The best way to see the Northern Lights at their spectacular best is to crash head-on into a Finnish pine tree at 60km/h. The sky immediately becomes a swirling kaleidoscope of unforgettable colours.
In the Land of the Sun, you can have such an earth-shattering experience in one of three ways. There are snowmobile safaris and husky-sledding trips, but these now face stiff competition from self-drive reindeer excursions. In north Finland, you can rent a polkka, or sledge, and hurtle around the Lemmenjoki National Park and other wilderness areas with a free-range, lichen-fuelled Arctic ungulate as your chauffeur. Translation: you can go off-roading on a reindeer.
Inari, a day-and-a-half from Helsinki by road, is the capital of the Sami mountain people and the reindeer capital of the world. Everyone is a second-hand reindeer salesman and all the restaurants sell reindeer parts. It's unnerving to ask a waiter what they can offer and be told, 'Tongue or bum, anyway you like.'
But just as you need a local beaver-hunting and ice-fishing permit, you also require a reindeer driving licence, which entails sitting a proficiency test. This means proving you know your way around a reindeer ... which means pointing to where the horn is. You must also demonstrate you are capable of controlling a speeding reindeer. You must do an emergency stop. Reindeer can burn slush if they want to, especially if pursued by a rakka, a large swarm of horseflies.
The secret of driving a reindeer is that there is no secret at all. Because they have wide peripheral vision, flapping your arms is enough to get them motoring. Stopping is largely up to the reindeer and whether it passes a tasty roadside shrub, which will usually cause a speeding Rudolph to screech to a halt. Otherwise, as my instructor and reindeer-driving examiner Mikko tells me, all you need is a great deal of patience and upper-body strength.
He should know. Mikko is a professional reindeer jockey. For three months a year, from November, he travels around Lapland competing in reindeer races.
The sport is highly popular in northern Finland: Lapps like a flutter and the biggest race is the Royalty or Kingship Cup. Held over 3km every April, it is the Arctic Ascot. Hundreds of spectators gamble thousands of euros trackside, the track being a frozen lake.