I feel certain that when I am gasping my final breath,
the Northern Lights will be the defining travel experience of my life.
I traveled to northernmost Finland in December
in search of the notoriously elusive Northern Lights.
I saw them in a plane.
The hot tub at the back of this lodge was full of English models
splashing around in bikinis.
I arrived at the wilderness lodge that would be my home for the week
just before midnight to be met in reception by Ida, a local girl.
But as we stepped outside, she stopped in her tracks
and exclaimed, "The Northern Lights, they must like you."
The pilot said, "Good news. We can see them up ahead."
And he turned all the lights off inside the cabin
so it was completely pitch black. So we had amazing visibility.
The whole sky was lit up with these wonderful fluid green lights
which kept transforming and changing shapes.
There was curtain after curtain of light, and it was lime green but also flickers of pink.
We could see this kind of glow up ahead of us,
like this sort of kind of eerie, mystical glow from some distance away.
Then after about five minutes, the sky went black
and out of the darkness came what looked like a giant serpent.
It stretched across the sky before coiling one end into a perfect spiral.
Film and photographs of the Northern Lights don't really give you a feel
for what it's going to be like when you experience them.
They are captivating, humbling, strangely spiritual, and genuinely soul stirring.
And it does give you a real sense of perspective
of kind of your own existence and scale of the whole universe.
I didn't realize it could be quite so spectacular
and so different and so otherworldly.
September, October, and March around the autumn and spring equinox
are statistically the best times to see the lights.
Northern Finland is a very good bet. It's quite easy to get to in winter.
If you're flying in and out of somewhere like Iceland,
reserve yourself a good window seat.
Maybe mention to the cabin crew that you're interested in seeing them,
and they'll be able to advise, for example, whether visibility is good that night.
You really need to have a clear sky,
cold temperatures, dark nights. There are a lot of things which have to come together
before you get a really fantastic display.
Take thermal gear. It's incredibly cold out there.
The night that I saw them it was bone numbing minus 25 degrees.
Keep checking outside. >> Take a good camera if you want to try and capture the lights.
There's a very good chance if you go for three or four nights
in winter north of the Arctic Circle that you will see something.