An 8-day tailor-made journey from Helsinki to Finnish Lapland by overnight train through the Arctic Circle. Northern Lights viewing, snowmobile safaris and glass-fronted suites facing north.
8 days
|From £5,940 pp
An 8-day tailor-made journey from Helsinki to Finnish Lapland by overnight train through the Arctic Circle. Northern Lights viewing, snowmobile safaris and glass-fronted suites facing north.
Helsinki to Finnish Lapland. This journey moves between two distinct worlds in eight days. Two nights in Helsinki, a city that has built one of the strongest design and food cultures in northern Europe, followed by five nights in Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland, where the days are spent on the snow and the evenings are spent watching the sky.
The Northern Lights are the reason most people come to Finnish Lapland, and Rovaniemi delivers better odds than almost anywhere else in Europe. The city sits directly on the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north, inside the auroral oval, the band of sky where the lights appear most frequently and most intensely.
Between November and March, recording clear skies on around 200 nights per year through winter. Displays range from a faint green wash on the northern horizon to curtains of green, violet and white that move across the full width of the sky and can last for hours.
They cannot be predicted more than a day or two in advance and cannot be guaranteed, but the conditions here give you the best chance of any destination in Europe. Do Not Disturb arranges a dedicated guide who monitors the KP index, the measure of geomagnetic activity that predicts aurora strength, in real time and moves you to the right position away from light pollution at the right moment.
Do Not Disturb designs this journey around your pace, with private guides, the right properties and every transfer handled from arrival to departure.
Arrive into Helsinki and transfer privately to your hotel on Esplanadi, the boulevard that runs through the centre of the city to the South Harbor. Do Not Disturb selects the right property based on your preferences, with options ranging from historic grand hotels that have been at the centre of Helsinki’s cultural life for over a century to smaller design-led properties in the heart of the city.
Helsinki is a city of two speeds. The daytime is for the museums, the markets and the design district, and the evening is for the restaurants. The Old Market Hall on the South Harbor has been trading since 1889 and is where the fish, cheese and smoked meats of the surrounding region are sold each morning. The design district south of Esplanadi concentrates the city’s independent studios, galleries and shops into a few walkable blocks, centreed on the work of Finnish designers from Iittala to Artek.
Your private guide covers the city on the first full day, starting at Senate Square, framed by Helsinki Cathedral and the neoclassical buildings that make up the administrative centre of the capital. The Temppeliaukio Church, known as the Rock Church, was built directly into the bedrock of the city in 1969 and seats 750 people in a copper-domed chamber carved from solid granite. Suomenlinna, the 18th-century sea fortress on an island off the South Harbor, is reached by a fifteen-minute ferry and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Helsinki now has multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, most built around Finnish produce, game and coastal seafood. Do Not Disturb will work to secure reservations based on your preferences for both evenings, though availability at the most sought-after restaurants cannot always be guaranteed.
A private charter flight from Helsinki takes you north to Rovaniemi in around an hour, crossing from the city into the forest landscape of Finnish Lapland.
Do Not Disturb arranges the full transfer, from your Helsinki hotel to the aircraft and from the Rovaniemi landing to your property.
Arriving in the afternoon gives you a first evening in Lapland that the overnight train does not. Time to settle into the property, a sauna session before dinner and the northern sky visible from your room on the first night.
A guided introduction to cross-country skiing on the trails around Rovaniemi, one of the oldest forms of winter travel in Lapland and still the way locals move through the forest in winter.
The trails run through birch forest and along the frozen riverbank, and the pace is set by your guide rather than a clock. No prior experience is needed.
The afternoon moves into a traditional Finnish sauna ritual at the property. The sauna is not a footnote to Finnish culture, it is central to it, with over three million saunas in a country of five and a half million people.
The ritual works through heat, cooling and rest in alternating stages, and the experience at the end of a day on the snow is as restorative as anything else the week offers.
The first full day in Lapland is built around two of the region’s experiences. A snowmobile safari through the forest takes two to three hours on a guided route through the trees and along the frozen river, covering terrain that gives a picture of the scale of the Lapland wilderness.
In the afternoon, a reindeer safari with a local Sami herder covers the traditional relationship between the Sami people and the reindeer that have shaped the culture of northern Finland for over a thousand years. The safari is as much a cultural encounter as it is an outdoor activity.
That evening, your guide monitors the KP index and takes you to the best position outside the city for Northern Lights viewing, away from the light pollution of the town. On a strong night the display can be visible for several hours, shifting colour and intensity as the solar particles move through the atmosphere above.
A morning excursion to one of the frozen lakes outside Rovaniemi, with a local guide who drills the ice and teaches the technique over two hours before cooking the catch on an open fire in the forest.
Ice fishing has been practiced in this region for centuries and the combination of the frozen landscape, the fire and the lake is hard to find a comparison for elsewhere in Europe.
The afternoon is at leisure, with time in the sauna before the evening. The Northern Lights are most active between 9pm and 2am. Glass-fronted rooms facing north mean that a strong display will be visible without leaving the property, though your guide will call if the forecast shows a significant event worth going out for.
The last full day in Lapland is built around a husky safari through the forest by sled, with the chance to drive the team yourself on the return leg of the trail. The kennels outside Rovaniemi run teams of between six and twelve dogs, and the route takes you through forest trails that are inaccessible by any other means in winter.
The final evening is yours. A last dinner, a final session in the sauna, or simply a quiet hour outside with the forest and the sky above. If the forecast shows Northern Lights activity on the last night, your guide will be in touch.
A private transfer to Rovaniemi Airport for the return flight to Helsinki and onward international connections. Do Not Disturb handles the full routing home from Rovaniemi to your departure city.
Experience traditional Finnish smoke sauna and ice immersion at Lake Saimaa with a master sauna practitioner.
Spend time with Sami hosts in Swedish Lapland, learning about reindeer herding, seasonal migration, and a culture that has shaped life across northern Scandinavia for thousands of years.
A multi-day dog sledding expedition on the Finnmarksvidda plateau in northern Norway covers 25 to 40 kilometres a day through terrain that has no roads and no artificial light. Guests drive their own sled, stay overnight in wilderness cabins and spend several days covering ground that is otherwise inaccessible in winter. The season runs from December through March.
Tromsø sits beneath the Auroral Oval in northern Norway, giving it some of the most consistent Northern Lights conditions in the world. A private boat charter departs when conditions are right, moves to the darkest available fjord and stays as long as the display warrants.
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