I went looking for the Northern Lights for the eleventh time

One thing that’s on everyone’s bucket list for a trip to Iceland or Lapland is seeing the Northern Lights. The magic of the dance of the heavens, the supernatural displayed in front of our eyes… who wouldn’t want to see that? Let me break that bubble for you. The Northern Lights are extremely capricious; they come out when they want to and no sooner. You have to have clear dark night skies – they can be wiped out by the full moon and hidden by clouds and no matter how perfect the conditions, no matter how clear, crisp and cold – perfect Northern Lights conditions – you’re still at the mercy of the solar wind’s whims. To be put it another way, I’ve now been on eleven Northern Lights hunts and seen something worth seeing on three of them. That’s eight out of eleven nights, nearly 73% of my attempts, standing out in the cold looking at an unrelenting black sky while my feet freeze off.

Me in a long-tailed hat almost silhouetted against a fjord and snowy mountains and a sky that's not quite as black as an ideal Northern Lights sky could be. — Because it happens in near-absolute darkness, there are very few photos of me waiting for the Northern Lights to not show up. Even in this one, if you look carefully, you can see actual Northern Lights faintly over the mountains.

Because I’ve been there and seen nothing so many times, I’m well aware, more than probably anyone except Northern Lights tour guides, of how low the chances are. I will shout to the rooftops about how you should book a “Northern Lights and….” tour. I’ve done Northern Lights and snowshoeing. Northern Lights and trip to Fontana geothermal pool. Northern Lights and sausages in a hut on top of a mountain. You go home feeling like you’ve done something and had a good time even if you didn’t see the elusive lights in the sky. So for this trip to Iceland, I booked the Fontana tour. I’ve done it twice before, not seen anything but had a lovely evening in the hot baths in the dark without the hundreds of other tourists in there. Bliss. Unfortunately, it was cancelled several days in advance “for operational reasons”. Even more unfortunately, this was the second time I’ve booked this tour in under two years and not gone on it through no fault of my own. My “rise and fall of tourism in Iceland” post from 2023 was inspired by RE’s failure to pick me up from my designated bus stop in time for me to get on the bus. That’s twice I’ve gone to Reykjavik in winter in less than two years with plans to do this tour and Reykjavik Excursions have prevented me going. I mentioned in my last post that I don’t trust RE any further than I can throw them – this, and leaving the famous five behind on the cave tour are why. They’re just too big to care about their tourists as individuals – who cares if we annoy one, there’ll always be another 10,000 in tomorrow.

Laugarvatn Fontana by night, lights reflecting on water and handrails silhouetted against a black sky.

So instead, I found a minibus tour on the one clear night of the entire week I was in Iceland, where I went to look for the Lights. The big tour companies send out fleets of 60-seater coaches, which didn’t appeal. The second time I looked for the Northern Lights was in Iceland and there were eight coaches in convoy, 500-odd tourists, all descending on the same campsite in western Iceland. I did not fancy being one of a crowd of 500 ever again, so I went for the minibus. The big coach tours are the cheapest option but I’m willing to throw a little bit of money at a minibus to be one of 25 instead.

Inside a minibus at night, lit by bright blue tube lights.

The tour guides know good dark spots where they can park a minibus, entertain tourists and where they might see the Northern Lights. On my first trip in Iceland we went to a fuel stop somewhere along the South Coast, for the second to that campsite and the other two I’ve previously done have been random spots of countryside on the way back from the Golden Circle region. This time, much to my surprise, we headed south-east out of the city, out to the Reykjanes peninsula. As well as having local knowledge, the tour guides have apps which tell them where the patches of clear sky are and where you might see something and this was tonight’s pick. We went out to Hafnarfjörður, the next town along from Reykjavik, out to the Íshestar stables and then further up the valley, to a large car park alongside a couple of country cottages. I’m sure the occupants were delighted when two minibuses and a full-sized coach turned up.

A blurry picture of a snowy scene. Even more blurry are people and car lights in the bottom corner.

We piled out, all excited. It had been cloudy all week and now it was clear. I personally don’t think it was really dark enough there, not with the orange glow of Hafnarfjörður on the horizon. You have to let your eyes adjust to the darkness a bit. Often, if there are Northern Lights to see, you won’t see much with your eyes but your camera will pick something up. I’ve heard many people disappointed that although they got great photos, they didn’t really see much themselves. I had an old camera that only just works that has my beloved Starry Skies setting, ideal for Northern Lights, and I took several long-exposure photos with that. Nothing. The guide from the other minibus had a tripod and a good camera and enough experience to use the manual settings rather than the presets and he wasn’t getting anything either. That’s normal. You get used to just standing and waiting and hoping.

