Like many other people, seeing the northern lights has always been on my travel bucket list.

Finding them proved much easier, and more rewarding, than I could ever have imagined.

The lights are visible from several northern latitude regions but we settled on the Lofoten islands, a rocky, windswept archipelago off Norway's north western coast.

The islands are high enough in the arctic circle to offer a good chance of experiencing this spectacular meteorological phenomenon, given the right conditions.

Of course the thing is you never know exactly when they'll be visible, or if they're even going to be active.

And the trip wasn't going to be cheap – were we prepared to fork out the money without a guarantee of seeing the lights?

But the lure of seeing the aurora proved too strong, even if it was a remote chance, so my partner and I bought tickets to Norway's capital Oslo and set off on our quest.

The first mishap occurred the day we landed in Oslo.

Somewhere along our jet-lagged ramble through the city that afternoon we managed to lose the camera on which we'd planned to capture all those wonderful shots of flaming skies.

By the time we'd tracked it down we were on the train headed north to Trondheim, Norway's hippest locality, and onwards to the northern port city of Bodo.

For the crossing from Bodo to Lofoten we jumped on board the Hurtigruten coastal cruiser, which was docking at the capital Svolvaer on its way up to Krikenes, in Norway's far northeast.

After a three hour journey the craggy rock faces of Lofoten rose before us, massive and monolithic, shrouded in mist. An awesome sight.

We disembarked at Svolvaer late at night and trudged along a road in the darkness and over a bridge to the islet of Svinoya where a cluster of log huts, or "rorbu" perched over the water, our home for the next few days.

Out on the wooden deck of our converted fisherman's hut we scanned the sky hopefully. There was heavy cloud cover and no stars were visible.

If there was any activity from the lights we weren't going to be seeing it tonight.

The next night it was cloudy again and I was beginning to despair of seeing the lights.

I'd heard there was a man in the village of Laukvik named Rob Stammins who operated a Polar Light Centre which monitored auroral activity. I figured he might be able to help us.

But when we arrived in Laukvik after a 40 minute drive in our rental car, passing arctic tundra and majestic mirror-like fjords, it looked like Stammins might be as elusive as the lights themselves.

After driving around in circles we finally stumbled across it. A small building with a modest sign. We knocked and out came a wiry man with a wild grey beard, every inch the mad scientist.

Inside, in a room jammed with all manner of machinery and bristling with knobs, buttons, wires and graphs, Stammins talked to us about how he'd been seduced by the lights and I asked if he thought we might see them.

"Tonight the lights could come, yes," he said. He said there had been a lot of solar activity lately, which boded well for our chances.

Back at Svolvaer around 9pm I stuck my head out of the window of our cabin.

There it was: an unmistakable thin sliver of luminescence arching across the sky. We raced outside.

The band widened and intensified and all of a sudden the aurora launched its dance.

Great sheets of rippling light were moving across the night sky, pearly white or tinged with pink and pale green.

The lights were above us, behind us, in front of us, throwing the mountains into silhouette, rippling and sighing, coming and going in waves of intensity, appearing here, then there, descending on top of us like some sort of pulsating alien spaceship.

We stayed watching the spectacle for hours until our teeth were chattering and we were ready to drop from exhaustion and cold.

We saw the lights again the next night, when we drove out with doonas wrapped around us to the golf course at Gimsoy to avoid the light pollution; and the next, on the deck of the boat as we left Lofoten behind.

In Oslo we picked up the camera, which had zero photos of the lights, before jumping on the plane back to Sydney.

But who needs photographs when you've experienced the real thing?

I mightn't have anything to post on Facebook but the lights will shine in my memory forever.

THE AURORA BOREALIS

* The aurora borealis, or northern lights, are caused by collisions between electrically-charged particles discharged into the earth's atmosphere during solar activity.

* A series of large flares have erupted from the sun since October, producing some of the best auroral displays in years.

* Auroral displays can appear white or in shades of pale green, pink, red, yellow, blue or violet.

* They can be seen from the Arctic, Greenland, northern Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Siberia.

* It's hard to predict exactly when the lights will be visible but the best time to see them is in northern polar latitudes between August and April.

* Dark, clear conditions are best and the peak time is between 11pm and 2am, although they can come out earlier.

* For live updates on auroral activity and your chances of seeing the lights from where you are to visit aurora-service.eu

* For information on the Polar Light Centre visit polarlightcenter.com

GETTING THERE

* Numerous airlines fly from from Sydney to Oslo with Emirates now offering a daily service direct from Dubai.

* You can fly to Lofoten from Oslo or Bodo (lofoten.info) or travel from Oslo to Bodo by train (nsb.no) and cross to Lofoten on the coastal cruiser (hurtigruten.no) or express ferry.

* Rental cars are available on Lofoten (rentacar-lofoten.com) or other agencies.