Reindeer soup, northern lights, sleigh rides through moonlit snow - Jenny Diski takes a slow boat through the fjords into the Arctic Circle

There have always been travellers: hunter-gatherers, nomads, merchants, migrants, explorers, crusaders, troubadours and pilgrims. There are still business travellers and immigrants, of course, but these days, whether it's a journey of a lifetime or an annual holiday, many of the people getting on planes, boats and trains are off to somewhere else in search of what they describe simply as an "experience", as though no further explanation were needed. The desire is for a special experience, for something particular that occurs usually far away and happens to or is witnessed by them in person, and many places in the world now have much of their economy based on fulfilling that desire.

What was I looking for, when I started out at St Pancras, heading for Tromsø in the north of Norway, 350km inside the Arctic Circle, in the dead of winter? I had a hankering to travel into the darkness and spend some time there, looking at the fading light. To go north and see what north really means as the light disappears, the temperature drops and the world freezes. But not as an explorer - not as Amundsen or Scott struggled with life and death towards the poles. Not being in the slightest degree rugged, I went as a modern tourist, one of the millions with the time and money to go in search of experience and convenience both, a leisurely traveller taking advantage of integrated timetables and modern transportation. Though not too modern. I kept my feet on the ground, wanting to get a sense of the distance I was going and the landscape I was travelling through. So I didn't fly to Tromsø, but took a route involving six trains and a ship that took me overland through Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, and farther north by sea, sailing in and out of the fjords that wrinkle the coast of Norway.

If you go by train, give yourself time: even spending a night in Oslo wasn't enough to take the weariness out of the two days it took to get there. By the time I got to the highlight of the train journey - the famous vintage railway from Oslo to Bergen, that crossed the snow-covered plateau high in the mountains and passed the blue Hardangerjøkulen glacier - I'd grown pretty tired of the rhythm of the track. It didn't help that when I settled myself in the elegant old train, I found I was between two windows with a blank wall beside me and just a foreshortened sliver of view from the window of the seat in front. More a tease than a view. I sipped the pretty good coffee from the trolley that came round, and sulked. Odd, really, to be disgruntled at not seeing out of a window when I wanted to travel in the dark. Eventually, I found a buffet coach, without a buffet, but with tables and chairs beside curtained windows, and parked myself there for the delirious view of flat white blankness surrounded by rough peaks, creeping glaciers and brilliant sunlight sparking the snow crystals beside the line. So far, not much in the way of polar night. The frozen waterfalls, like suddenly stilled film, had me worrying pleasantly but at length about how waterfalls freeze. From the top down? Bottom up? From the outside inwards, so that the water still falls for a while inside a cylinder of ice?

I got to Bergen in time to board the ship, the MS Trollfjørd, in which I was to spend five days threading up into the Arctic Circle towards Tromsø. I'd heard of this working ferry, a smallish mail and cargo boat, I imagined, that took Norwegians up and down the coast, like a local bus, and also carried some tourists. Hopelessly out of date, I discovered. Though a few local people were making their way along the coast, most of the 400 passengers (half the ship's capacity) were German and English couples and families, with a few evident newlyweds who nibbled at each other frequently and gave us older folk a knowing pang or two. I was on one of those floating hotels you hear talk of, and I confess my heart sank at the sight of the glass lifts running up and down amidships to each of the nine decks, the frantically patterned carpets, the shop, the cafe, the starry-lit ceilings. I was relieved to find that my room was more like a ship's cabin than a hotel room: plain but comfortable, and with proper hums, creaking and rattlings to reassure me I was at sea, after all. I was even more relieved to discover that however garish the ship looked, someone, somewhere understood that this strange, sinuous journey towards the pole didn't require piped music or entertainment. The lights on board were always dim, especially near the vast, panoramic windows in the viewing lounge, and there were plenty of comfortable places to sit, uninterrupted, so that all the eerie subtlety of the sun's brief rising at well past 10am and falling back below the horizon by 2.30pm could be watched and wondered at. I wanted nothing more than to spend a couple of hours every day watching the mysterious steel-grey water and the bright and shadowed blue-grey twilight passing by. The sea made foamy scurries around rocky disturbances in its way. Great monsters slowly appeared in the half-light, towering granite cliffs with crags and deformations frosted with ice, and snow nestled in ancient chasms. Smooth water, convoluted stone and every shading of mist, cloud and ice kept me fixated at the window or on the shockingly windy deck throughout the brief daylight hours. I came to appreciate this paradoxically gaudy ship that put quiet looking at a high premium.

We passed by thousands of islands and islets, docking frequently, two or three times a day. There were organised excursions during the longer stops, but I enjoyed just wandering around the harbour, or the town if it was close enough - in Ålesund, for example, where the dock was right by the streets of pretty, multicoloured, wooden houses with long, thin windows reaching up into sharply pointed eaves. The town burned down in 1904 and was rebuilt in art nouveau style. Bad luck and good luck - imagine if it had burned down in 1964.

Tromsø, when I finally left the ship, turned out to be a university town, permanently set in party mode. Lots of shops, and late at night the thudding of dance music coming from club after club. T-shirted men stood in groups smoking outside in the -6C, and women in short skirts and high heels teetered dangerously along ungritted, ice-covered pavements.

I, wearing as much as possible, went off with five other tourists in the early evening with Kjetil Skogli, the guide responsible for helping Joanna Lumley find the northern lights on TV. This was what most of the tourists were here for - an "experience" of the aurora borealis - and what Tromsø and most of northern Norway offered them. It's a brand. The ship called its journey "Hunting The Light", and Chasing The Light in his people carrier was Kjetil's speciality. Not a phenomenon that happens or doesn't in that part of the world, but a quest, a reason for leaving home.

The lights were Kjetil's personal obsession, as it turned out. We started out at 6.30pm and he drove at speed away from cloud, snow and city lights, to find the clear skies hinted at by various weather instruments. He happily answered questions, but otherwise was silently intent on finding the lights in the sky. But the promised clear skies were invariably clouded over, and the snow fell each time we got to them. We drove fast and furiously along the major roads, often crossing our own tracks, until at one point we were just 14km from the Finnish border. At 2am we got out for perhaps the fourth or fifth time by the side of a road, but on this occasion Kjetil set up his camera. He pointed out a streak of northern light, though all I saw was something that looked like a very slightly lighter cloud than the rest. But it seemed to please my fellow tourists whose determination to experience the lights kept them from freezing in the 25-below-zero night. Myself, I'd seen the lights before, and much brighter, in Arctic Sweden, but in any case, it was quiet darkness I'd been after, rather than a hell-ride quest for green streaks in the sky. How far are we from Tromsø, I wondered, a little desperate by then. "You don't want to know," Kjetil said. We arrived back in the city at 3am, after eight and a half hours of driving and standing by the side of the road looking up at an uneventful sky.

The following evening, I went inland again, to take a ride on a reindeer sled and have a Sami supper in a lavvu (a kind of tepee). There were two sleds, each drawn by a reindeer. Roar led the first with his seven-year-old daughter Karoline, and I followed behind on a low, elementary wooden sled, not at all like that of the Snow Queen, being pulled silently along a meandering, wooded mountain track, in the blazing polar night. The gleaming whiteness of the waist-deep, powdery snow lit up the darkness and reflected a brilliant quarter-moon and sparkling stars. It wasn't a real journey, like Roar and his family make, following the annual migration of the reindeer, but it was a jewelled and icy few hours of being allowed a glimpse into another rhythm, another way of leading a life. In the lavvu, we met up with others who had been dog sledding and light hunting. Craig and Rachel from Leicester had made a list of all the things they wanted to do before they die. Seeing the northern lights was on it. But why, I wondered, as we ate delicious reindeer soup. "For the experience. So I can say I've seen them in person." In fact, Craig was going home the next day without seeing the lights. He was philosophical, but his list would be incomplete.

"What about you?" I asked Roar. "Is there somewhere you want to go, something you want to experience?" He smiled. "I like to be in the forest and mountains with my reindeer. There's nowhere else I ever want to be." That was another late night, but it felt good sitting in the wood-fire's light, talking quietly to people from there and far away. I, at least, felt the journey was worthwhile, that very long journey to discover at its end a man who was content to stay where he was and experience his own life to the full.

Getting there

Return from London to Oslo, from £327. To book, call 0844 848 4070 or go to raileurope.co.uk. Scenic train from Oslo to Bergen, from £31pp, from nsb.no. To sail into the Arctic Circle, call Hurtigruten on 020-8846 2666 (hurtigruten.co.uk). Seven days from Bergen to Kirkenes in March costs from £739pp for two sharing.

Stopover

Oslo. The Grand Hotel, Karl Johans Gate, Oslo, 0047 2321 2000, grand.no

Stay at

The Rica Grand Nordic Hotel, Tromsø, nordic.no. To chase the northern lights or go reindeer sledding, go to destinasjontromso.no/english/activities.html

Discover the World (01737 218800) offers a seven-night Saab Lapland Explorer package from £1,640, based on two sharing, including return flights from London to Kiruna, two nights' accommodation at the Icehotel, two nights in Bjorkliden and three nights at Finnholmen Bryggehotel, all on a B&B basis. It also includes five-day rental of a four-wheel-drive Saab 9-3 Turbo.

Forget a tame fly-drive in Florida, a new package sends you deep into the Arctic on a 700-mile road trip through stunning scenery. Matt Carroll picks up his keys and turns the heating up to max

If it wasn't for the fact that I've been wide awake for hours, I'd swear that I am dreaming. Here I am, lying in a room made of ice, when in walks a strange man with a backpack and a head torch. His spotlight arrives a few seconds before he does, puncturing the pitch black as he bursts through the curtain; I'm reminded of one of the bad guys in the scene from ET, where Elliott and his extra-terrestrial friend are being experimented on. Luckily, this chap is armed with nothing more sinister than a cup of hot lingonberry juice - just what I need after a night spent lying on a block of ice.

While the Icehotel, in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden had looked very pretty when I'd popped my head through the door the previous day, to ooh and aah at the impressive sculptures, sleeping here is a different story. I'd booked into one of 30 unique "Art Suites", where the rooms are individually crafted by different artists who are commissioned to come up with new designs each year. Mine had a nautical theme, with a little hovercraft for a bed. At 3am I woke up with my head caught underneath its rear aerofoil, my nose so cold that I thought it had snapped off.

This was the opening night of my great Arctic Adventure. Fly-drives have been all the rage in hot countries for years but now British tour operator Discover the World has teamed up with Saab to offer winter road trips in the icy wastes of northern Sweden and Norway. The journey is spread over seven days, covering a total distance of around 700 miles, with pre-arranged stopovers along the way. After the initial night at the Icehotel, I was to make my way to the ski resort of Bjorkliden for two nights, before continuing on to Henningsvaer - a tiny Norwegian fishing village in the Lofoten islands - for another three and eventually making my way back to Jukkasjarvi.

Navigation should be easy - the brand new, four-wheel-drive Saab waiting outside the Icehotel had a full tank of fuel and a pre-programmed sat nav. All I had to do was start the engine and follow the directions, which mostly consisted of "continue straight ahead". There aren't many bends in this part of Sweden, especially once you leave the sanctuary of its towns. With the heating cranked up full I made my way out of Jukkasjarvi and headed west. Although Bjorkliden is only 75 miles away, it takes around two hours in the icy conditions - especially when you're tempted to stop and gawp at the scenery every five minutes.

Almost immediately outside Jukkasjarvi, vast stretches of white space opened up, interrupted only by whale-backed hills and colossal frozen lakes. It felt like a scene from Fargo, except that the dead body I found beside the road in the icy wastes was that of a reindeer, rather than a cop.

This was the first (and only) reindeer I saw on the whole trip, and I couldn't resist stopping for a closer look. I wished I hadn't. After taking a few snaps of the morbid scene, I got back in the car only to discover that it was beached in the snow. Panic set in as it dawned on me that I could be stuck out here for a while. Sweden is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe and it could be hours before another car came past. Luckily, it wasn't that long before a couple of Swedes pulled up to find me lying face down in the snow, attempting to dig the Saab out with my bare hands.

A quick tow was all it took to get me going again and in another hour or so I was making my way up the mountain to Bjorkliden. This is one of Europe's tiniest ski resorts, with one hotel, one ski rental shop, five lifts and just 24 runs. It's also one of the most northerly on the planet, lying 150 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

From the restaurant at the back of the hotel, you get a cracking view of the Tornetrask - a vast lake where the surrounding mountains rise straight up out of the water - and Lapporten, a U-shaped rock formation known as the "gateway to Lapland". Beyond lies a great stretch of untouched wilderness: just you, the trees and the odd Sami reindeer herdsman.

