hours, lazily rolling along the horizon. As it begins to be fully visible the sky is flooded with colour, which – if you have been here for the darker months – can come as a bit of a shock to the system. Suddenly the brain is stimulated by deep shades of colour.

In the cold winter months effects in the sky created by the sun are exaggerated and enhanced by ice crystals in the air, creating huge haloes, ‘sun dogs’, light ‘pillars’, and yellow and orange candle shapes. The clouds that shoot over the sky can be ‘nacreous’ or ‘mother of pearl’ clouds – waving and colourful reflecting the winds of the stratosphere.

The light rushes back here at such a speed so that by the end of May there is daylight 24 hours a day. The midnight sun is well documented, and – strangely – isn’t so much to see, once you’ve seen it. It looks the same at ‘night’ as it does in the ‘daytime’, the variety and colour has gone, and there is no dawn or dusk twilight. But it it an experience to live in so much light. Light is stimulating, and sleep isn’t so easy, but you do get used to it. It’s addictive – it feels really bad the first day you are aware there is twilight again.

See some of the light in the sky at:

www.gallery.68degrees.se

There’s a good website that describes the variety of effects that can be seen up here.

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/

Will I see the northern lights?

Everyone wants to know, even if they don’t ask. We of course hope that people who come here will see them, but we know that a high proportion of them won’t. The odds against are high.

First, the bad news

Many people arrive here excited by images of spectacular pink and green swirls over the skies of northern Sweden. If we have to disappoint them and tell them that recently no lights have been visible in the area – because there has been no solar or geomagnetic activity – they are insistent there must have been – they’ve seen them. At least on the web. But the date of the photo on the web is often the ‘photo upload’ date, not the date the lights were seen.

There’s no getting away from the fact that in a world where there seem to be so many tools at hand to control things around us, the northern lights are still unpredictable and elusive. Space weather forecasts will tell you about sun or geomagnetic activity, so you can sometimes get a rough idea of a period of a day or two when there is a higher chance. But, then, that ‘day or two’ can shift by a day, and – damn! – you’ve already caught the flight home.

But supposing the forecast holds, and there’s a high chance of activity on the day you are here?… Good, you’ve got through the first hurdle. The next hurdle, however, is when exactly in the 24 hours the activity is going to happen. You’re here, you’re on the look-out, but the lights may come and go very quickly so if you aren’t looking up at the sky at the right time when they appear you might be having a shower, eating your meal, picking your nose and reading old magazines.

But you’re determined – you will be outside, concentrating, focussed. But there’s another hurdle; it’s minus 18 degrees and after a while determination isn’t enough. If you’re in town, where you can come indoors to warm up in between watching sessions, then the lights will also be harder to see when they first appear. If you’re out of town and more in the dark, then the length of time you can watch and wait is shorter. A car helps, but the headlights of Swedish cars come on automatically with the engine, so you will have to sit in the car waiting with the heating off. Good luck.

But suppose you are in luck – you are in the right place, at the right time, with the right clothes on, and the lights appear! Hurrah! But unfortunately you can’t see them because the sky – clear for the last four hours – has now clouded over and remains that way for the rest of the night, or at least until 4am, by which time you have long since succumbed to sleep.

There has to be a way around this, you reason. There must be people who can help. And there are plenty of people out there really keen to help you. But has there ever been such a clear tourist anachronism as a ‘Northern Lights Tour’? Unless they’re a mixture of Santa/Richard Branson (can take you above any clouds) and God (know exactly when the lights will appear) this kind of tour is like offering ‘A Sunny Day in Bournemouth’, only much much less likely.

These tours are based on two false ideas: that the lights can be predicted to be seen at certain times, and that the lights can be seen in certain places and not others. I think we’ve covered the first one. The second one is trickier. The only part of that one that is true is that it is easier to see them if it is darker. So no question, if they happen to appear when you are out on your dog-sled tour on a frozen lake with no artificial light, bingo! But what’s the chance of that? We’ve had people stay with us who have walked back to a particular spot in Kiruna, because someone else saw the lights there. It doesn’t work like that. In fact the whole of the north of the globe gets them, or not, with a variation only on which side of the globe you are, and whether it is dark there or not.

There’s an idea that one can chase the northern lights. Again, this is only partly true. The lights appear in the sky that night, at a certain latitude, or not – it won’t matter if you are in Tromsö or Kiruna. But what will matter is if it is cloudy – then you can ‘chase’ the clearer weather, and so see the lights. Sometimes the lights appear only in one direction, so you might have a better chance of seeing them if there isn’t a mountain or town in the way of your view. But that direction is usually north, so chasing isn’t usually necessary – you should just begin in the right place. And being higher up doesn’t help either..

So what’s the good news?

The good news is that although a lot of people who come here don’t see the northern lights, most of them nonetheless go home feeling ok about this. Surprised? So were they.

For all this talk about northern lights – and they are wonderful when they appear – there are other kinds of lights up here that we think are rather overlooked. Twilight is beautiful – the flat top of the earth means that dusk and dawn are long. Then there are all the other effects in the sky caused by ice crystals, the angle of the sun shining upwards, the effect of the nearby mountains on the clouds – it can be magical, even without the northern lights. (Read the entry – ‘Twilight and other magic light’).