Winters are long and summers are short in the north of the Arctic Circle. Keith Allan joins Swan Hellenic’s Diana on a 10-day Norwegian odyssey, taking in ‘cod’s own country’

If you’re driving north, be careful of the reindeer,” said Father Christmas as I sat beside him at Santa Claus’s Main Post Office in Rovaniemi. “We have 230,000 reindeer here in Finland,” he said, “bu

Exciting ways to get away from it all

Take a winter road trip from Iceland’s second city, Akureyri, through a northern peninsula framed by fjords and punctuated by isolated herring-fishing villages.

Steam rises in plumes, roaring from fissures in rocks, while around me, pools of mud bubble. The hillsides are rusted with iron ore, and dark storm clouds echo the colours of the dark-coloured earth.

As we sipped our G&Ts and watched the sun glistening on the water in the late evening, we reflected on the events that had brought us to this beautiful spot. A few hours ago, we’d resigned ourselves t