Postcard of the Week: The Northern Lights in Iceland
I sincerely apologise for not extolling the virtues of Iceland on this blog sooner! It’s been a whole three months since my trip to Iceland and there is simply so much to write that I haven’t known where to begin! I’ll start with this postcard in the meantime. This is Hotel Rangá, in the south of this snowy, white country, located on the banks of a beautiful little river in the absolute middle of nowhere. Usually this location would be an utter no-no in my book. Why stay in a hotel that’s an hour’s drive to any sights? Well, Hotel Rangá’s location is actually its main appeal, as it’s far from the light pollution of cities. All the better for seeing the Northern Lights with! It claims to be the best place in Iceland to see the Aurora Borealis and it has a dedicated star-gazing hut and wooden sunbeds outdoors to recline on while watching this hypnotic light display. Apparently it’s also the most luxurious hotel in all of Iceland so we completely lucked out in staying there!
The Northern Lights however are by no means guaranteed to make an appearance, but obviously that’s what everyone is hoping for… We spent 4 anxious nights at Hotel Rangáand only on the final night did we see these beautiful green apparitions we’d been hoping for. To be perfectly honest, it was more a sense of relief to have seen them than pleasure in seeing them! Oh the effects of the modern-day obsession with bucket lists…
Below is a photo of the Northern Lights we saw, which I still found very impressive! Green is the most common colour to see, with pink and purple being far rarer. The rest of the holiday actually beat seeing the Northern Lights, and I have plenty more to write about Iceland. I was travelling with 12 others, family and family friends, and it was honestly one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. Perhaps because I didn’t know what to expect? In any case, Iceland is getting seriously popular with travellers so keep any eye out for my blog posts about Iceland.
Cool you got to see it. My experience was much like yours.
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Very nice pic. We saw the aurora by accident! We were there in February for 3 nights. I even messed up booking our trip. I realized if I never messed up booking we would have missed it. We are dying to go back to Iceland. At first we thought it was a funny long whitish cloud that kept getting brighter.
http://jebusmewsandandrea.com/2015/03/10/an-accidental-aurora/#more-1934
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What luck! We were anxiously waiting every night!
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Wow!!
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