The good thing about this place being so small and isolated is that you get the pistes to yourself. A quick, ski-booted shuffle across the car park from the hotel takes you straight on to the slopes, which, although short, are reassuringly wide. Always a good thing when you're taking to skis for the first time.

For someone who normally snowboards, this was a big step into the unknown - which I marked with several embarrassing wipeouts. After going through the basic turns on the baby slope I joined the grown-ups on the blue run next to the hotel, which resulted in more public humiliation. It was worth it, though: there's a fabulous view across the lake as you ski down. With its epic views of unspoilt back country and deserted slopes, Bjorkliden feels more North American than European. Once you've conquered the slopes here, you can always graduate to the nearby resorts of Narvik (14 runs; five lifts) and Riksgransen (16 runs; six lifts). Both lie within 30 miles of Bjorkliden, making them easily commutable when you've got your own wheels.

If skiing's not for you, there are plenty of other activities that make it worth sticking around here for a few days. One thing you should do is take a dog-sled up to Laktatjakko mountain station - Sweden's highest at 1,228 metres - from where you can see all the way to Norway on a good day. There are no lifts to get up here so it all feels rather intrepid.

Not quite so edgy, however, as my drive from Bjorkliden to Henningsvaer. Leaving the resort, I set off on the five-hour drive across to Norway, on roads that thread their way between lakes and mountains, often coming within a few metres of the sea. This 285-mile drive is apparently one of the most scenic in Europe. When it isn't dark and blowing a gale that is.

Unfortunately, I spent the entire journey trying to keep the car on the road as Arctic storms engulfed the area.

I made it to the Finnholmen Bryggehotel in Henningsvaer to find the owner, Roger, serving up home-made fish stew. This place is exactly what you need after a long, arduous drive: the restaurant is decked out like the inside of a fisherman's cottage, with sturdy wood beams and seafaring bric-a-brac lining the walls.

Scattered across a series of tiny islets connected to the mainland and each other by bridges, Henningsvaer is a bona fide fishing community that's changed little in the last 100 years. Olive-green, mustard-yellow and cocoa-painted houses line the harbour front, adding splodges of weather-beaten colour that stand out against the snow-sprinkled backdrop of Mount Vagakaillen. Until the bridges were built in the early Eighties, the only way of getting between the islands was by boat, so Henningsvaer has retained much of its bleak charm.

To get a true taste of Lofoten life you can head out with one of the local fishing crews to watch whales or catch cod that can be brought back to the hotel and transformed into dinner. All that was to come, however. In the meantime, a howling gale outside was blowing the boats in the harbour all over the place.

For the second night that week, I had a feeling that I wouldn't be getting much sleep.

Essentials

Discover the World (01737 218800; discover-the-world.co.uk) offers a seven-night Saab Lapland Explorer package from £1,640, based on two sharing, including return flights from London to Kiruna, two nights' accommodation at the Icehotel, two nights in Bjorkliden and three nights at Finnholmen Bryggehotel, all on a B&B basis. It also includes five-day rental of a four-wheel-drive Saab 9-3 Turbo.

A summertime Arctic cruise offers Juliette Jowit little in the way of ice and snow - but fantastic opportunities to see wildlife close-up

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I was, for a few moments, frightened. Every time the inflatable boat banged off a two-metre wave the woman next to me screamed. Wind gusting up to 50 knots blew sheets of cold salty spray into us. Usually it helps to think: "What's the worst that can happen?" This time the answering image of upturned boat in the Arctic-cold water was not comforting. I tried not to remember being told two days before that we might be the only ship in nearly half a million square miles of the Hudson Bay.

Then I saw the murres: first one or two, then dozens of purposeful tiny birds skittered around us as we banged our way to the bottom of the high cliffs of Cape Wolstenholme. We looked up from calmer waters at a teeming colony, birds perched on every ledge.

I was travelling with Cruise North Expeditions, which makes two claims to be extraordinary. First, it is majority-owned by a non-profit Inuit company; second it claims to be the only cruise operator dedicated to the Arctic's summer season, from June to October. Antarctica reputedly had nearly 30,000 visitors last "summer", but the Arctic cruise scene is far less developed.

The first thing to do when you visit this part of the Arctic in summer is to banish images of ice and snow. Below the "high Arctic" the landscape is mostly granite rock and raw tundra. Even seasoned guides were unprepared however for more than 20C of humid heat when we arrived on a chartered flight from Montreal to the town of Churchill on Hudson Bay in northern Canada.

Waving away big black flies and mosquitoes, we trundled on old school buses around the self-proclaimed "polar bear capital of the world" (human population about 800). Suddenly there was a rush to the right hand side of the bus: our first polar bear, padding about on a small patch of grass. It was a far cry from proud images of these great furry beasts waiting patiently over seal holes or stamping on walrus, but already we could tick off one of the Arctic "Big Five". Later, in the Churchill River, we watched beluga whales. A few hours and already two out of five: only caribou, musk ox and walrus to go. It was about to get harder, though.

On the first day, our cruise ship struck out into Hudson Bay. A few passengers succumbed to seasickness, while the rest of us wandered between our tiny but spotless cabins, the glorious sunshine on deck, and a series of lectures - introductions to the region and its mammals, whaling history, seafaring superstitions, and an explanation of the different definitions of the word Arctic. Though we were south of the Arctic Circle, and well below the Arctic Sea, our trip was an "Arctic" one because it was mostly north of the tree line, the wavy zone between the 53rd and 68th parallels where stunted pines peter out to be replaced by tiny flowers, grasses and the miniature Arctic willow.

It was also an opportunity to get used to life on board the 185-berth Lyubov Orlova. As well as a lecture room, the boat has a small exercise room, a bar, a library, and a dining room. We were encouraged to spend as much time as possible on deck. As the sun sank over an oil-blue sea with a 360-degree horizon, beyond any mobile phone signal or email, I felt liberated.

Our first day's excursion was cancelled because of high winds, and instead we had a lecture about the Inuit, learning a few words of Inuktitut, and also how Scottish reeling was brought to these parts by the whalers, explorers, miners and other fortune-seekers who travelled here.

But Europeans also brought disease and alcohol - and missionaries, who persuaded the Inuit to abandon their traditional customs, and changed many communities from small nomadic groups into larger villages. The more settled communities found it hard to adapt when the incomers left and cut off supplies of dollars and tinned food.

The legacy of all this is widespread social problems, which Cruise North hopes to help address. The company is three-quarters owned by the Makivik Corporation which is run by and for the benefit of the people of Nunavik, one of the three autonomous Inuit regions of Canada. The other quarter is owned by Dugald Wells, a Toronto engineer whose idea it was to bring some of the riches of polar tourism to the Canadian north.

The company has a policy of taking on Inuit trainees so I was surprised to find few Inuit staff on our ship. Wells said this was because older trainees found it hard to adapt to the fairly regimented life; now they are hiring younger trainees, some of whom are being encouraged to use their new skills to find other work or go back to education.

The key to a rewarding expedition, we kept being told, is to be flexible. And later we were rewarded: the wind calmed and we got our first landing, on Coats Island. Arctic animals can be elusive, but on Coats Island, the compensation was right beneath our feet, with an unexpected richness of plant life: purple saxifrage, yellow Arctic poppies, white cottongrass, the blush-pink thrift, and burning orange lichen. Then half-way into our walk news came by radio: walrus, around the headland. We made a five-minute slow pass in the inflatable boat, peering through camera zooms at these monstrous-looking masses of brown blubber with great tusks.

On day four the highlight was a visit to Kangiqsujuaq (population 590). Yaka, who lives in the village, showed us the 'sights', including the Northern and Co-op stores, the museum for a national park 85km away, and a swimming pool and community centre built with money from a company mining nearby. At the centre children danced and sang for us and an elder told how, before the Northern and Co-op opened, the people here were sometimes so hungry they ate their sled dogs.

After lunch we took the boat over to nearby Diana Island, where dozens of tourists in waterproofs huddled together, giggling, trying to look like a single animal so the musk ox would be confident enough to approach - a tactic which, hilariously, worked.

On the final day, it was too rough to land - "Sorry, but nature is in charge," said Julio, the expedition leader - so we spent the afternoon gawping at glaciers and learning to recognise the glide-flap-glide flight of a fulmar, before finally making a beautiful sunset entry into an almost still George River, and our first sight of a tree for a week.

Essentials

Cruise North's eight-night Arctic Odyssey (00 1 866 263 3220; cruisenorthexpeditions.com) costs from US$5,245, plus $1,265 for domestic flights. BA (ba.com) flies to Montreal from about £404. Audley Travel (01993 838 700; audleytravel.com) has packages from £3,800 including all flights and three nights' pre- and post-cruise accommodation. Quebec Tourism: 0800 051 7055; bonjourquebec.com.

Staying overnight in a ski lodge inside the Arctic Circle allows access to an empty, off-piste paradise most skiers can only dream of

It's difficult to embrace the quiet beauty of a place when you're shifting through it at mach 10, skidoo engine roaring in your ears, cheeks whipped to burning in the cold. But as the dying sun cast its light across the thousands of snow crystals thrown up by the wind, the ensuing rainbow which hovered above the Låktatjåkko Mountain Station compelled silent attention. Nestled 250km north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland, it's a place where you can let yourself believe in magic.

Låktatjåkko, or Låkta, is a tiny annex of the petite ski resort of Bjorkliden, just north of Abisko national park, accessible only by skidoo or touring skis. On the shores of Lake Tornetrask and dwarfed by the legendary Lapporten Gap, the U-shaped gateway to Lapland, Bjorkliden is a resort surrounded by epic scenery. Trains rattle past it from Kiruna to the better known ski destinations of Narvik and Riksgransen, meaning anyone who gets off will pretty much have all 24 pistes to themselves. Small and charming, it has one ski shop, one restaurant, one bar, one hotel and 80 beautiful self-catering cabins. Almost everyone is Norwegian or Swedish; Bjorkliden was a well-kept secret from British skiers until 2007, when Discover the World started offering packages to the destination. The main targets may be families and beginners, but the area also offers up a world of unexplored off-piste, heli-skiing and powder up to your thighs as late as May. Yet if it weren't for the local tipple being called Wolf Paw, you'd be forgiven for thinking life was pretty chilled in Bjorkliden.

Låkta lies 9km further inland from Lake Tornetrask, in a pass between two peaks. The highest mountain station in Sweden at 1,228m, it takes around 30 minutes – depending on your driving skills – to skidoo from Bjorkliden. You can easily swap one of your nights in the resort for a night up at the mountain station, or you can arrive for dinner and leave the same evening. Operating like a small hotel, it has 18 beds in basic but comfortable rooms with dinner and breakfast provided. The remoteness of its location is not reflected in its interior, with a log fire, sauna and well stocked bar, making it feel like a cosy chalet rather than a refuge. It's a favourite among skidoo enthusiasts who stop off for lunch, and a base for ski tourers and backcountry skiers to access the kind of powder fields only usually seen in dreams.

If I dreamt that night, I couldn't remember the next morning. An evening of Swedish hospitality laid on by Låkta's managers Per and Marie with the help of Samuel Adams, a bottle of red, reindeer steaks, cloudberries and piles of the mountain station's famous waffles, left little time for that.

After days of high winds and heavy snowfall, the next day dawned bluebird. The snow was light, dry, sparkling. "I think," murmured Per as he laid out breakfast, "that with these conditions, you are about to ski the best run in the whole of Sweden."

The beauty of staying at Låkta is, while the icy air gets to work on the hangover, you can get a head start on the day's adventure, stomping off from the front door. You can hire a guide in Bjorkliden who, if they are like mine, will arrive fresh and raring to go in the morning. With shovel packed and avalanche transceiver switched on, I set off in the wake of mountain manager Niclas Stockel. Leaving the warmth of the station we began our ascent of Låkta – the peak from which the lodge takes its name. For a climber, this would be a piece of cake. For someone who only ever goes up a mountain in a chairlift, it took its toll. While I grappled with gravity, Niclas ploughed on, carving a route through deep snow and ice, crossing reindeer tracks and scrambling over rocks. After 45 minutes we stood on the summit, me feeling every inch like Reinhold Messner, despite my rasping breath. Mountains revealed themselves in every direction. Norway lay behind us, a mass of peaks and troughs. To our left Moon Valley, inaccessible by anything except touring skis, making it a haven for wildlife, most notably wolverines.

