Chasing the Northern Lights in Finnish Lapland

The Northern Lights seen over Finnish Lapland We travellers are a hopeful breed. We hope that trains run on time and we hope that hotels have remembered our reservation and not given us a room above the nightclub, but most of all we hope that the natural world performs when we want it to.
We want dolphins to leap from the waves as we pass by on a dhow in the Musandam Peninsula, kangaroos to box in full view in the dusty Australian outback, and bright sunlight to follow deep snowfall and turn Scandinavian landscapes into winter wonderlands.
So it was with the traveller's hope in my heart and no fewer than eight layers of clothing, two pairs of gloves, a thermal balaclava, two hats and an Arctic survival jacket that I waited on Platform 6 at Helsinki's central train station as the temperature plummeted to -23°C.
I was off to Finnish Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle, on a mission to see the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, one of the most magical but least predictable natural phenomena.
With me that evening were most of Helsinki's families, kitted out for a school holiday week of activities in the snow. The station's cathedral-like concourse echoed with the rustle of a thousand skisuits.
Because punctuality is not a luxury but a right in Finland, the double-decked P265 night train (return fare costs about €150 [Dh733] per person) left bang on time and slipped almost silently out of the station and through Helsinki's frozen northern suburbs. As it cleared the city's outskirts, sped up and plunged into the first of numerous snow-laden forests along the route, the families gathered their excited broods, settled into their sleeper compartments and fed and showered their children who, in their youthful imaginations, were already sledging with abandon on the Arctic slopes.
I sat at the window and gazed at a ghostly landscape in which endless lines of pine and birch trees stood stiff and weighted down by feet of snow, stoically waiting out the long bitter winter and yearning for the freedom of spring. Above them the sky was inky black and free of clouds, but the Northern Lights were not firing. Would this be my second failed attempt to see the aurora? An earlier adventure to Iceland in the depths of winter had resulted in a week of sleep deprivation as I sat at the north-facing window of my small hotel - the Northern Light Inn, no less - through the long polar nights, struggling to keep awake to see the lights billowing across the sky. My only reward was a single line of dull green, low in the sky, looking vaguely like a smudge of toothpaste and lasting for less than a minute. By that time I was so delirious with exhaustion that I was not entirely sure if it was the real thing or a figment of my imagination.
From the lower bunk of the sleeper compartment my wife reminded me to have hope - the traveller's hope - that we would witness the lights.
The next morning, as the grey of the slow winter dawn turned to blue and then snow-white outside the window, my BlackBerry's message light was flashing: it was an alert from the aurora-watchers at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There had been a solar flare on the sun, it said, and a significant auroral display was expected imminently.
The sun occasionally spits out these gigantic solar flares that emit billions of charged particles called ions. As these ions hit the Earth's magnetic field, they are directed to the North and South poles and, as they collide with gases in our atmosphere, they glow, not unlike a neon light tube. Voila, Northern Lights.
According to Nasa, the sun has been quiet and boring for the past few years but now is entering a period of high activity - the sun is "waking up from a deep slumber", the agency has said - which means that the prospect of seeing magnificent auroral displays through 2011, 2012 and 2013 is higher than for many years.