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Clare
Clare

Day 3: Saariselkä

We'd just finished eating dinner last night when I got a notification from an app on my phone to tell me that the northern lights were visible outside. These notifications don't always translate into actually being able to see something once you step outside, but as it was the first notification of the holiday I decided to put all my warm-weather clothes on and see whether there was anything worth looking at. It turned out there was!

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As ever, the northern lights look a much more intense shade of green in the photos than they did in reality, but I could make them out in the sky with my eyes even if I couldn't see them as quite these colours.

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I sent Tim a picture and he decided it was worth him putting on all his gear to come outside too :)

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It's admittedly not ideal trying to look at the northern lights outside the apartment we're staying in because there's quite a lot of artificial light coming from the cabins and nearby street lights. You can see that in some of these photos.

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We'd probably have been able to see them a lot more clearly if we were in the middle of nowhere, but it was still really cool.

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The position and strength of the lights in the sky kept changing. Tim took some pictures of me and we realised there was even some pink/purple in the lights behind me.

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We definitely couldn't see all these colours with the naked eye but the photos have turned out pretty well :)  This is just with the pre-set "night" mode on my Samsung phone.

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It was definitely a fun end to our first day in Lapland. And made all the travelling on Saturday feel worthwhile!

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The weather forecast had said that Monday was going to be colder than Sunday, and when we stepped outside again this morning we could definitely feel that there had been a drop in the temperature.

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The thermometer outside the apartment suggested that the temperature was around minus 15.

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As we walked down the road into the centre of the village I was pleased to see that some sort of pavement-clearing machine had been out since yesterday afternoon and had flattened down the snow on the pavements. That meant it didn't feel as slippery and icy everywhere as it had yesterday.

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We made our way through the village towards the entrance to the Urho Kekkonen national park, which is marked by this rather large teepee.

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The plan for today was to walk on a fairly straightforward trail called the Aurorapolku, which we've done many times in the past.  We noted a big change from last year as we set off though; the first part of the trail was barred off by these rather brightly coloured barriers.

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I'm not 100% sure but I suspect it may be to stop people tobogganing on the footpath. When we were here last year there was quite a crowd of tourists sledging down this fairly steep part of the path, which made it difficult to walk on.

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My suspicions were confirmed further when we came across a "no tobogganing" sign further along the route.

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The rest of the scenery in the national park looked reassuringly familiar.

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The sky was much clearer today than it had been yesterday and we could see tinges of sunrise in it as we walked.

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And even if there wasn't quite as much snow here as there had been last year, there was still plenty!

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The trail leads down, across a small stream and then upwards on the other side of a small valley, from where you can see back across to the big hotel buildings in Saariselkä.

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The trail is lit up at night with discreet lights that face downwards, so you can come and walk along here in the dark while searching for the aurora.

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It was still a little bit icy underfoot in places though, so I'm not sure I'd fancy doing it in the dark at the moment!

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As we walked we could see up to the top of Kaunispää hill, which we might attempt the trail up tomorrow.

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I also saw some pawprints in the snow which looked like they might have come from something like the snow hare I spotted yesterday!

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The walking trail is supposed to be a loop but somehow we took a slightly wrong turn and ended up returning towards Saariselkä a different way.

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It didn't matter - it was still very pretty everywhere :) 

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And I found at least one tree which had accumulated a lot of snow!

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The sky looked like it was probably switching from sunrise to sunset as we made our way back across the little stream.

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As we then walked on a path alongside a road, we realised we weren't very far away from our apartment.

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We'd emerged in the centre of town, next to Saariselkä's church.

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As we walked back through the village towards the supermarket to pick up some more supplies, we had a fantastic view of the setting sun.

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Time to go back to the apartment and warm up!




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