Clip in. Ski off. We cruised through the first powder field, the mellow gradient forcing a no-stopping rule until a couloir, where snow swept past my feet like velvet. Bursting out into a second powder field, the light a soft yellow, I looked back at tracks which seemed to lead down from another planet. I had never seen so much snow with absolutely no evidence of any other skier. Niclas upped the ante by choosing a steeper descent on an area which had been known to avalanche. I stared at the face until I swear I could see cracks appearing before plummeting down it with ill-advised speed, hands death-gripping the poles. "I could hear you gasping from where I was," said Niclas as he led the way into a tightly packed tree run.

This was more like it. Quick, sharp turns, the young, lissome trees forgiving any lapses of concentration. The ride ended at the first sign of life for a long time – a railway line. And a four-wheel drive on hand to ferry us back to the resort.

I opted for a final ski before dinner and caught one of the resort's five button lifts to the top of its longest run – 3km. No people, just powder. The view wasn't dramatic by, say, Rocky Mountain standards but it was composed of a series of elements – the lake, the Lapporten Gap, Låkta – which were all variations on a white theme. The sharp light allows each element to stand out on its own merits, but the combined effect is to make you feel like you are moving through a painting. I moved through mine silently, snow pattering down with each turn until I arrived rosy and flushed at the bar in Hotel Fjället– where a band were playing Status Quo covers to the delight of the four revellers occupying the dance floor. But a blast of dad rock was a small price to pay for the first, and only, tracks of the day.

• Discover the World (01737 218 800) offers a three-night package to Bjorkliden, including return direct flights from Heathrow to Kiruna, transfers, full-board and ski pass from £623pp from December to May. To hire a one-on-one guide for a day is 2,500 kroner (£218) but you can split that between a group. A night at Låkta costs from 450 kroner (£40); two-course dinner is 350 kroner (£30).

Kevin Rushby stays on board a ship deliberately trapped in the ice in Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago

A trek to a ship-hotel frozen into the ice in the middle of the Arctic wastes makes for the trip of a lifetime – as long you can keep your feet warm

It's an idea so simple, so beautiful, that you can't believe it was not thought of before. Sail a ship into the Arctic as the winter freeze grips, let it get trapped in ice, then run visitors out there by dog sled or skidoo. And if that vessel is special – like a two-masted tall ship – all the better: the trip becomes something imbued with adventure, redolent with the traditions of Shackleton and Nansen, something to conjure up faded sepia images of the Fram and the Endurance, of explorers with icy beards, and heroism on the limits of human endurance. This is what Basecamp Explorer has done.

Flying in to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard from Tromsø in northern Norway, I am gripped myself, with the sheer excitement of it all. Behind me a group of men with fur-lined hoods are trading extreme travel anecdotes. "So we built a barrier with skis to keep the bears out..." "There were narwhals all around the ice floe..." But for me there are no such stories. I'm a hot country person – always have been. This is a first taste of the Arctic and, before I even contemplate anything as extreme as narwhal-besieged ice floes, I want to know if I could handle the conditions. I have – I have to admit – two very large doubts, both of them size nine and already encased in three pairs of socks.

The first surprise is how light it is at midnight in late March. The Arctic changes from total darkness to total light within two months, a difference of about half an hour a day from mid-February. The second surprise, as I walk to the small modern airport terminal, is the cold. It settles around you like a super-cooled over-excited lover: nibbling your ears, licking your eyeballs. And it doesn't stop. Not for day, not for night, not for man, woman or beast. For the entire trip, it goes on trying to get inside your clothing.

Longyearbyen, the capital city, population about 2,000, stands on one of the fjords of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the archipelago. Around the few buildings, which are mostly grey, the ground is white. The surrounding mountains are white, too; the fjord is frozen white and nothing at all is green. I get out of the car and stand in the street, looking down towards the fjord and the mountains beyond. When the wind blows it smudges away the certainties of ridge and horizon, and replaces them with subtle suggestions of great and aching beauty. It also bites the end of your nose off.

"We'll get you equipped properly tomorrow," Solfrid Håkenstad, base manager, tells me. She looks around, as if searching for a few landmarks to interest me, but like everyone in Longyearbyen, she is drawn back to the only feature that counts: the huge dark satanic power plant. "It runs on coal," she says. "We have some mines."

Within the hour I am in love with that power station. I adore its 24-hour lights and plume of smoke. I love the steady grumble as it devours fossil fuels to keep me warm.

The Basecamp hotel is a charming pastiche of a pioneer's log cabin, with a good connection to the power plant. Inside no one wears boots and it is deliciously cosy. I could have stayed there for my entire trip, enjoying that warmth and reading Arctic exploration stories – like that of Umberto Cagni in 1900, amputating his fingers with scissors and walking 12 hours a day on drifting ice only to discover that in a week he had managed three feet in the right direction. I love that kind of story when I'm in a warm bed. However, in the morning they force me outside and down to the clothing depot.

Martin Machiedo is my guide, a huge man who looks like a Viking marauder, but is actually an affable Croatian. I am decked out in one-piece padded snowsuit, balaclava, crash helmet, fur-lined gauntlets and huge boots. I am already wearing every single sock I have brought with me – four on each foot – but my toes are cold. Martin hands me hot pads which I shove down my boots. It takes an hour to get dressed, then we head over to the skidoo park and have a 10-minute driving lesson. The skidoo is basically a customised ride-on lawn mower that will never see grass. We slide out of the parking area and hit the frozen surface of the fjord. The engine noise hides all other sounds. We speed north-east, stopping occasionally to view a lone reindeer. Spitsbergen has three species of resident land animal: a dwarf variety of reindeer, the Arctic fox and the polar bear. The first of these cling to life through the winter by digging for scraps of moss and lichen, then fatten up during the brief summer, to the delight of the other two.

After an hour we leave the valley and begin to climb towards a pass where we take advantage of a small hill to have a picnic. Outdoor lunches in minus 20C are different from your average picnic. They don't last as long.

Under way once more, I am wishing that the cumbersome helmet and clothing, necessary to travel at speeds of 80kph, did not interfere so much with viewing the stark beauty around us. But up at these latitudes, the cold is always the dominant factor. When Dutchman Willem Barents first stumbled on this archipelago in 1596, his expedition became trapped in the ice, enduring constant polar bear attacks in temperatures so cold that the men, huddled around a fire, found their socks were on fire but their feet still frozen. Englishman Hugh Willoughby, in the same waters a few years earlier, was found dead in his ship along with all his crew. According to one report some were frozen "in the act of writing, pen in hand ... others at table, spoon in mouth".

"This winter was quite mild," Martin muses. "It even rained once."

I nod understandingly, desperately inserting yet more hot pads into my gloves. We are at -40C and every photograph tempts frostbite. The cold has become my only thought, my obsession.

We come to a small group of huts by the frozen reaches of Templefjord. "This is where the hero of Svalbard, Hilmar Nois, lived," Martin tells us. "He spent a record 37 winter seasons here, hunting foxes and bears."

And all without a string vest, I mutter. At that moment, Hilmar seems to me like the most dangerous kind of lunatic – one people admire. He came here, with three uncles, in 1909 and lived in a tiny hut of wood and earth. The hut still stands, looking more like a relic of the municipal allotment society than a testament to polar heroics.

Far away across the fjord we can see our destination, the ship, but first we pass a glacier, getting off the skidoo to admire the blue ice and spot some large footprints. "Polar bear," confirms Martin. Sadly the animal does not reappear and we skidoo the last mile to the ship. The light has faded to a pearly blue and the huskies who sleep around the ship are being fed. Without losing a second, we park and clump up the gangplank to the antechamber for partial undressing. Then finally we're inside that boat.

Instantly we are transported to a world of warmth, steaming mugs, tots of brandy, mahogany and brass, the smells of cooking, books and charts, smiles. Ted van Broeckhuysen is the captain of our immovable ship, the Noorderlicht, and he tells me how it can take a month of delicate manoeuvres before they finally get properly stuck. The ship was built in 1910 and has been through numerous incarnations: a lightship, a hostel for construction workers, a clubhouse and an empty hulk until Ted and colleagues fully restored it.

We eat a hearty, and convivial, dinner. People settle down afterwards with a book or a map. I examine the charts, spotting remote trapper huts and an abandoned Russian fishing station, tiny human traces in a world of rock and ice. The cold, once fought off, becomes a distant memory and leaves only a seductive languor behind. I wonder if that's how it goes when you are dying out there on the ice: the pain melting into that deliciously irresistible sleepiness. Through the portholes the light has faded to a smooth pinkish glow and the huskies are sleeping. I sip a whisky. Maybe this Arctic explorer business isn't so bad. Maybe I could get to like it. Eventually I head to my cabin and sleep like a baby.

Next day Martin has us up early. We've a long way to go. Our mission is to see a colony of nesting northern fulmars. A little miracle of nature really – that birds could hatch eggs and rear chicks in these conditions. Nesting birds, I recall, were the reason behind the great classic book of polar exploration, Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World – the author and his two companions having been sent by Captain Scott to collect emperor penguin eggs. The cold was so severe that when Cherry-Garrard's teeth chattered at -60C, they shattered.

After a long drive into the mountains we find the birds in a deep sheltered canyon, miraculously raising their young. The peculiar thing is that this is a very common creature and lives off Britain's coast, too. It's like spotting a London bus on Everest.

By evening we are back in Longyearbyen again – back to my favourite power plant. But next morning I'm out once more, ready to try the dog sled. In the Arctic, huskies are kept on the edges of human settlements in compounds of high wire fences. Marthe Sørli, the dog team leader, gives us our instructions. Six dogs in a team. Fetch one at a time. Keep the snow anchors embedded. Dog names are shouted out and I identify my first: a greyish mutt with one blue eye that burns with malice, and a green one that is pure venom. I try to estimate the length of chains on the dogs I have to get past. Would those teeth penetrate the snowsuit? One stands on his kennel and yowls like a mad thing. Others do wild dervish dances. Some, the most scary ones, lie still and watchful.

These are Alaskan huskies, smaller than their Greenlandish cousins, but a bit quicker and – Marthe tells us – less ferocious. As I grab my dog's chain, trying to communicate a confidence I don't feel, I realise he is only excited. They just want to come. They all want to come. He drags me to the sled. I clip him on and go back for another. Soon we are ready. The dogs are wild with excitement and making a noise greater than any skidoo engine. Then Marthe yanks up the anchors and instantly we are jerked forward into – silence. The dogs all stop barking and run. All we hear is the swish of the sled.

We race out of the compound, down the slope and on to the valley bottom. I'm sitting in the sled, but when Marthe finally manages to halt the enthusiastic hounds, we swap over. Once again the mad cacophony is instantly cut off as we spring forward. I've learned the two commands: Ji! means right and Ha! is left. The dogs do not require a go signal. Within minutes I am hooked. I love the peace and tranquility. I love the way you can leap off and run alongside to keep warm. Most of all, I love the dogs – mad snow rolls, fights, total and complete enthusiasm. The day passes far too quickly and I'm left with only one regret – that I didn't do the entire trip by sled.

Back in Longyearbyen, over a reindeer steak in the Huset restaurant, Martin tells me about a friend of his. "He's taken his dogs and gone off to the North Pole – again. He loves it. Weeks out there, camping and sledding."

The memory of the cold is already fading. That delicious sleepy languor is creeping over me, assisted by the Huset's astonishingly well-stocked wine cellar, and I find myself musing on future possibilities. Of course, that is when the Arctic is at its most dangerous – when you're warm.

A professional guide helps when photographing polar bears in the Arctic – especially if you mistake them for a lump of snow

How hard can it be to photograph polar bears? They are the world's biggest land carnivore and live in a treeless environment, so should be fairly easy to spot. And their average walking speed is 3.5mph, so it shouldn't be too hard to get close. How wrong could I be?

Before setting off to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, I asked for advice from photographer and wildlife film-maker Sue Flood. Now, on the very first morning, I realise that I have already broken the first three of her rules: get to know your equipment (I played with my borrowed camera for one day before leaving); bring the right kit (it is raining – why don't I have a cover for the camera?); and wear warm clothing (it's difficult to get good shots when you're shaking with cold).

