Letters from 68 degrees, Kiruna

The end of the ‘polar night’ was officially a few days ago, but it’s hard to know exactly because if there’s a hill in the way you won’t see the sun above the horizon. Then there have been many days of heavy snow and clouds, so no chance of seeing the horizon at all. Today for the first time the clouds had cleared and we actually saw the sun. You don’t realise how much you’ve missed it until it comes back. I got a lift like on a warm spring day, a feeling that life had just become a lot fuller and happier.

The sun was around for maybe an hour today, and then we were back to the winter twilight. For the last month twilight has felt quite light, but now we’ve seen the real thing twilight suddenly feels rather dark.

Coming at the same time as the reappearance of the sun are the more reliably cold temperatures of winter. December was unusually warm, with the temperatures often hovering around zero and bringing the threat of melting snow layers and then ice. The higher temperatures also mean higher humidity, and lots and lots of snow. I’ve never seen so much snow. How can I indicate just how much snow there is? I’ve droned on long enough about the hours spent shovelling, and as the snow increased I ran out of adjectives to describe the increasing amounts of snow and time spent dealing with it.

It struck us yesterday that the route down to our car now looks like the entrance to a cavern. The sides of the driveway are sharply piled up with snow walls, as if the driveway has been carved deep into the snow. There is so much snow frozen to the birch trees that their branches are pulled down by the weight so they hang almost vertically.

Last night we were out looking for the aurora. There had been one of the strongest predictions of a good show we’ve ever seen, and the colder temperatures meant clear skies. An event on the sun’s surface was predicted to result in solar storming at a level that might even be seen in the UK. We had good warning for it – at least a day ahead – and when reports from Colorado said the storming had been delayed we cheered, because that meant it would coincide with the darkest hours here.

I had instructed our guests to look at the Kiruna sky camera, which wasn’t working, so we were all relying on the magnetometer graph to indicate when the show would begin. At about 21.00 hrs we were all in the hallway putting on our boots because the coloured lines on the magnetometer had just started to leap about. We got ourselves out as fast as possible – Rolf and I heading for a new spot we wanted to try in a forest area out of town.

We were sitting in the car at the end of a narrow dark track, waiting. The sky was really clear – it hadn’t been like this for weeks. Masses of stars visible, and cold temperatures (minus 17). But no sign of the northern lights. That can happen – they do something, then disappear, and then come back later. We were in no hurry. At that temperature you have to turn the car engine on now and again to warm it up, and when you do that all the lights come on and you lose your night vision. We tried to sit in the dark as much as possible. Looking out at the snow-heavy birches under the stars was a calm experience, just waiting. Sometimes I got out the car to have a better look at the sky. Fantastic. Then I saw a falling star – large and near the horizon, like a glittering boulder hurled up out of the forest by a troll.

The northern lights didn’t appear. Colorado’s space research centre did its best, but the aurora remain elusive, unpredictable. We had great time though, just waiting.

You can take your country with you, to some extent (in my case, keep Marmite in the cupboard and listen to ‘The Archers’) but at some point you have to admit that the world outside is humming a different tune, however feint. Things you took for granted can look surprisingly odd, and things you never even thought of before become an important part of your life. It’s a rug being pulled out from under your feet. Uncomfortable sometimes (prejudices are so comforting) but life-enriching.

There’s an additional thing about running a bed and breakfast. Just as you begin to get used to the Canadian approach to Kiruna, you need to find room for the Singaporean way of seeing it. We try to adapt, remember not to assume anything, but we often get it wrong.

In the early days of running the be and b we apologised a lot to Swiss guests about the landscape around Kiruna, assuming they’d come here by accident not knowing our ‘mountains’ are rather less impressive than theirs. Mountains are matter of fact for the Swiss – but what does impress them, we’ve learnt, is open landscape and not many people – basically, the absence of the aprés ski set – which they find here in abundance. So no need for apologies, as it turns out.

Some people find Kiruna alarmingly bigger than they’d expected – they’re looking for that log cabin in the snow, wolves howling at the door and northern lights dancing across the sky. Others are surprised and disappointed to find the whole places shuts on a Sunday and you can’t find a decent cappuccino any day of the week. It’s hard to know which it is, when you first meet someone.

All these differences are good, I decided. The danger comes when we expect everyone to have the same assumptions as ourselves, seeing only what is already familiar – what we call ‘the garden shed’ approach to travel. We once sat in the cafe in Jukkasjärvi listening to some English people have a very long conversation about their garden sheds. They’d been whisked up here to the ice hotel, barely had time to put on the gear and take a walk, and top of their agenda was not a world of difference (minus temperatures, a frozen river, reindeer herding culture, long hours of darkness, explorers who came here thinking it was the end of the world, etc) but the world they’d brought with them. They needed longer, to see the differences.

Some differences are much harder to see. Arriving suddenly there can be an air of the playground about some visitors’ approach to their holiday. As if Kiruna is a giant theme park which has laid on snow and ice and fast snow scooters purely for their entertainment. One can forgive people feeling like this, since this is sometimes how it’s presented. It’s one fun activity after another, not rooted in any reality, and the fairground manager has arranged it all to look a bit challenging and scary just to increase the excitement, just like they would back home.

Meanwhile, the culture in this neck of the woods is that you have respect for the wilderness and learn to take responsibility for yourself. Not much sign of ‘health and safety’ regulations here. Tour operators give visitors what they want (fun and thrills) but they haven’t made it all easy for them. This mismatch can result in visitors feeling hard done by (we had to harness the sled dogs ourselves!), and alarmed. Some discover, too late, that snow scooters aren’t a toy.

I’m rather charmed that the space research site in Colorado (NOAA), that provides up to date reports of space weather and aurora, is paid for by the US government. It tells us what’s going on out in space and when it’s good to look for the northern lights. Their objective is to warn scientists and air traffic controllers of possible interference to radio communication. When they forecast solar storming, NOAA expresses this as ‘a threat of significant activity’. What’s a threat to some may be a gift to others.