Ep. 05 | Four Hours of Daylight: Saunas, Lonkero, and Waiting for the Sky to Open

In Finnish Lapland, the extremes of the seasons bring two fascinating phenomena: the Midnight Sun and the Polar Night (Kaamos). During the summer, the sun never dips below the horizon; in the depth of winter, it refuses to rise at all.

When I visited Saariselkä in late November, the Polar Night was still about two weeks away. The sun barely peeked above the horizon around 10:00 AM and slipped back down before 2:00 PM. With less than four hours of true daylight, our 24-hour cycle left us with more than twelve waking hours draped in complete darkness.

Mornings in Saariselkä start unhurriedly. The primary reason is simple: most visitors stay up late into the early morning hours chasing the aurora borealis. But with less than four hours of precious sunlight ahead, I refused to let the day slip away. I woke up at 7:30 AM for breakfast and stepped out of the hotel around 9:30 AM.

Although official sunrise wasn’t until nearly 10:00 AM, the Arctic morning dusk rolls in early. By 9:30, the sky was already bright with a soft, silvery twilight. The walk down the mountain to the village takes about thirty minutes. Calling it a “downtown” might be a stretch—it is essentially just a couple of souvenir boutiques and a local supermarket.

Back when I lived in Canada, winter daylight still lasted a generous eight hours, with the sun setting around 5:00 PM. Around 4:30 PM, when classes and offices wrapped up, the grocery store near campus would pack full of students and faculty. Everyone had the exact same mission: stocking up on alcohol. When you live in a rural town where the night stretches on forever—far removed from the buzzing nightlife of a metropolis like Seoul—the day almost naturally concludes with a drink.

Sure enough, I walked out of Saariselkä’s K-Market with both arms full: local Finnish beer, cans of grapefruit Long Drink (Lonkero), and a bottle of wine. The night before, unable to go shopping, we had raided the hotel mini-bar at a painful premium. Tonight, we came prepared.

With grocery bags and keepsakes in hand, I called a local taxi. While walking downhill from our mountaintop hotel was an easy morning stroll, hiking back up in deep snow with heavy bags was entirely out of the question.

By the time we got back to the hotel, it was already noon—leaving barely two hours before sunset. We headed right back out toward the restaurant perched at the peak of the ski fell. Along the way, we paused at the wooden Saariselkä landmark to take photos and lay down in the fresh snow to make snow angels.

The gift shop up at the summit had a distinctly authentic, local feel compared to the shops down in the village. After browsing, we stepped into the summit restaurant to order the dish our hotel shuttle driver from the previous night had insisted was “the best salmon soup in the world.”

Taking that first spoonful, I understood immediately why he was so confident. Having tasted salmon soup (lohikeitto) across several towns before and after this stop, this one remained the undisputed favorite of the entire trip.

We returned to the room just as the sky began to dim again. After walking out in the biting Arctic cold for hours, nothing sounded better than heat. We spent a full hour soaking in the dry heat of our private Finnish sauna, and by the time we stepped out of the shower, night had fully blanketed the fell.

I cracked open an ice-cold can of grapefruit Long Drink and drank it down in deep gulps. People always warn you never to enter a sauna after drinking alcohol, but I had never heard anyone forbid drinking right after stepping out of one. Dehydrated and craving liquids after sweating, my body seemed to absorb the refreshing, crisp alcohol instantly.

We opened a second can and spread out the board games we had brought from home. By 5:00 PM, after a couple of rounds, hunger set in. We pulled out the instant rice and packs of ramyeon from our luggage. Knowing that many international borders restrict meat-based soup powders, I had picked up vegetarian-friendly instant noodles for this trip. Meat base or not, hot spicy ramyeon in sub-zero Arctic weather is always undefeated. We paired it with canned kimchi and furikake, finishing every last drop before topping off the meal with Finnish xylitol gum.

By 6:30 PM, the dishes were done and tea was brewed. It was still too early for the northern lights, so we turned on Netflix and queued up Emily in Paris. My travel companion hadn’t seen it yet, and since Paris was the next major leg of our itinerary, it felt like the perfect mood-setter.

At 8:30 PM, we bundled up in our heaviest winter layers for the evening safari. Around 9:00 PM, we boarded a timber sled hitched to a snowmobile and rode into the wilderness toward a traditional Sámi goahti. We gathered around a roaring open fire, boiled water for hot cocoa, and chatted with the guide and fellow travelers. Unfortunately, thick cloud cover blocked out the sky, and the aurora stayed hidden. After a few rounds of hopping out to push our snowmobile through the powder, we returned to the hotel past 11:00 PM. Even after the campfire, the lingering chill called for one more sauna session to warm up our bones.

By midnight, the combination of a packed day and lingering jet lag started pulling heavily at my eyelids. Every weather report and aurora forecast indicated that the clouds were unlikely to part, yet the slim hope of catching a sudden clearing made it impossible to sleep easily. I kept watch by the window until 2:30 AM, but the sky remained blanketed in gray.

Four days in Saariselkä, and this was night two. Three nights deep in Lapland without an aurora sighting. Whispering a quiet wish that the Arctic sky would grant us at least one clear window before we left, I finally drifted off to sleep well past 2:30 AM.