I am finding it hard to adhere to the fourth rule, too: make eye contact with your subject. The other nine people on the rubber Zodiac boat have apparently spotted a polar bear and are saying, "There he is! Can you see him?" All I can see through rain-smeared glasses is a rocky grey beach with a dirty-looking, boulder-sized lump of snow on it. Have I given up two weeks in the sun to shiver in a lurching boat for this?

Then the lump shifts slightly, and a smaller, black-tipped boulder appears from its other side – a head. It is too far away and in a terrible position for photos, but it is still our first polar bear.

My daughter and I are sailing around Svalbard on the Sergei Vavilov, a former Russian spy ship. Whaling and walrus-hunting were big here in the 17th and 18th centuries, but now seven national parks protect 65% of the archipelago, and hunting bears and walruses is banned. That said, anyone venturing outside Longyearbyen is advised to take a rifle with them. While we are in Svalbard, a Norwegian canoeist camping on one of the islands is dragged from his tent by a bear.

Most of the 103 people on board have booked through Exodus, and although the age range is wide – from 13-year-old Imogen, my daughter, to people in their 70s – everyone is reasonably fit and willing to have a go. The team do try to make concessions for less agile travellers, but weather and sea don't.

In the afternoon we head to an inlet where the remains of a dead whale lie just under the water. All of a sudden there are more bears than you can shake a stick at. One is spotted resting high above us on a ledge, then a mother and cub are sighted towards the top of a mountain. Most exciting of all, a young, scrawny bear is heading straight for the carcass.

We float about 20ft from the bear as it repeatedly dives into the water, emerging with lumps of whale meat in its jaws. Cameras are clicking furiously. I forget about being cold and uncomfortable. All that matters is getting a picture of the animal as it heaves its body furiously from side to side to shake water from its fur.

In the evening we return in the company of professional photographer Paul Goldstein. He knows exactly where the Zodiac needs to be positioned to get the best shots. A large male bear has already dined on the whale carcass and is starting a long, slow climb up the mountain, fabulously backlit by the sun.

"Wait until his offside front leg is coming forward," says Paul. "It opens up the bear's body and makes a better picture." Then, as the bear gets higher, he says: "Drop down a couple of f stops if you really want something unusual."

Most people on the trip are using amateur SLRs or small automatics. Most, including me with my Canon EOS 7D, are taking what Paul describes as "postcard" pictures, the type that will make people go "ahh", rather than force them to linger in admiration. But two days into the trip Paul takes us in hand. Showing a selection of his own images, he illustrates how positioning, light, speed and movement can turn a "nice" photo into a spectacular one.

He also urges us to be more cavalier with our equipment. "Take the cover off your lens and slip it in your pocket so you can change [lenses] without wasting time," he says. "Which is worse? Eventually scratching the lens, or knowing you have missed a once-in-a-lifetime shot because you were fiddling with lens caps? Cameras are tougher than you think."

The next day, as we edge through slushy ice towards a vast glacier. Paul explains how the calving of the ice at the front oxygenates the water, encouraging lots of fish to the surface. The result? Thousand of kittiwakes in a feeding frenzy.

"Slow your camera right down," says Paul. "Try 1/30th [shutter speed]." I do, and instead of a boring shot of birds behaving badly, I get a photo that looks a bit like an Arctic Monet. Some of the birds are in focus because they are flying towards the camera; most are blurred into an essence of motion.

But it is only when we head out into the open sea littered with ice floes that I really feel we are in the Arctic. We see so many bears it is difficult to believe they are endangered. The crew are extremely good at spotting these small blobs of cream in a vast area of white.

The crew spy a mother and cub, and the captain nudges the ship towards them until the vessel is resting against their patch of ice. The bears are so intrigued by the smells emanating from the ship (excited photographers and beef bourguignon) that they come right up and touch the side of the Vavilov with their noses.

Paul is obsessed with achieving "air" in his images. By this he means space between the animal and the ground, to give a real wow factor. And polar bears, despite their bulk, are very obliging: reluctant to get wet, they take giant leaps from one ice floe to another. One hopscotches over several floes.

But the gold medal goes to our very last bear. At Hornsund we see her walking across the top of the glacier. Reaching the side where ice meets land, she lies down on her front with her head and paws pointing towards the water and starts sliding. No air, and too far away for most people to get decent shots, but we will never forget this Amy Williams of the bear world.

•Exodus's (0845 004 1382, exodus.co.uk) 11-day Spitzbergen Photographic Charter with Paul Goldstein tour costs from £4,139pp including SAS flights from London, accommodation in a twin cabin, meals and activities. Departures are on 16 June and 16 July

If you're spending it like Beckham, private islands, penthouses and outer space are within reach. Here's how to take the holidays of the rich and famous, on a budget

It could be you. Your numbers might just come up. And if it's a EuroMillions Rollover, you could be into the holiday territory of the super-rich.

The budgets are rarely bigger, the locations more pristine and itineraries more extraordinary than for the clients – mainly billionaires and royalty – of a company called Based on a True Story (020-7100 6991, basedonatruestory.co.uk)). Its trips start at around €200,000, rising to €2m if you include private jets and superyachts. Holidays have included nights in a cast-iron bed on a private precipice over Victoria Falls, and closing Burmese airspace so a private jet can fly to a superyacht in the untouched Mergui archipelago.

For more squillionaire holiday options, and their more affordable alternatives, try the following …

Ultimate skiing

$24,250 Forget the Alps – too many oligarchs, darling – and head south. Deep south. Antarctica's Ellsworth Mountains offer some of the planet's best ski touring. Adventure Network International (+1 801 266 4876, adventure-network.com) runs guided mini-expeditions into the exquisite landscapes of the Connell Canyon, Charles Peak and the west face of Mount Rossman. The 14-day trips (the next departure is not until December) include all meals and activities, equipment and transfers, but not international flights.

On a budget Swap Antarctic for Arctic and you pay a fraction of the price. Stay at Lyngen Lodge (+47 93 440010, lyngenlodge.com) in northern Norway for a week for about £2,458pp, including private transfers. Norwegian (norwegian.no) flies from Gatwick to Tromsø from £53 return.

Venezuela in style

€2m A tailormade trip could start with a few days on a yacht – super if necessary – in Venezuela's Los Roques islands. Then you take a chopper to the dramatic Gran Sabana plateau, where ancient massifs rise dramatically from forested plains, before lunch above Angel Falls. Final price depends on flights and choice of yacht.

On a budget Explore (0845 013 1537, explore.co.uk) has a 15-day Venezuelan expedition with a visit to Angel Falls, a rainforest canoe journey and a day on a Caribbean beach, from £2,199pp including flights and camping/basic accommodation.

Your fairytale castle

£63,180 Want to make like Madonna in a grand Scottish pile? You could splurge £31,520 for a night's sole use of Skibo Castle, with its 20 massive rooms and lodges. But you'd also have to drop a £24,000 joining fee for the Carnegie Club (carnegieclubs.com) plus £7,660 annual membership.

On a budget In January, all rooms at the Tudor Thornbury Castle (01454 281182, thornburycastle.co.uk) in the Cotswolds are £260 a night, including three-course dinner and breakfast. You might even bag the four-poster where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn once slept.

Swiss bliss

€42,000 A night in the Royal Penthouse Suite at the Hotel Président Wilson (+41 22 906 6112, hotelpwilson.com) on Lake Geneva costs the same as five years at a Travelodge. It is slightly more luxurious, with seven bathrooms, two hammams, two dining rooms, a gym and a huge party space. Artwork, flowers and furniture are tailored to guests' tastes, and there are antiques galore, bulletproof windows and helipad. Oh yes, breakfast is extra.

On a budget The Bel'Espérance (+41 22 818 37 37, hotel-bel-esperance.ch) close to Geneva's Old Town has a roof terrace with fantastic views. Doubles cost about £100, including breakfast and a public transport pass. Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies to Geneva from several UK airports from £56 return.

Ancient cultures

£9,950 It's one thing to tour a top historical site, quite another to do so with a renowned archaeologist who worked on the excavations. In Peru that means Guillermo Cock explaining the incredible Moche pyramids and burial sites on the Pacific coast, and, at Machu Picchu, Alfredo Mormontoy Atayupanqui who is revising some of the findings of Hiram Bingham, discoverer of the Inca citadel in 1911. You would travel by swanky trains and stay in luxurious style at Orient Express hotels on a 10-day trip with Abercrombie & Kent (0845 618 2200, abercrombiekent.co.uk).

On a budget Guides with Journey Latin America (020-8747 8315, journeylatinamerica.co.uk) are less well-known but still knowledgeable. Its new Machu Picchu and Easter Island trip, combining two historical treasures in one two-week holiday, costs from £1,897pp, excluding international flights, until 25 March.

A number one safari

£21,750 Fellow billionaires will approve of your choice of three extraordinary camps in the Botswana bush. Kings Pool has a unique underground hide with eye-level views of elephant herds; Vumbura Plains Camp in the Okavango Delta offers epic views from raised rooms open on three sides; and at Little Mombo Campan exclusive-use deal gives you three vast tents with high-level walkways, allowing animals to stroll through the camp. A nine-night trip with Ultimate Safaris & Islands (020-7589 8800, ultimatesafarisandislands.com) includes full-board, safaris and first-class flights.

On a budget Dragoman's (+44 01728 861133, dragoman.com) nine-day trip from Victoria Falls to Johannesburg, taking in Chobe national park, the Okavango Delta, and a rhino sanctuary, costs from £1,425pp including camping and basic transport, but not flights.

An island of one's own

£48,980 North Island, in the Seychelles, with its peaks, beaches and lush vegetation, is the ultimate Indian Ocean eco-retreat, with 11 vast villas. Keep it exclusive by taking all 11, complete with butlers, sunken sofas and mother-of-pearl chandeliers. The above price is per night, but that does include fishing, scuba-diving and acclaimed cuisine. Heli-transfers extra. Book through ITC Classics (01244 355 527, itcclassics.co.uk).

On a budget Stay in a Landmark Trust (01628 825925, landmarktrust.org.uk) cottage on Lundy, in the Bristol Channel, and you needn't see another soul. Tibbetts is a granite cottage nearly two miles from the village, with no electricity. Sleeping four it costs from £215 for four nights.

The final frontier

$200,000 Virgin Galactic's sub-orbital flights, starting in a few years' time, already have 330 takers. As well as five minutes looking down on earth, you get three days' training in New Mexico, followed by a "lift" to a mother ship before your spacecraft, the SS2, is launched. After floating around in zero gravity 68 miles above the Earth, you'll glide back to terra firma. Hopefully. Book through Elegant Resorts (01244 897003, elegantresorts.co.uk).

On a budget Board a full-scale mock- up of the US Space Shuttle at the Euro Space Centre (+32 6165 6465, eurospacecenter.be) in Transinne, Belgium. Entrance costs about £9. Eurostar (08432 186186, eurostar.com) returns to any Belgian station cost from £80pp.

The Human Planet series has reached the Arctic and there should have been a warning at the start: dozens of animals were killed during the making of this programme

Skins: your verdict on the new cast

Mmmm, kiviak for tea. The recipe? Take one rotten old seal skin, stuff with little auks – the whole thing, beaks, feet, feathers and all, about 500 of them should do it. Sew the seal skin up, add a dollop of grease, put a big rock on top and leave for several months, until the birds have fermented into a sticky, pungent, toxic, cheesy gloop. Then enjoy with friends for Christmas. Mmmm. Suddenly mum's overcooked turkey isn't looking so bad (I know Mum, it was Simon's fault).

Human Planet (BBC1) has reached the Arctic – northern Greenland. They must be getting used to British television crews up there; Bruce Parry was in town just the other day.

The catching of the auks is fun – fishing in the sky with nets on long springy poles. Not so fun for the auks, but there seem to be plenty of them up there.

A narwhal hunt is exciting, too. Three men in kayaks working in a pack, using stealth and cunning like corvettes hunting a U-boat. When the battle is over, and won, it's a sorrier sight; the extraordinary creature pulled out on to ice by its magnificent spike, half whale, half unicorn. But hey, that's what they do up there, you've got to respect that. And they need the narwhal skin for vitamin C. Personally, I'd get in my kayak and paddle south, until I reached somewhere I could grow vegetables, or keep a chicken, or at least where there was a Tesco Metro, with orange juice, and pizzas as an alternative to kiviak.

