cold, until our eyelashes froze and we stopped blinking.
It was time to head back.
While the Finnish Lapland shows off its uncontested
position as a top Arctic destination in Scandinavia, there
is another major draw to this place that you would sooner
or later surrender to. Once I got here, a ski lesson was as
unavoidable as the wild berries in Lappish cuisine. In the
city centre and on either side of the main street, rental
companies had put up signages indicating that every size
of ski was available, coupled with lessons for beginners.
I relented. At this point in my life, the word ‘adventure’
fastened itself rather tightly to my ski boots as I dug
into my skinny energy reserve to accept the cold, hard
truth: If you are from a tropical country, be prepared for
embarrassment. Men, women, the elderly, and children as
young as five, even the neighbour’s dog, are aces at skiing,
except you. So, I remained contended with being able to
walk—one step at a time—from my rental store called Zero
Point, to a tiny red flag hoisted some 40 feet away. My ankles
became impossibly immobile, and in a first, I catalogued my
calf muscles as a crucial part of the body.
Ski lessons can teach you a lot about tenacity, especially
when your tutor looks like she’s floating on snow. Two
hours in, to her repeated instructions of, “Just bend a little
and glide,” I had salvaged around 10 mediocre moves, two
face-first falls, and a painful one on my knees.
Little did I know then, that something much larger
would overpower the emotion I had hitherto felt on this
trip. The following morning—the scheduled day for a
Northern Lights excursion—I woke up with a tingle at my
nape. It felt as if everything I had done in Finland so far
was only a prologue to the story still waiting to be written.
At 5.30pm, I arrived at Aurora Sky Restaurant for dinner,
the signature Lappish offering at the Levin Iglut hotel.
This is one of the few luxury igloo hotels in Lapland that
capitalise on the Northern Lights experience by providing
a cosy base for witnessing the phenomenon. Each igloo
is an independent one-bedroom suite that comes with aAurora Borealis rises over the
glass igloos in Finland.
ROBERTHARDING/ALAMY. OPPOSITE: RAFAEL PÉREZ