Lapland and Rovaniemi, Santa's Hometown

The cold doesn't scare us; the idea of visiting Santa's village, and the wish to be pulled through snow-covered woods by a sled of howling dogs, pushes us to look online for a cheap way to make a trip that seems a little expensive. First we look for the flight and luckily we can reach Helsinki with a low-cost airline, while from Helsinki to Rovaniemi we have to fly Finnair but we manage to keep the cost under 200 euros each. Once in Rovaniemi, two hours of coach await us because we fully intend not to miss the Northern Lights show, and since we read that the further north you go the more likely you are to see it, we head up to Luosto. The coach taking us north seems to have ice-proof snow tyres. It races along the completely snow-covered road at 120 an hour as if nothing were happening... I'm dying of fear but of course I'm distracted by the enchantment of the landscape.

We arrive in Luosto and what strikes us most is the total silence: everything seems still and buried in snow, you see nothing but white; the light lasts very few hours (about 4 a day) but the Lapps are organised and the ski slopes are all lit until late evening. The next morning we go on a snowmobile excursion to see the amethyst mines and have lunch in a kota where a Lapland woman serves us an exquisite, piping hot and therefore very welcome salmon soup; then on the way back we have a nice sauna in our wooden apartment found online.

The next day we fulfil our wish to be pulled through the woods, among reindeer and snow, by a very comfortable dog-drawn sled, not knowing that at night we'd have the surprise of being dazzled by a spectacle that will stay in our minds for a lifetime: the Northern Lights, something so magnificent that I can't find the exact words to describe it, it's just something to see... and we know we've had a great privilege. All that's left is to return to Rovaniemi and visit the famous Santa Claus Village which, as we suspected, is quite touristy, but we're happy to have immortalised ourselves with our feet on the Arctic Circle. We head back to base happy that all our friends have seen us indirectly online on the Rovaniemi city-centre webcam.