The catching of an arctic shark, a monster from the dark depths, is sadder still. There's no battle, no contest, no drama – he's simply dragged up slowly from half a mile down, pulled unceremoniously through a hole in the ice to die, gasping in a world he doesn't belong in, then hacked apart and fed to the dogs. It's not just wildlife porn, this show; it's wildlife snuff porn, a total slaughter fest. There should be a warning at the start; dozens of animals were killed during the making of this programme.

At least in the town of Churchill in northern Canada the tables are turned. Here, hungry polar bears roam the streets, looking for bite-sized children to snack on before they get to the seal colonies further north. Halloween is a specially fruitful hunting time. Mmmm . . . trick or child.

The start of series five of Skins (E4) means a whole new cast to get to know. Franky looks initially promising. She's freaky, androgynous ("is that a batty or a lezza?" in teenspeak) and has an interesting style. There's some bad stuff in her past: bullying, a Facebook – sorry "Friendlook" – fraping, her best mate Dean went to young offenders ("that's so fucking cool!").

But it very quickly all goes a bit pantomime, with her two gay dads with their overvests and their serrano and reblochon sandwiches, and a ridiculous mobility scooter joyride chase on the way to school. So by the time Franky gets there, instead of feeling her awkward terror and dying inside and all those other things I can just about remember from starting at a new school, I'm just feeling mildly unamused. Hello? Earth to ridiculous?

In the past Skins has been sad and difficult and occasionally beautiful, much like teenage. And if it hasn't perfectly reflected reality, it has certainly had some basis there – like one of those wonky distortive fairground mirrors that produces a scarier version of the real you.

So far, this lot just seem a bit sillier. And I'm not overimpressed with the acting: there's too much of that . . . hesitant . . . pausing . . . inexperienced . . . actors . . . do because they think it makes them sound real but actually it makes them sound as if they're in a school play. And then a gun, already, out of nowhere . . .

The first day back is always difficult, maybe it will settle down, bed in. I'll be interested to hear what people of a target audience age make of it. But for one fortysomething it could be time to let Skins go.

There's much more to Lapland and the Arctic Circle than Santa. Been there readers share their top tips, from sea skiing in Canada to watching the northern lights from your bed in Finland

• Add a tip for next week and you could win a digital camera

Winning tip: Senja Island, Norway

There can't be many places where the scenery is quite as dramatic as Senja, where jagged mountains plunge into fjords. Hire a car and drive round the island – with each tunnel you exit, and each new fjord view, you will think it can't get any more astounding, but it does. Even better, there are hardly any tourists – most go to the nearby Lofoten Islands. Get in touch with Bent at Senja Mountain Lodge (senjalodge.com): he'll take you off-piste skiing, climbing or snowshoeing.
Rebecca Day

Finland

Hotel Kakslauttanen, Lapland
At my favourite winter wonderland in the Arctic Circle you stay in traditional log cabins with open fires, private saunas and outside hot tubs. You can also spend a night in a heated glass igloo where you can see the northern lights from the bed. Or try husky sledding, a snowmobile excursion to the forests on the Russian border, ice fishing with the local Sami people, or a reindeer safari. This is a perfect location for Christmas, a romantic break or a family adventure.
kakslauttanen.fi/en
Elainefp

Karaoke, Arctic style, in Lapland
There is no experience more surreal than seeing local people in Lapland singing karaoke. It is more melancholy than the Portuguese fado, more entertaining than Las Vegas. The women arrive on skidoos, then peel off their helmets and overalls to reveal cocktail dresses and dancing shoes. The karaoke is a window into the minds of Arctic people. Where else will you hear 1980s big hair heavy metal followed by Lady Gaga, Frank Sinatra, and a Russian ballad? The Finns say that in Lapland no normal rules apply, and I have to agree.
wanhamestari.fi
bigsoulmama

Sweden

The Aurora Retreat, Junosuando
The bright blue skies and startling snowy landscape during the day and a night sky lit by the dancing northern lights take your breath away. Coming back here after a day's husky driving, snowmobiling, crosscountry skiing or sledging is perfect – cosy and intimate, lovely home-cooked food and roaring log fires. For those wanting something less adventurous there is yoga, massage, cooking and trips to visit Santa. With temperatures averaging -30C, it's a real bonus that all the necessary outerwear and boots are provided.
auroraretreat.se
Triciamaryb

Norway

Walking on Svartisen glacier
Visit Svartisen glacier from Holandsfjord to an arm called Engabreen, which appears to reach down and tickle the fjord with its icy fingers. The magical blue ice draws you nearer but the screeching and groaning remind you of the hidden dangers. Ice caves and deep fissures abound, so book a guide if you wish to explore. They'll equip you with rope, ice picks and crampons for your unforgettable hike. The walk lasts about five hours and should be booked in advance.
visitnorway.com
FarawayVisions

Greenland

Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island
Qeqertarsuaq is the largest village on Disko Island, off the west coast of Greenland, with a population of about 1,000. After you've spent days trekking on glaciers in 24-hour daylight, climbing virgin peaks and wading through thigh-deep snow drifts while eating ration-packed foods, the village is exquisite. It offers stunning views of a bay filled with monstrous icebergs, and opportunities to scuba dive in the incomprehensible cold or catch and eat the freshest, purest cod you have ever had. This is where adventurers become enthralled for life.
qaasuitsup.gl/en
adavidson

Canada

Sea skiing, Baffin Island
Try a skiing experience with a difference in the Canadian Arctic. Wrap up warm and ski straight out of the door of your beachside cabin and out on to the sea ice. Ski past the fishing boats moored for winter on the frozen ocean waters and glide upriver through the mountains where, if you're lucky, you may come across one of the locals fishing at their ice-hole for a few Arctic char for dinner.
visitcanada.com
Beckslottie

Iceland

Blue Lagoon, Grindavík
A geothermal spa that helps to relax every muscle in your body, cleanse your skin and provide an incredible volcanic setting for all that. Spending a day here is rather too easy, with 37C to 39C waters, containing an array of minerals and algae for those aching limbs. Even visiting as a 17-year-old, I loved being pampered beyond belief. There is even a hotel on site so that the tranquillity can be extended for as long as you like.
bluelagoon.com
adavidson

Norway

Lofoten Islands
Endless days in summer, endless nights in winter. In summer, wild flowers compete to make the most of their short season, and sitting by the sea at midnight, watching white-tailed sea eagles and reading your book by the light of the sun, you may even experience an algal bloom turning the warm sea brilliant turquoise. In winter, a wonderful place to see the northern lights with (relatively) mild temperatures due to the Gulf Stream. From February to May, you may find the smell of drying cod somewhat overpowering. The only other downside is that you'll always suffer from the urge to go back there!
lofoten-info.no
Sladatlantic

Finland

Ylläs in Finnish Lapland
Dress for the weather and you will fall in love with this place. If it's fun you're after, you need a week to do it all: skiing, dog sledding, ice fishing, reindeer sleighs, snowmobiles, meeting the local Sami people. The pristine snow is another option, with miles of walking trails that cannot be beaten for peace and solitude. Or be a big kid and travel to Santa's official home, Rovaniemi. Add to this first-class hotels, romantic log cabins, blazing log fires and you have it all. I stayed at the Äkäs hotel, in unspoilt Äkäslompolo near Ylläs, where they gave me a wakeup call when the northern lights appeared.
yllas.fi/en
Pmartini

Sweden

Arvidsjaur
I first visited Arvidsjaur when I was a young teen. My auntie and I went just after Christmas for our annual holiday together. On our first night we witnessed the aurora borealis from just outside our spa hotel, Laponia. Over three days, we went husky sledging, travelled across frozen lakes on skidoos and ate fantastic local food. For a snowy holiday somewhere peaceful and beautiful, Arvidsjaur is perfect.
hotell-laponia.se
KaySmythe

The Inuit community in Ittoqqortoormiit comes together to prepare whale meat, but one of the party has seen it all before

The old man pauses while searching among the black beach stones for a point for his walking stick. It's slippery, fresh blood and freezing arctic waters washing over them. Amid the young men, cutting and heaving and slicing and pulling, it's the serenity of this nonagenarian that captures my attention. The face of tranquillity belying wrinkling years of wisdom. While one eye darts beneath thick glasses to check his balance, he surveys the community all around him. And nods approval; all is good and as it should be in Ittoqqortoormiit.

I'm standing on freezing Walrus Bay. A hunter's wife tells me these are the first whales the community has killed in six years. The community has walked out to the secluded bay to lend a hand and watch the age-old practices of flensing and carving. All that will remain of two minke whales, six and 10 metres, will be 10 equal piles of skin, blubber, ribs, fins and great, geometric blocks of deep-red meat. Ten piles represent 10 hunters and their extended families. Nothing will be wasted. Even the giant back bones will be dragged to where huskies, tied up for the short summer, will fight each other for their share.

As the butchering continues, with family members loading meat and blubber into giant plastic bags, the old man sits on one of the bigger rocks at the base of the steep scree slopes hemming the bay. He's the elder. He's seen the old ways erode, but some stay the same and he likes that.

Ittoqqortoormiit is one of the northernmost settlements on the largely depopulated east coast. Its 400 Inuit people, ancestors of the Thule migration from Arctic North America, are one of Greenland's last hunter societies.

As the chilling polar stream bears down, I join the throng by the whales. A boy offers a slice of thick skin, cut with his pocketknife. I taste its salty crunch. I revere the creature, and I know its life force is serving to these lovers of the Arctic. Later, I'll sample my own small whale fillets and discover, when seared on a hot skillet, there's first the oily sheen of lipids on the palate, then a lean, sharp flavour akin to kangaroo.

I see the old man in the back of a pickup truck. Surrounded by family and huge bags of whale meat, blubber and the odd rib bone, he's serene. The gods of east Greenland have been kind and all is as it should be in Ittoqqortoormiit.

Every week Guardian Weekly publishes a 'Letter from' one of its readers from around the world. We welcome submissions – they should focus on giving our readers a clear sense of a place and its people. Please send them to weekly.letter.from@guardian.co.uk

Could Greenland, with its old reliance on whale and seal, become a gourmet destination? Its inventive new chefs think so, but will a frozen Tim Moore agree?

Despite the best efforts of the Vikings, who chose its inviting name to hoodwink prospective settlers, no one expects Greenland to be lushly hospitable. Its bleak magnificence had been laid out beneath my plane window for half the morning: a frosted, monochrome enormity of granite and glaciers two-thirds the size of India, fringed with slightly more inhabitants than Hereford.

All the same, stepping out into the still, bright morning at Kangerlussuaq airport, the brutal reality of life at minus 40C came as a shock. My nostrils crinkled as everything up them instantly froze. Then I breathed in, and Dracula punched me in the throat.

I'd come to try a bold twin experiment by Greenland's tourist authorities. First, a new season for holidaymakers: the flesh-shattering depths of winter. February and March are the cruellest months in the Arctic and almost all visitors to Greenland currently come in summer, when you only need one pair of gloves. Second, a new destination for the adventurous gourmet. Copenhagen's Noma has become one of the world's most-feted restaurant (and ranked the very best for the last three years) with its freestyle riffs on Nordic cuisine. Denmark's former colony now finds itself in the gastronomic halo, a challenge for native chefs even in the south of the country, where the Vikings' bucolic brand name seems least outrageous – they've got trees and everything. I'd come to the barren and permafrosted mid north-west, which must surely rank as the foodie's final frontier.

My base was Ilulissat, a town of 4,000 people and 2,500 sled dogs, situated, like every other settlement in Greenland, on the coast. It's a plucky, cheerful place with brightly coloured houses warming up the deep-frozen landscape, and a harbour becomingly strewn with little boats in ice-locked hibernation.

Both the hotels I stayed in were spanking new and devoid of traditional local character – wisely so, as a turf roof and fish-oil heating isn't likely to bag too many stars on TripAdvisor. What they did have were some tirelessly dumbfounding vistas. Ilulissat means "the icebergs" in Greenlandic, and what a sight they were through the treble-glazing: sometimes a fleet of Tolkienesque dreadnoughts, sometimes a Henry Moore retrospective on the run, lined up on a massive iced horizon thickly buttered with sunset, or picked out by a full moon and the free-form green swooshes of the northern lights. The Greenlandic winter landscape is under a fairytale curse: its serene, shimmering majesty tempts you outside, then snaps your flash-frozen soul in half.

