I took on the Northwest Passage (in my penthouse suite)

One hundred and ten years ago, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen completed the first sea voyage through the Northwest Passage. Sailing in a little herring boat, it took him and his six companions more than two years.

I’ve just done the Northwest Passage, too. I was one of 1,600 people aboard Crystal Serenity, and we did it in 32 days.

Where Amundsen’s team battled the elements for survival, I could stand on my private balcony and Instagram the sun setting behind our icebreaking escort, the RRS Ernest Shackleton. It carried two helicopters for emergency evacuations and flightseeing tours — perks of a trip that costs more than £15,000pp. Our predecessors didn’t have climate change on their side, either. After all, decades of disappearing sea ice was what took Crystal Cruises’ idea of Anchorage to New York by sea from laughable to doable.

I still get goose bumps remembering the moment Crystal Serenity sailed into the sea ice. While visiting the Alaskan ports was great, they were a known quantity. The ice, on the other hand, would either send us back home or into the history books. On our eighth day at sea, Captain Birger J Vorland’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker: “We’ve reached the ice!” Lecturers stopped their PowerPoint presentations, spa attendants paused mid-manicure and even the runners on the fitness centre’s treadmills came to a halt.

A few days later, we ate the ice. “Taste this,” our Danish guide said, using her Swiss army knife to carve bite-sized chunks out of the ice floating around our small rubber boat. Less than 100yd away, a polar bear lounged nonchalantly on its private ice island. The only thing that interrupted or, better put, enhanced the experience was the beverage boat making zoom-bys. I asked myself: “Who sits in an idling Zodiac in Arctic waters, sipping hot chocolate while silently worshipping the world’s largest land predator?” Apparently, I did.

I later spoke to our ship’s wildlife-spotter, an Inuit hunter who has killed six polar bears. His most recent skin has been sitting in a freezer for two years, waiting for a buyer. Over coffee in the ship’s cafe, Stevie took me through the course of his hunting career. It started more than 50 years ago, when he was seven and began to explore in his older brothers’ dogsled.

Our community visits to Stevie’s home town and other small Inuit settlements in Canada’s Northwest Territories were reciprocal. Once Crystal Serenity dropped anchor, we were ferried ashore in Zodiacs. Those boats would then take the locals, who were waiting on the beach — everyone from infants to elders — back to the ship. On board, they taught mitten-making classes, competed at guttural throat-singing and tucked into Ben & Jerry’s at the all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar on deck 12.

Yes, the ship was five-star, and with its diamond stores and Dior-filled boutique, it felt like a floating Fifth Avenue. Still, I didn’t spend every night in my plush, hypoallergenic penthouse suite. In addition to kayaking, helitours and whale-watching, Crystal Cruises offered overnight excursions. In Greenland, 17 of us flew to Kangerlussuaq — a fjordfront town of 500 people. Carrying our packs and wearing crampons, we hiked across the world’s second largest ice sheet. After hours of not being able to tell where the ice ended and the horizon began, we dined on musk-ox steaks before bundling up in long underwear and slipping into two sleeping bags each. Never have I been so humbled by the magnitude of Mother Nature. While I left a sizeable piece of my ego on the icecap, that’s all I left. We hauled our waste back to town on sleds.

The entire voyage was filled with comparable highlights yet to grace the pages of the guidebooks. Our cameras futilely attempted to capture tremendous glaciers, elusive narwhals and the northern lights.

And we did all this in luxury. Where those early travellers foraged and fought — not always successfully — for their lives, we had to put up with running out of carrot juice after three weeks and enduring woefully sporadic wi-fi. But you don’t need to suffer to appreciate the grandeur of nature. Every morning, we would look out at the horizon, and the significance of what we were doing would come home to us. Then we could go and have a long, hot shower.