No booking confirmation. No guaranteed departure time. No polite little email the day before.
Just darkness, weather, solar activity and luck. That is the Northern Lights for you.
And if you are going to play that game, Hotel Rangá is a very good place to do it. Sitting out in the countryside of South Iceland, around two hours from Reykjavík, it has just enough quirk to feel memorable without trying too hard. There are no city lights to contend with out here, very little between you and the enormous Icelandic sky, and during the darker months, one very good reason to keep a coat somewhere within grabbing distance of the bed.
The Northern Lights are famously uncooperative.
You cannot book them. You cannot upgrade to them. No amount of travel-advisor persuasion is going to make them appear on Tuesday at 9.30pm because that is when you have a gap in the itinerary.
What you can do is put yourself in the right place at the right time.
In Iceland, the Northern Lights season generally runs from late August through to mid-April, although we would suggest looking at September through March if the aurora is a major reason for travelling. Around the September and March equinoxes there can be particularly good aurora activity, while the middle of winter gives you those wonderfully long, dark nights.
Then you need clear skies, solar activity and a decent helping of luck. Very scientific.
This is our kind of aurora hunting.
Hotel Rangá has been rather clever about the last part. Since 2005, it has offered a Northern Lights wake-up call. Switch it on before you go to sleep and, if the aurora appears during the night, the hotel will call your room. So instead of standing outside for five hours staring hopefully into darkness, you can go to bed.
This is our kind of aurora hunting.
So instead of standing outside for five hours staring hopefully into darkness, you can go to bed.
Hotel Rangá, South Iceland
If the call comes, throw on some warm clothes and head outside. The hotel has snowsuits and blankets available, and there are outdoor benches positioned for watching the sky. There are also three outdoor hot tubs, which gives you the option of doing the whole thing with considerably less dignity but much warmer feet.
And if the lights don't appear?
This is important, because they might not.
The Northern Lights are a natural phenomenon, not tonight's scheduled entertainment. You could have all the solar activity in the world and Iceland decides to give you clouds instead.
On clear winter nights, the hotel's observatory opens with an astronomer on hand and two telescopes for looking far beyond what you can see with the naked eye. It generally operates from late September through to the end of March, weather permitting, and gives you the chance to see planets, constellations and galaxies from a properly dark Icelandic sky. It is one of those experiences that sounds slightly nerdy until you are actually standing there looking through a telescope in the Icelandic countryside, then suddenly it feels like an excellent use of your evening.
It is a very good Plan B. Although calling Saturn a Plan B feels slightly rude.
The hotel has personality too
Rangá is not all glass, concrete and Scandinavian minimalism. It is much more relaxed than that.
There are 52 rooms and a collection of themed suites inspired by the seven continents, which could very easily have gone wrong, but somehow the hotel carries it off. The overall feel is cosy, a little eccentric and very comfortable, which is exactly what you want when it is freezing outside and you have spent the day being blown sideways beside a waterfall.
The restaurant leans into Nordic cooking and local Icelandic ingredients, and after a day outside in Icelandic weather, coming back here for dinner, a glass of wine and a hot tub is exactly the point.
Location-wise, it also works beautifully as part of a South Iceland itinerary. This is the land of waterfalls, black-sand beaches, glaciers and wonderfully strange volcanic landscapes, so you are not travelling all this way simply to sit around waiting for darkness.
You explore during the day.
Then, at night, you look up.
Would we travel all the way to Iceland just for the Northern Lights?
Probably not.
They are simply too unpredictable to build an entire holiday around, and anyone promising you otherwise has considerably more influence over the sun than we do.
We would, however, travel to Iceland in the right season, stay somewhere that puts you in one of the better positions to see them, fill your days with everything else Iceland does so well, and let the aurora be the rather spectacular bonus.
And if that phone rings at 1.17am?
Trust us.
Get up.
We’ll time it for the darker months
Which months suit your plans, how many nights to give the sky, and how to build Rangá into a South Iceland itinerary of waterfalls, black-sand beaches and glaciers.
