Sailing Into A Dream

Scenes from the fantasy feature Game of Thrones come to life in the otherworldly landscapes of the Arctic Circle.

- VICTORIA BURROWS

I wake up and look out of the porthole of my cabin. Rising up out of the deep blue water ahead of me is a spectacular cliff of ice that stretches left and right as far as I can see. Our small expedition ship, the MV Viking fjord, is keeping a steady pace running parallel to its face. I grab my down jacket and woolly hat and take the narrow stairs up to the viewing deck.

Outside, with the frosty air hitting my face and the sound of water slapping the side of the hull, the effect is even more dramatic: the wall of white tinge the iciest blue towers above, looking like something out of hit television series Game of Thrones. The only breaks in the cliff are where huge chunks of ice have calved into the water, leaving giant zigzags in the face.

Then I see a smooth strip of white running from the top of the ice shelf into the sea below. As we get closer, I realise it is a waterfall. It is an otherworldly sight: a ribbon of white melt water tumbling down against the cyan of the ice into the azure of the water.

But then Svalbard itself feels like an otherworld. Part of the Kingdom of Norway, the archipelago is closer to the North Pole than the Norwegian mainland. It is a land of ice and snow, mist and clouds, black jagged mountains and wind-swept tundra.

More than half of the land is covered with glaciers 2,100 of them. The ice cliff we are sailing alongside is formed by one of these, called Brasvellbreen, along with the massive Austfonna ice cap, which covers more than half of Svalbard's second-largest island of Nordaustlandet and is the thirdlargest ice cap in the world.

A DISH OF REINDEER