Column: Turning Japanese heads skyward

Yes, I promised you a series on Nunavut, and it IS coming. But these things take time. Gathering your thoughts, let alone any hard facts, about Canada’s black hole of information is a difficult task. For now, enjoy this story about Japanese tourists in Yellowknife.

It’s -30 C outside and 11 p.m. on Friday night. The Japanese ladies in the photo above are boarding a bus to go Aurora Borealis watching near a lake just outside of town.

I don’t really have the full story, but the lights so fascinate the Japanese that every year a few thousand of them are willing to fly all the way to middle of nowhere - better known as Yellowknife - for the chance to take a look.

Just prior to shaking up these full-body snowsuit wearing women with the unexpected flash of my camera, I had a chat with the group’s guide. He says they usually leave their downtown hotel around 9 p.m.

They then wait inside the mini-bus for the Northern lights to show until about one in the morning. Should the lights be fickle and forget to fill the sky, participants can choose to stay two hours longer. After this, at three in the morning, the guide says they must return to town.

Now I’m not sitting in my apartment staring out the window, waiting for the lights to come out. But I do regularly look up to see if there’s any activity, and lately the skies have been so overcast that I doubt anyone is seeing anything.

Just before Christmas, I interviewed a Japanese girl who won a trip North at the Expo in Aichi, Japan. If nothing else, she seemed understandably anxious about seeing the lights. The tour guide I talked to last night was the same guy who helped translate for the girl.

I asked him if she had any luck.

He shrugged and said, “I don’t remember,” but his nervous smile gave me the feeling he might be lying.

And this winter there have been weeks at a time when the round-the-clock cloud cover aboveYellowknife has been so thick the sun was invisible.

So no matter how impressive, this is why the Northern Lights are not really a great tourist attraction because no amount of money can guarantee you’ll see them. Even if you do, you have to know a bit about photography to get a decent photo.