Almost everyone in Ilulissat works in fishing, most of them at factories that process prawns and halibut for export to Denmark. Semi-independent Greenland is stumbling through a slow-motion divorce from its one-time overlord: Copenhagen still pays an annual subsidy and takes charge of foreign and financial policy but Inuit Greenlandic is now the sole official language, and the old Danish place names have been replaced. With its halting, sibilant clucks, Greenlandic is not an accessible tongue, though neither, as we've learnt from the strangled gurgles of many imported TV dramas, is Danish. The half-Greenlandic guide who showed me round what was once Jakubshavn said that her young son spoke better English than Danish. (She also told me that he once got frostbite on her 20-minute walk to school.)

Reclaiming Greenland's national identity, insists champion chef Inunnguaq Hegelund, also means reclaiming its national cuisine. No easy task in a land where what passes for fertile soil is 500 years old.

"Well, it's amazing what you can do with angelica," he told me in his aunt's kitchen, bigging up one of the few plants that prospers here. (In the days ahead I found that what you can mainly do is make everything taste faintly of fennel and rhubarb.)

Hegelund is an engagingly self-assured 24-year-old, who isn't entering the national catering finals this year "to give someone else a chance". His repertoire at Ilulissat's Hotel Arctic is inevitably fish-centric, but the splendid meal he created for us at his aunt's was a tribute to Greenland's unsung, land-based fauna. I didn't imagine that sheep could survive in Greenland. The one I ate bits of obviously hadn't, but it was beautifully succulent. I'd never even heard of muskox, which despite its name and the beefy rareness of its meat, is a massively furry goat. Hegelund set it off with a rich sauce made from crowberries, which ripen in tiny black hillside clusters during Greenland's nightless summers. I was told that Greenlandic culture remains rooted in the kill-everything-and-eat-it tradition of the macho outdoorsman but Hegelund – trained in Denmark, and attuned to European sensibilities – understands that the typical gourmet tourist is unlikely to appreciate the marine-mammal aspect of this tradition. If the search for offshore oil continues to disappoint, tourism revenue may prove crucial for Greenland's independence, and people who go there want to watch whales, not eat them. And it isn't just the ethics that might leave a bad taste for visitors: when I tried seal a few days later, it proved stubbornly unmoreish: dark, tough, fishy meat that tastes like the smell of 1970s cat food.

The morals of seal hunting may deter some tourists from visiting but the clothing it yields is about practicality. My two-day dog-sledding trip simply would not have happened without my thermal sealskin anorak and salopettes, outermost of five layers of clothing. Without the matching mittens, and two pairs of under-gloves, I'd be typing this with my nose.

I've been dog sledding before, in Lapland with two of my children a few years ago. Then I took charge of my own sled, or tried to, clinging on to the waist-high bar like a man being dragged down the Cresta Run on a Zimmer frame. This time, there were many more dogs: 16 huskies instead of four, a tangled dog's cradle of yapping jostles. Plus, I was a passenger, sitting with only the ropes that attached the luggage beneath me to hold on to. My driver, Hans, was invigoratingly old-school. Frost speckled his sparse beard, and his legs were sheathed in a voluminous pair of polar-bear-fur trousers.

The following three hours offered an immersive experience of Greenland's hardcore winter wilderness. We swished across frigid lakes at the rear of an eight-sled canine convoy, the whiff of musky poo forcing its way up my nostrils through a bandit-scarf and two balaclavas. My face-holes began to leak fluids that soon solidified in the fabric that sheathed them. This grim carapace froze to my nose; then, after some ill-advised poking, to my tongue. My eyelids periodically bonded.

When I got off to help push us up, everything instantly defrosted into steamy sweat. The process was promptly reversed when we barrelled down the snow-marbled granite on the other side. With the brilliant sun nosing into another golden goodbye our convoy reached a pair of cosy huts. Then sped right past them and out onto the frozen fjord behind.

Hans and his friends were out here, in the ultra-remote, super-hostile middle of frozen nowhere, to go fishing. Some of them were already at it, winching up a long, many-hooked line through a hole in the half-metre ice. Hans told me it had been minus 55C out on the ice the week before. If the conditions were inhuman, then so was the alien panorama: a yawning white flatness girdled by heavy, lifeless mountains. The men at work might more convincingly have been prospecting for rare elements near the pole of Mars.

As it was, the first of a succession of huge halibut emerged from the hole, each waist-high to the men who unhooked them. When the time came to cut them up into chunks they were frozen rigid, though the smell of solid blood was enough to set the dogs off into a wolverine chorus.

The huts, when we made it back to them, seemed as warm and welcoming as a village pub on Boxing Day, though by the time our fresh-off-the-sled halibut soup hit the boil, the water in my bottle still wasn't moving.

I was too tired to care. The simple act of generating body heat all day had exhausted me: sitting on your arse is hard work when that arse is frozen. I rolled out a billion-tog sleeping bag on the floor and slept right through an apparently epic twin display of northern lights and snoring. We sledded back to Ilulissat and spent the following days in ever-smaller and more-remote settlements.

I took a helicopter over the fractured ice sheet to Disko Island, a Danish name that probably hasn't survived just so that I could send funny text messages, but because the native variant is Qeqertarsuaq. Eight hundred people live in the only significant town, another kaleidoscopic huddle of warm houses and frozen boats. Backed by long, flat-topped mountains, it looked like rural Iceland with a broken boiler. Everyone kept telling me that Disko was a sea of green in the summer, "though we know it's hard to believe".

Greenland's cultural collisions smashed out everywhere. Skinned seals were strung up from porches topped with satellite dishes. A hunter dragged a big, white arctic hare past a new supermarket full of Pringles and tortellini. Children in Manchester United shirts played three-and-in at a football net half-buried in iced snow. I had the finest meal of my trip – plump, moist, reindeer steak with crowberries – prepared by a Greenlandic cook who boasted that the only time he ever went outdoors was to smoke. The menu at Arthur, Disko's solitary restaurant, is winningly dependent on what this man can get his hands on: a fisherman had just turned up at the kitchen door with wolf-fish and a salesman's smile. When my helicopter out of Disko was delayed by a blizzard, the chef put together an impromptu muskox chilli.

I was taken out to a headland on the edge of town by Outi and Mads Tervo, husband and wife researchers at Disko's venerable Arctic station. They're studying the song of the bowhead whale, a huge and mysterious animal that suffered more than most in the bad old days: during the 1850s, four bowheads were being slaughtered every day. Mads opened a hatch in a squat little lighthouse and handed me a headset connected to a distant array of submerged microphones. Whale song is a soaring, groaning electronic chorus. Its purpose is still hazy, but the Tervos have established that the anthem, mimicked identically by every bowhead, is different each year.

Not bad going when you learn how many tunes some of them have to remember: recent autopsies have found evidence – in the form of ancient ivory harpoon tips embedded deep in their blubber – which suggests that bowheads can live for more than 200 years, longer than any other mammal. One which died during US president Bill Clinton's term of office survived a harpoon attack when Thomas Jefferson was president. It felt portentous when Outi pointed to sea, and in a distant patch of open water between the toothpaste-blue bergs, I saw two great black crescents rise and fall.

The final trip out of Ilulissat was an hour-long jaunt for my snowmobile driver, and an ordeal of Scott-grade folly for me. Snowmobiles go much faster than dogs, so passengers get much colder. My goggles were impenetrably ice-rimed before we'd even left town. When I sensed the terrain begin to undulate I curled both arms round my driver's tangibly reluctant torso, but numbness soon slackened my grip.

Blind, spent and mired in frozen mucus, by the time we arrived in Oqaatsut (formerly known as Rodebay) I didn't feel my life was worth saving. When I fumbled off my goggles my driver squinted at my central brow with some concern, then prodded it with an appraising thumb. "Souvenir of Greenland," he grunted: a crusty red bindi of first-degree frostbite.

I thawed out over a lavish marine buffet in a guesthouse run by a German couple. Wind-dried halibut, breaded capelin, deep-fried cod roe – as long as you forgot to eat the latter, everything was rewardingly weird and wonderful. I'd learned that even in Greenland's most unpromisingly desolate extremities – running water in Oqaatsut means a lump of melting iceberg in a tank – you will eat well. Perhaps especially well, with the nearest breakfast pop tart on the other side of two mountains and a frozen fjord.

Afterwards, I went out to explore with Ole Dorph, town elder and de-facto mayor. Home to 46 people, Oqaatsut in deepest winter had the thrilling air of mankind's last stand. Big icebergs came right up to the door. Sled dogs howled beneath racks of wizened fish left out to dry. A fair few of the far-flung scatter of houses were abandoned, their frost-bleached furnishings picked out by the late sun coming in through cracked windows.

Dorph told me that his town had been dying since its fish-processing plant closed in 2000. Oqaatsut, or more properly Oqaatsut, had begun life in the 18th century as a Dutch whaling station. He pointed out the original barrel-making cooperage, still apparently in use. "We have a little tourism," he said, "but most of us must take our living from the sea."

And with that he led me into a warehouse by the frigid shoreline. At the back stood a large, cold store, which exhaled a pungent fog when Dorph opened its heavy door. Inside, his deep-frozen dream for Oqaatsut's future lay piled up around us in thousands of vacuum-sealed sachets.

When the fish plant closed, Dorph set up a local co-operative and after many years of lobbying was awarded the right, under an "aboriginal subsistence" exemption, to kill and process a bowhead whale. The necessary investment almost crippled the tiny town, and things got worse when the grim work was done. In the 40 years since Greenland landed its last bowhead, people had lost their taste for its very blubbery meat. The supermarkets wouldn't take it. Nor would local fishmarkets. As Dorph discovered, even the people of Oqaatsut didn't want to eat the stuff, and two years on are now feeding it to their dogs.

I didn't know what to say, or what to think. This big fridge full of plastic bags was the final resting place of a mighty, majestic creature, the end of a life that might, just, have begun before Queen Victoria's. The people who lived here had, in the final analysis, slaughtered it for no reason, but I still felt for them. And with their nation's independence in some curious way beholden to ethically minded, foodie-centric extreme tourism, you have to believe that Oqaatsut's short-term loss is this truly astonishing country's long-term gain.

Chasing Ice, a documentary by the producers of Academy award-winning The Cove, tells the story of James Balog's mission to capture visual evidence of the effect of climate change on our planet

Chasing Ice, the award winning film of one man's mission to provide undeniable evidence of climate change in the Arctic, premieres in the UK on 3 December

Reindeer soup, northern lights, sleigh rides through moonlit snow - Jenny Diski takes a slow boat through the fjords into the Arctic Circle

There have always been travellers: hunter-gatherers, nomads, merchants, migrants, explorers, crusaders, troubadours and pilgrims. There are still business travellers and immigrants, of course, but these days, whether it's a journey of a lifetime or an annual holiday, many of the people getting on planes, boats and trains are off to somewhere else in search of what they describe simply as an "experience", as though no further explanation were needed. The desire is for a special experience, for something particular that occurs usually far away and happens to or is witnessed by them in person, and many places in the world now have much of their economy based on fulfilling that desire.

What was I looking for, when I started out at St Pancras, heading for Tromsø in the north of Norway, 350km inside the Arctic Circle, in the dead of winter? I had a hankering to travel into the darkness and spend some time there, looking at the fading light. To go north and see what north really means as the light disappears, the temperature drops and the world freezes. But not as an explorer - not as Amundsen or Scott struggled with life and death towards the poles. Not being in the slightest degree rugged, I went as a modern tourist, one of the millions with the time and money to go in search of experience and convenience both, a leisurely traveller taking advantage of integrated timetables and modern transportation. Though not too modern. I kept my feet on the ground, wanting to get a sense of the distance I was going and the landscape I was travelling through. So I didn't fly to Tromsø, but took a route involving six trains and a ship that took me overland through Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, and farther north by sea, sailing in and out of the fjords that wrinkle the coast of Norway.

If you go by train, give yourself time: even spending a night in Oslo wasn't enough to take the weariness out of the two days it took to get there. By the time I got to the highlight of the train journey - the famous vintage railway from Oslo to Bergen, that crossed the snow-covered plateau high in the mountains and passed the blue Hardangerjøkulen glacier - I'd grown pretty tired of the rhythm of the track. It didn't help that when I settled myself in the elegant old train, I found I was between two windows with a blank wall beside me and just a foreshortened sliver of view from the window of the seat in front. More a tease than a view. I sipped the pretty good coffee from the trolley that came round, and sulked. Odd, really, to be disgruntled at not seeing out of a window when I wanted to travel in the dark. Eventually, I found a buffet coach, without a buffet, but with tables and chairs beside curtained windows, and parked myself there for the delirious view of flat white blankness surrounded by rough peaks, creeping glaciers and brilliant sunlight sparking the snow crystals beside the line. So far, not much in the way of polar night. The frozen waterfalls, like suddenly stilled film, had me worrying pleasantly but at length about how waterfalls freeze. From the top down? Bottom up? From the outside inwards, so that the water still falls for a while inside a cylinder of ice?