A long-exposure photo (taken in my hand rather than on a tripod) of the moon and some white wisps that might be clouds or might be really faint Northern Lights invisible to the naked eye.

But gradually everyone started drifting back to the bus. It was cold. I’d come prepared – I have a battery-powered heated coat, I had my down jacket underneath and I even had a fleece skirt which is a piece of magic that keeps your legs warm even if you’ve got leggings and lined waterproof hiking trousers on underneath it. The one thing I hadn’t brought with me was my pair of battery-powered heated insoles. You do have to wear the battery packs strapped around your ankle with wires coming out the back of your boots and they look ludicrous but they keep your toes warm.

A couple of the bonuses of choosing the minibus tour over the coach invasion is that you get hot chocolate and the guide will take your photo with the Lights. Within half an hour, most of us had retreated to the bus. Someone would shriek if anything interested happened and at least it was above freezing inside. The guide got out, went round the back of the bus and made a clatter before poking his head back in to announce that the hot chocolate was ready. So we all got out and went outside again.

We drank the hot chocolate dry. There was enough there for two cups each, plus chocolate bars. Still no Lights though. Trying to be positive and sociable, I pointed out to nearby people that “at least it’s a good night for stargazing – I can see three planets from here”, which some of them were quite impressed by. I can now recognise the big light in the sky that is Jupiter and I can generally pick out Mars which is genuinely reddish but I did have to use my app to locate Saturn, low and much dimmer over Hafnarfjörður. But I can see all three of those planets on my daily walk from my own front door in the winter months, so while they might be a novelty to people who don’t have a stargazing app, they’re not really a substitute for green streaks across the sky.

Green streaks across the sky seen from so low down that blades of grass half-block them. — Sorry, these are from January 2013.

At about half past eleven, our guide announced that there was nothing on the app and we were going to call it a night. We moved, I kid you not, about five yards before the bus stopped again and the guide spent at least twenty minutes in consultation with the guide from the other minibus while we all sat there wishing he’d make up his mind one way or the other. According to the other guide’s app, and according to one of the tourists on our bus’s app, the Northern Lights were likely to make an appearance in the next few minutes. Took twenty minutes to decide this. So we all jumped off the bus again…. and as you might guess from the lack of Northern Lights photos in this post’s featured image – no Lights!

The lights of downtown Reykjavik by night, with no Northern Lights. — This was an evening I spent wandering downtown Reykjavik, where it’s far too bright to see Northern Lights anyway, back in February 2023.

We dropped about half the bus off somewhere out to the east of downtown Reykjavik and then drove on, quite mysteriously, to a little industrial area on the edge of the bay, next to the company’s depot. Not because the driver had forgotten he still had ten or fifteen people on board but because this is the darkest part of the city itself and we were taking one more opportunity to see if the Lights were going to cooperate. No, they did not. The fact that I know my chances are less than 30% did not make the disappointment or frustration any less. It is frustrating to stand out in the cold and lose feeling in your feet and your fingers for nothing and get home in the early hours of the morning tired and grumpy for nothing.

The only bright point is that, at least in Iceland, if you don’t see anything on your Northern Lights tour, you can rebook. It was my last night in Iceland so booking again for later in the week wasn’t possible but you can rebook for any time in the next two or three years. You used to get a voucher and now it’s on you to send an email. I was hoping for something more concrete than “Uh, yeah, uh, I didn’t see the Northern Lights two years ago so I wanna go out tomorrow?”, something more like “here’s my rebooking voucher, I would like to rebook for this date” so I emailed and asked and was told “yep, this email will serve as your confirmation”, so it’s worth doing that as soon as possible so you’ve got the evidence. I suspect this scheme works on the principle of tourists forgetting about it or not being able to come back or not being able to prove what they didn’t see. I also heard that you only get one more chance but it does seem that for every evening you don’t see anything, you just do the same thing with your new booking and if you’re in Iceland long enough, or keep coming back enough times, then you pay once and just keep trying and trying until you’re successful.