Each of the six ferry journeys along the route felt like a rite of passage, none more so than the crossing of the Arctic Circle. A line on the map shouldn't make a difference, but here the mountains seemed even higher, the ice a deeper shade of blue. There was a certain gravitas too, in the knowledge that the vast Svartisen icecap, one of mainland Norway's largest, lay hidden from view just beyond the wall of mountains. Glacier tongues swept steeply down from the heights to the shores of cobalt-blue fjords that were themselves carved by glaciers in aeons past; some of the fjords here are more than 1km deep.