I got to Bergen in time to board the ship, the MS Trollfjørd, in which I was to spend five days threading up into the Arctic Circle towards Tromsø. I'd heard of this working ferry, a smallish mail and cargo boat, I imagined, that took Norwegians up and down the coast, like a local bus, and also carried some tourists. Hopelessly out of date, I discovered. Though a few local people were making their way along the coast, most of the 400 passengers (half the ship's capacity) were German and English couples and families, with a few evident newlyweds who nibbled at each other frequently and gave us older folk a knowing pang or two. I was on one of those floating hotels you hear talk of, and I confess my heart sank at the sight of the glass lifts running up and down amidships to each of the nine decks, the frantically patterned carpets, the shop, the cafe, the starry-lit ceilings. I was relieved to find that my room was more like a ship's cabin than a hotel room: plain but comfortable, and with proper hums, creaking and rattlings to reassure me I was at sea, after all. I was even more relieved to discover that however garish the ship looked, someone, somewhere understood that this strange, sinuous journey towards the pole didn't require piped music or entertainment. The lights on board were always dim, especially near the vast, panoramic windows in the viewing lounge, and there were plenty of comfortable places to sit, uninterrupted, so that all the eerie subtlety of the sun's brief rising at well past 10am and falling back below the horizon by 2.30pm could be watched and wondered at. I wanted nothing more than to spend a couple of hours every day watching the mysterious steel-grey water and the bright and shadowed blue-grey twilight passing by. The sea made foamy scurries around rocky disturbances in its way. Great monsters slowly appeared in the half-light, towering granite cliffs with crags and deformations frosted with ice, and snow nestled in ancient chasms. Smooth water, convoluted stone and every shading of mist, cloud and ice kept me fixated at the window or on the shockingly windy deck throughout the brief daylight hours. I came to appreciate this paradoxically gaudy ship that put quiet looking at a high premium.

We passed by thousands of islands and islets, docking frequently, two or three times a day. There were organised excursions during the longer stops, but I enjoyed just wandering around the harbour, or the town if it was close enough - in Ålesund, for example, where the dock was right by the streets of pretty, multicoloured, wooden houses with long, thin windows reaching up into sharply pointed eaves. The town burned down in 1904 and was rebuilt in art nouveau style. Bad luck and good luck - imagine if it had burned down in 1964.

Tromsø, when I finally left the ship, turned out to be a university town, permanently set in party mode. Lots of shops, and late at night the thudding of dance music coming from club after club. T-shirted men stood in groups smoking outside in the -6C, and women in short skirts and high heels teetered dangerously along ungritted, ice-covered pavements.

I, wearing as much as possible, went off with five other tourists in the early evening with Kjetil Skogli, the guide responsible for helping Joanna Lumley find the northern lights on TV. This was what most of the tourists were here for - an "experience" of the aurora borealis - and what Tromsø and most of northern Norway offered them. It's a brand. The ship called its journey "Hunting The Light", and Chasing The Light in his people carrier was Kjetil's speciality. Not a phenomenon that happens or doesn't in that part of the world, but a quest, a reason for leaving home.

The lights were Kjetil's personal obsession, as it turned out. We started out at 6.30pm and he drove at speed away from cloud, snow and city lights, to find the clear skies hinted at by various weather instruments. He happily answered questions, but otherwise was silently intent on finding the lights in the sky. But the promised clear skies were invariably clouded over, and the snow fell each time we got to them. We drove fast and furiously along the major roads, often crossing our own tracks, until at one point we were just 14km from the Finnish border. At 2am we got out for perhaps the fourth or fifth time by the side of a road, but on this occasion Kjetil set up his camera. He pointed out a streak of northern light, though all I saw was something that looked like a very slightly lighter cloud than the rest. But it seemed to please my fellow tourists whose determination to experience the lights kept them from freezing in the 25-below-zero night. Myself, I'd seen the lights before, and much brighter, in Arctic Sweden, but in any case, it was quiet darkness I'd been after, rather than a hell-ride quest for green streaks in the sky. How far are we from Tromsø, I wondered, a little desperate by then. "You don't want to know," Kjetil said. We arrived back in the city at 3am, after eight and a half hours of driving and standing by the side of the road looking up at an uneventful sky.

The following evening, I went inland again, to take a ride on a reindeer sled and have a Sami supper in a lavvu (a kind of tepee). There were two sleds, each drawn by a reindeer. Roar led the first with his seven-year-old daughter Karoline, and I followed behind on a low, elementary wooden sled, not at all like that of the Snow Queen, being pulled silently along a meandering, wooded mountain track, in the blazing polar night. The gleaming whiteness of the waist-deep, powdery snow lit up the darkness and reflected a brilliant quarter-moon and sparkling stars. It wasn't a real journey, like Roar and his family make, following the annual migration of the reindeer, but it was a jewelled and icy few hours of being allowed a glimpse into another rhythm, another way of leading a life. In the lavvu, we met up with others who had been dog sledding and light hunting. Craig and Rachel from Leicester had made a list of all the things they wanted to do before they die. Seeing the northern lights was on it. But why, I wondered, as we ate delicious reindeer soup. "For the experience. So I can say I've seen them in person." In fact, Craig was going home the next day without seeing the lights. He was philosophical, but his list would be incomplete.

"What about you?" I asked Roar. "Is there somewhere you want to go, something you want to experience?" He smiled. "I like to be in the forest and mountains with my reindeer. There's nowhere else I ever want to be." That was another late night, but it felt good sitting in the wood-fire's light, talking quietly to people from there and far away. I, at least, felt the journey was worthwhile, that very long journey to discover at its end a man who was content to stay where he was and experience his own life to the full.

Getting there

Return from London to Oslo, from £327. To book, call 0844 848 4070 or go to raileurope.co.uk. Scenic train from Oslo to Bergen, from £31pp, from nsb.no. To sail into the Arctic Circle, call Hurtigruten on 020-8846 2666 (hurtigruten.co.uk). Seven days from Bergen to Kirkenes in March costs from £739pp for two sharing.

Stopover

Oslo. The Grand Hotel, Karl Johans Gate, Oslo, 0047 2321 2000, grand.no

Stay at

The Rica Grand Nordic Hotel, Tromsø, nordic.no. To chase the northern lights or go reindeer sledding, go to destinasjontromso.no/english/activities.html

Discover the World (01737 218800) offers a seven-night Saab Lapland Explorer package from £1,640, based on two sharing, including return flights from London to Kiruna, two nights' accommodation at the Icehotel, two nights in Bjorkliden and three nights at Finnholmen Bryggehotel, all on a B&B basis. It also includes five-day rental of a four-wheel-drive Saab 9-3 Turbo.

Forget a tame fly-drive in Florida, a new package sends you deep into the Arctic on a 700-mile road trip through stunning scenery. Matt Carroll picks up his keys and turns the heating up to max

If it wasn't for the fact that I've been wide awake for hours, I'd swear that I am dreaming. Here I am, lying in a room made of ice, when in walks a strange man with a backpack and a head torch. His spotlight arrives a few seconds before he does, puncturing the pitch black as he bursts through the curtain; I'm reminded of one of the bad guys in the scene from ET, where Elliott and his extra-terrestrial friend are being experimented on. Luckily, this chap is armed with nothing more sinister than a cup of hot lingonberry juice - just what I need after a night spent lying on a block of ice.

While the Icehotel, in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden had looked very pretty when I'd popped my head through the door the previous day, to ooh and aah at the impressive sculptures, sleeping here is a different story. I'd booked into one of 30 unique "Art Suites", where the rooms are individually crafted by different artists who are commissioned to come up with new designs each year. Mine had a nautical theme, with a little hovercraft for a bed. At 3am I woke up with my head caught underneath its rear aerofoil, my nose so cold that I thought it had snapped off.

This was the opening night of my great Arctic Adventure. Fly-drives have been all the rage in hot countries for years but now British tour operator Discover the World has teamed up with Saab to offer winter road trips in the icy wastes of northern Sweden and Norway. The journey is spread over seven days, covering a total distance of around 700 miles, with pre-arranged stopovers along the way. After the initial night at the Icehotel, I was to make my way to the ski resort of Bjorkliden for two nights, before continuing on to Henningsvaer - a tiny Norwegian fishing village in the Lofoten islands - for another three and eventually making my way back to Jukkasjarvi.

Navigation should be easy - the brand new, four-wheel-drive Saab waiting outside the Icehotel had a full tank of fuel and a pre-programmed sat nav. All I had to do was start the engine and follow the directions, which mostly consisted of "continue straight ahead". There aren't many bends in this part of Sweden, especially once you leave the sanctuary of its towns. With the heating cranked up full I made my way out of Jukkasjarvi and headed west. Although Bjorkliden is only 75 miles away, it takes around two hours in the icy conditions - especially when you're tempted to stop and gawp at the scenery every five minutes.

Almost immediately outside Jukkasjarvi, vast stretches of white space opened up, interrupted only by whale-backed hills and colossal frozen lakes. It felt like a scene from Fargo, except that the dead body I found beside the road in the icy wastes was that of a reindeer, rather than a cop.

This was the first (and only) reindeer I saw on the whole trip, and I couldn't resist stopping for a closer look. I wished I hadn't. After taking a few snaps of the morbid scene, I got back in the car only to discover that it was beached in the snow. Panic set in as it dawned on me that I could be stuck out here for a while. Sweden is one of the most sparsely populated countries in Europe and it could be hours before another car came past. Luckily, it wasn't that long before a couple of Swedes pulled up to find me lying face down in the snow, attempting to dig the Saab out with my bare hands.

A quick tow was all it took to get me going again and in another hour or so I was making my way up the mountain to Bjorkliden. This is one of Europe's tiniest ski resorts, with one hotel, one ski rental shop, five lifts and just 24 runs. It's also one of the most northerly on the planet, lying 150 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

From the restaurant at the back of the hotel, you get a cracking view of the Tornetrask - a vast lake where the surrounding mountains rise straight up out of the water - and Lapporten, a U-shaped rock formation known as the "gateway to Lapland". Beyond lies a great stretch of untouched wilderness: just you, the trees and the odd Sami reindeer herdsman.

The good thing about this place being so small and isolated is that you get the pistes to yourself. A quick, ski-booted shuffle across the car park from the hotel takes you straight on to the slopes, which, although short, are reassuringly wide. Always a good thing when you're taking to skis for the first time.

For someone who normally snowboards, this was a big step into the unknown - which I marked with several embarrassing wipeouts. After going through the basic turns on the baby slope I joined the grown-ups on the blue run next to the hotel, which resulted in more public humiliation. It was worth it, though: there's a fabulous view across the lake as you ski down. With its epic views of unspoilt back country and deserted slopes, Bjorkliden feels more North American than European. Once you've conquered the slopes here, you can always graduate to the nearby resorts of Narvik (14 runs; five lifts) and Riksgransen (16 runs; six lifts). Both lie within 30 miles of Bjorkliden, making them easily commutable when you've got your own wheels.

If skiing's not for you, there are plenty of other activities that make it worth sticking around here for a few days. One thing you should do is take a dog-sled up to Laktatjakko mountain station - Sweden's highest at 1,228 metres - from where you can see all the way to Norway on a good day. There are no lifts to get up here so it all feels rather intrepid.

Not quite so edgy, however, as my drive from Bjorkliden to Henningsvaer. Leaving the resort, I set off on the five-hour drive across to Norway, on roads that thread their way between lakes and mountains, often coming within a few metres of the sea. This 285-mile drive is apparently one of the most scenic in Europe. When it isn't dark and blowing a gale that is.

Unfortunately, I spent the entire journey trying to keep the car on the road as Arctic storms engulfed the area.

I made it to the Finnholmen Bryggehotel in Henningsvaer to find the owner, Roger, serving up home-made fish stew. This place is exactly what you need after a long, arduous drive: the restaurant is decked out like the inside of a fisherman's cottage, with sturdy wood beams and seafaring bric-a-brac lining the walls.

