Scott, Amundsen… try life as an explorer in the far north of Norway

Alaskan huskies are skinny little dynamos, and I quite fancied keeping a pack to transport me around London after I'd steered them with such ease and pleasure through the frozen wastes of Svalbard. I was, in this remote territory, still in Norway, although at 2,300km from Oslo also halfway to the north pole and in a part of the world where access rights are shared in an almost hippy-like way with the surrounding countries. I was in explorer land: this was where Roald Amundsen and a whole queue of other international adventurers had set off to conquer the north pole after the great Norwegian had claimed its southern counterpart in a gruelling contest with Robert Scott that came to fascinate the world.

It was a hundred years ago this year that Amundsen, the first human to do so, made it to the south pole, while the Briton, chasing after him, arrived weeks later and, comforting his companions and scribbling in his diary till the last, died of cold and hunger on the way back. The miserable death of Scott - do we celebrate him in Britain partly because of his tragic failure? - and his comrades still resonates a century on, but that hasn't stopped people reassessing his status as an explorer and concluding, in some cases, that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a ninny.

Amundsen's stature, on the other hand, continues to grow (not that he necessarily needed it; he was already over 6ft), partly because of our acknowledgment these days that native peoples - yes, that lot the British succeeded so well in conquering - might actually have something to tell us about surviving in their own lands. Amundsen, ahead of his time, knew that from the beginning. He equipped his expedition more or less as an Inuit from the northern polar regions he knew well would have done. He wore thick, fur versions of Inuit clothing (anorak and parka are Inuit words; ski, interestingly, is the only Norwegian one we have in English); he packed foods such as seal meat and arctic cloudberry, rich in vitamin C, to prevent scurvy; he insisted on travelling in a small, cohesive group and, perhaps most crucially, he chose dogs to pull the group's sledges.

And Scott? Standard British naval storm gear would suffice for the conditions, he judged. It didn't; the cold bit cruelly from the start. Instead of dogs, he thought newfangled motorised vehicles, the forerunners of snowmobiles, would confer an advantage; they foundered on virtually the first crevasse.

Individualists and the odd desperado
As for Svalbard, you might not know of the place but you could hardly miss it: it might be part of Norway but its four huge, glacier-draped islands are bigger than the whole of Denmark. I suspect the people who settle here are little different from its inhabitants in Amundsen's day: intrepid, individual types, with the odd desperado thrown in. Yet Svalbard has also been a destination for the more adventurous tourist since the 1890s, and now thousands come each year and ski shops line the little main street of Longyearbyen, the capital.

Still, visitors tend to fade away during the 24-hour polar night that caps the end and beginning of the year, when I visited and when the region is left to the miners, guides and handful of old-style trappers who live here year-round. And to the polar bears, which, at 3,000 or so, just outnumber the human population. They mostly stick to the sea ice, although they sometimes wander into town and the mayor has to chase them away, like wild west gunslingers, in a helicopter. Sometimes they eat people, still, too - that's what polar bears do - and you can't leave the populated parts of Svalbard without a rifle.

It's strange that the thing that strikes you perhaps most strongly about the polar night in Svalbard is the light: a very distinctive dark blue that seems to emanate from nowhere and renders the landscape mysterious, beautiful and forbidding in equal parts. Every feature appears hazy and uncertain, a dream-like quality accentuated when you tumble off a fast-moving dog sledge but are quite unhurt because you fall into pillow-soft snow. At one point during my ride, Constanza, a local guide, was tipped from the sledge in front of me by an inexperienced driver. I, the last in the group, pulled up beside her and couldn't resist asking, "Wanna ride?"

The huskies can run for six hours at a time, with only a break for a meal, and it is tempting to think of them as mere beasts of burden - Amundsen ate some of his, after all - but the truth is this: they love to run. The animals being left behind in the ammonia-reeking dog yard while their fellows are being harnessed up yelp and leap in frustration: "I want to come, too!"

And they are noticeably individuals, each with its own name and place in the dog-team. Trug and Igloo led my pack of five, with the big bruiser Borneo alone in the middle and Tristan and shy, one-year-old Tusker, who seemed just to want to lie down all the time, bringing up the rear.

Affectionate care
The dogs seem not to forget all the affectionate care they receive. One musher - the Alaskan word for dog driver - a half-Scottish, half-Norwegian 26-year-old called Amanda Calder, a rare woman in the job who seemed pretty much to embody that rugged spirit I referred to earlier, told me how one of her dogs had once saved her limbs and possibly her life. One of Amanda's pastimes was long-distance dog runs, and on one such trek, all the way to Sweden, if you will, she found, as she made camp one night, that stove-fuel had disastrously leaked all through her sleeping bag.

So Amanda curled up with her lead dog, Roxy, a veteran of the north pole, only to wake up again and again with her feet in freezing agony. She feared losing them - and what would that mean? - but eventually opened her eyes in the morning to discover that, at some point during the night, Roxy had draped herself over these lowest parts of her body and warmed them through.

No such luck for Amundsen on his final expedition. The dogs that saved him on his journey to the south pole were missing this time; on a seaplane mission to rescue a rival explorer, the Italian Umberto Nobile, whose airship had crashed flying back from the north pole, the Norwegian himself disappeared and his body has never been found.

It is the kind of tale that inspired Philip Pullman's wildly popular His Dark Materials trilogy, set in an imaginary Svalbard of talking polar bears, noble solitary airmen and swirling magic. It is a fantasy I highly admired and do so only a little less now I realise how readily this incredible landscape must have inspired it.

TRAVEL FACTS

Simon travelled to Svalbard with the assistance of SAS, which has daily flights from LHR to Tromso and Longyearben via Oslo, starting from £331 return.

Where to stay
In Tromso, the main city of northern Norway and a staging post to Svalbard, Simon stayed at Rica Ishavshotell (Fr. Langesgate 2; +47 77 66 64 00), where rooms start from NOK1,200 (£138).

In Longyearbyen he stayed at the very characterful Trapper's Lodge (on the main street), where rooms start from NOK990 per person in low season.

Dog-sledding
Dog-sledding at Camp Tamok, from Tromso, with Amanda Calder and other guides, costs NOK1,595 per person (+47 77 71 55 88) including dinner and return transfers fromTromso. Camp Tamok also has skidooing trips and snowshoeing trips to look for the northern lights. All clothing is included.

The same activity in the remote Balterdalen, in Svalbard, costs NOK850 per person, including survival suits and transfers from Longyearbyen. Dinner at the onsite Trappers Station can be arranged for groups

More information
Two excellent museums give very compelling background to the natural region and polar exploration: in Tromso, the Polar Museum (Tollbodgata 11; opening hours 11-4; admission NOK50/adult; and the Svalbard Museum
(ask for directions; opening hours April -October 10-5, November-March 12-5;
admission NOK75/adult).

For further information about the region, see Visit Norway and Visit Northern Norway.