Scattered across a series of tiny islets connected to the mainland and each other by bridges, Henningsvaer is a bona fide fishing community that's changed little in the last 100 years. Olive-green, mustard-yellow and cocoa-painted houses line the harbour front, adding splodges of weather-beaten colour that stand out against the snow-sprinkled backdrop of Mount Vagakaillen. Until the bridges were built in the early Eighties, the only way of getting between the islands was by boat, so Henningsvaer has retained much of its bleak charm.

To get a true taste of Lofoten life you can head out with one of the local fishing crews to watch whales or catch cod that can be brought back to the hotel and transformed into dinner. All that was to come, however. In the meantime, a howling gale outside was blowing the boats in the harbour all over the place.

For the second night that week, I had a feeling that I wouldn't be getting much sleep.

Essentials

Discover the World (01737 218800; discover-the-world.co.uk) offers a seven-night Saab Lapland Explorer package from £1,640, based on two sharing, including return flights from London to Kiruna, two nights' accommodation at the Icehotel, two nights in Bjorkliden and three nights at Finnholmen Bryggehotel, all on a B&B basis. It also includes five-day rental of a four-wheel-drive Saab 9-3 Turbo.

A summertime Arctic cruise offers Juliette Jowit little in the way of ice and snow - but fantastic opportunities to see wildlife close-up

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I was, for a few moments, frightened. Every time the inflatable boat banged off a two-metre wave the woman next to me screamed. Wind gusting up to 50 knots blew sheets of cold salty spray into us. Usually it helps to think: "What's the worst that can happen?" This time the answering image of upturned boat in the Arctic-cold water was not comforting. I tried not to remember being told two days before that we might be the only ship in nearly half a million square miles of the Hudson Bay.

Then I saw the murres: first one or two, then dozens of purposeful tiny birds skittered around us as we banged our way to the bottom of the high cliffs of Cape Wolstenholme. We looked up from calmer waters at a teeming colony, birds perched on every ledge.

I was travelling with Cruise North Expeditions, which makes two claims to be extraordinary. First, it is majority-owned by a non-profit Inuit company; second it claims to be the only cruise operator dedicated to the Arctic's summer season, from June to October. Antarctica reputedly had nearly 30,000 visitors last "summer", but the Arctic cruise scene is far less developed.

The first thing to do when you visit this part of the Arctic in summer is to banish images of ice and snow. Below the "high Arctic" the landscape is mostly granite rock and raw tundra. Even seasoned guides were unprepared however for more than 20C of humid heat when we arrived on a chartered flight from Montreal to the town of Churchill on Hudson Bay in northern Canada.

Waving away big black flies and mosquitoes, we trundled on old school buses around the self-proclaimed "polar bear capital of the world" (human population about 800). Suddenly there was a rush to the right hand side of the bus: our first polar bear, padding about on a small patch of grass. It was a far cry from proud images of these great furry beasts waiting patiently over seal holes or stamping on walrus, but already we could tick off one of the Arctic "Big Five". Later, in the Churchill River, we watched beluga whales. A few hours and already two out of five: only caribou, musk ox and walrus to go. It was about to get harder, though.

On the first day, our cruise ship struck out into Hudson Bay. A few passengers succumbed to seasickness, while the rest of us wandered between our tiny but spotless cabins, the glorious sunshine on deck, and a series of lectures - introductions to the region and its mammals, whaling history, seafaring superstitions, and an explanation of the different definitions of the word Arctic. Though we were south of the Arctic Circle, and well below the Arctic Sea, our trip was an "Arctic" one because it was mostly north of the tree line, the wavy zone between the 53rd and 68th parallels where stunted pines peter out to be replaced by tiny flowers, grasses and the miniature Arctic willow.

It was also an opportunity to get used to life on board the 185-berth Lyubov Orlova. As well as a lecture room, the boat has a small exercise room, a bar, a library, and a dining room. We were encouraged to spend as much time as possible on deck. As the sun sank over an oil-blue sea with a 360-degree horizon, beyond any mobile phone signal or email, I felt liberated.

Our first day's excursion was cancelled because of high winds, and instead we had a lecture about the Inuit, learning a few words of Inuktitut, and also how Scottish reeling was brought to these parts by the whalers, explorers, miners and other fortune-seekers who travelled here.

But Europeans also brought disease and alcohol - and missionaries, who persuaded the Inuit to abandon their traditional customs, and changed many communities from small nomadic groups into larger villages. The more settled communities found it hard to adapt when the incomers left and cut off supplies of dollars and tinned food.

The legacy of all this is widespread social problems, which Cruise North hopes to help address. The company is three-quarters owned by the Makivik Corporation which is run by and for the benefit of the people of Nunavik, one of the three autonomous Inuit regions of Canada. The other quarter is owned by Dugald Wells, a Toronto engineer whose idea it was to bring some of the riches of polar tourism to the Canadian north.

The company has a policy of taking on Inuit trainees so I was surprised to find few Inuit staff on our ship. Wells said this was because older trainees found it hard to adapt to the fairly regimented life; now they are hiring younger trainees, some of whom are being encouraged to use their new skills to find other work or go back to education.

The key to a rewarding expedition, we kept being told, is to be flexible. And later we were rewarded: the wind calmed and we got our first landing, on Coats Island. Arctic animals can be elusive, but on Coats Island, the compensation was right beneath our feet, with an unexpected richness of plant life: purple saxifrage, yellow Arctic poppies, white cottongrass, the blush-pink thrift, and burning orange lichen. Then half-way into our walk news came by radio: walrus, around the headland. We made a five-minute slow pass in the inflatable boat, peering through camera zooms at these monstrous-looking masses of brown blubber with great tusks.

On day four the highlight was a visit to Kangiqsujuaq (population 590). Yaka, who lives in the village, showed us the 'sights', including the Northern and Co-op stores, the museum for a national park 85km away, and a swimming pool and community centre built with money from a company mining nearby. At the centre children danced and sang for us and an elder told how, before the Northern and Co-op opened, the people here were sometimes so hungry they ate their sled dogs.

After lunch we took the boat over to nearby Diana Island, where dozens of tourists in waterproofs huddled together, giggling, trying to look like a single animal so the musk ox would be confident enough to approach - a tactic which, hilariously, worked.

On the final day, it was too rough to land - "Sorry, but nature is in charge," said Julio, the expedition leader - so we spent the afternoon gawping at glaciers and learning to recognise the glide-flap-glide flight of a fulmar, before finally making a beautiful sunset entry into an almost still George River, and our first sight of a tree for a week.

Essentials

Cruise North's eight-night Arctic Odyssey (00 1 866 263 3220; cruisenorthexpeditions.com) costs from US$5,245, plus $1,265 for domestic flights. BA (ba.com) flies to Montreal from about £404. Audley Travel (01993 838 700; audleytravel.com) has packages from £3,800 including all flights and three nights' pre- and post-cruise accommodation. Quebec Tourism: 0800 051 7055; bonjourquebec.com.

Staying overnight in a ski lodge inside the Arctic Circle allows access to an empty, off-piste paradise most skiers can only dream of

It's difficult to embrace the quiet beauty of a place when you're shifting through it at mach 10, skidoo engine roaring in your ears, cheeks whipped to burning in the cold. But as the dying sun cast its light across the thousands of snow crystals thrown up by the wind, the ensuing rainbow which hovered above the Låktatjåkko Mountain Station compelled silent attention. Nestled 250km north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland, it's a place where you can let yourself believe in magic.

Låktatjåkko, or Låkta, is a tiny annex of the petite ski resort of Bjorkliden, just north of Abisko national park, accessible only by skidoo or touring skis. On the shores of Lake Tornetrask and dwarfed by the legendary Lapporten Gap, the U-shaped gateway to Lapland, Bjorkliden is a resort surrounded by epic scenery. Trains rattle past it from Kiruna to the better known ski destinations of Narvik and Riksgransen, meaning anyone who gets off will pretty much have all 24 pistes to themselves. Small and charming, it has one ski shop, one restaurant, one bar, one hotel and 80 beautiful self-catering cabins. Almost everyone is Norwegian or Swedish; Bjorkliden was a well-kept secret from British skiers until 2007, when Discover the World started offering packages to the destination. The main targets may be families and beginners, but the area also offers up a world of unexplored off-piste, heli-skiing and powder up to your thighs as late as May. Yet if it weren't for the local tipple being called Wolf Paw, you'd be forgiven for thinking life was pretty chilled in Bjorkliden.

Låkta lies 9km further inland from Lake Tornetrask, in a pass between two peaks. The highest mountain station in Sweden at 1,228m, it takes around 30 minutes – depending on your driving skills – to skidoo from Bjorkliden. You can easily swap one of your nights in the resort for a night up at the mountain station, or you can arrive for dinner and leave the same evening. Operating like a small hotel, it has 18 beds in basic but comfortable rooms with dinner and breakfast provided. The remoteness of its location is not reflected in its interior, with a log fire, sauna and well stocked bar, making it feel like a cosy chalet rather than a refuge. It's a favourite among skidoo enthusiasts who stop off for lunch, and a base for ski tourers and backcountry skiers to access the kind of powder fields only usually seen in dreams.

If I dreamt that night, I couldn't remember the next morning. An evening of Swedish hospitality laid on by Låkta's managers Per and Marie with the help of Samuel Adams, a bottle of red, reindeer steaks, cloudberries and piles of the mountain station's famous waffles, left little time for that.

After days of high winds and heavy snowfall, the next day dawned bluebird. The snow was light, dry, sparkling. "I think," murmured Per as he laid out breakfast, "that with these conditions, you are about to ski the best run in the whole of Sweden."

The beauty of staying at Låkta is, while the icy air gets to work on the hangover, you can get a head start on the day's adventure, stomping off from the front door. You can hire a guide in Bjorkliden who, if they are like mine, will arrive fresh and raring to go in the morning. With shovel packed and avalanche transceiver switched on, I set off in the wake of mountain manager Niclas Stockel. Leaving the warmth of the station we began our ascent of Låkta – the peak from which the lodge takes its name. For a climber, this would be a piece of cake. For someone who only ever goes up a mountain in a chairlift, it took its toll. While I grappled with gravity, Niclas ploughed on, carving a route through deep snow and ice, crossing reindeer tracks and scrambling over rocks. After 45 minutes we stood on the summit, me feeling every inch like Reinhold Messner, despite my rasping breath. Mountains revealed themselves in every direction. Norway lay behind us, a mass of peaks and troughs. To our left Moon Valley, inaccessible by anything except touring skis, making it a haven for wildlife, most notably wolverines.

Clip in. Ski off. We cruised through the first powder field, the mellow gradient forcing a no-stopping rule until a couloir, where snow swept past my feet like velvet. Bursting out into a second powder field, the light a soft yellow, I looked back at tracks which seemed to lead down from another planet. I had never seen so much snow with absolutely no evidence of any other skier. Niclas upped the ante by choosing a steeper descent on an area which had been known to avalanche. I stared at the face until I swear I could see cracks appearing before plummeting down it with ill-advised speed, hands death-gripping the poles. "I could hear you gasping from where I was," said Niclas as he led the way into a tightly packed tree run.

This was more like it. Quick, sharp turns, the young, lissome trees forgiving any lapses of concentration. The ride ended at the first sign of life for a long time – a railway line. And a four-wheel drive on hand to ferry us back to the resort.

I opted for a final ski before dinner and caught one of the resort's five button lifts to the top of its longest run – 3km. No people, just powder. The view wasn't dramatic by, say, Rocky Mountain standards but it was composed of a series of elements – the lake, the Lapporten Gap, Låkta – which were all variations on a white theme. The sharp light allows each element to stand out on its own merits, but the combined effect is to make you feel like you are moving through a painting. I moved through mine silently, snow pattering down with each turn until I arrived rosy and flushed at the bar in Hotel Fjället– where a band were playing Status Quo covers to the delight of the four revellers occupying the dance floor. But a blast of dad rock was a small price to pay for the first, and only, tracks of the day.

• Discover the World (01737 218 800) offers a three-night package to Bjorkliden, including return direct flights from Heathrow to Kiruna, transfers, full-board and ski pass from £623pp from December to May. To hire a one-on-one guide for a day is 2,500 kroner (£218) but you can split that between a group. A night at Låkta costs from 450 kroner (£40); two-course dinner is 350 kroner (£30).