"Where are you going?” a work mate asked.

“The Arctic” I replied

“Oh... wow... you gonna see penguins?”

“No it’s the Arctic, as in the North Pole. There are no penguins there, but plenty of polar bears!”

It’s amazing how many people get the two poles confused, and it is even easier to confuse what kind of animals and birds live there. Either we all needed to pay more attention to Grade 8 geography or there is a major disconnection between our natural world and us. I am inclined to think the latter, especially after a trip to the North Pole.

I have watched BBC wildlife shows and visited Africa’s vast open spaces, but nothing prepared me for what I saw and felt in the vast, silent, darkless wilderness of the Arctic. My partner Michaela and I boarded our flight to Oslo in early August 2010 and then made our way to Svalbard, an archipelago about 2 000km northwest of Norway, and part of the Arctic Circle.

As we lowered altitude and broke through the cloud cover it quickly became apparent that we were going to enter a world like no other on the planet. Massive glaciers, scarred with moraine, littered the ground and peaked mountains tipped in white (which gave Svalbard or Spitsbergen its name) could be seen as we banked to land at Longyearbyen. We touched down at about 2pm in the afternoon and the sky was an intense azure blue.

On arrival we had about two hours to spend in Longyearbyen, the most populated place in the Arctic Circle. It has a population of approximately 2000 people and is totally ice locked and in eternal darkness during the winter months.

It’s this cold isolated climate that has proved perfect for the world seed bank, an incredible initiative to preserve the world’s heirloom seeds. Fortunately summer is relatively warm at about an average of 5 degrees Celsius and there is a full 24 hours of sunlight to enjoy. We were blessed with delightful weather during the 11 day voyage on the Akademik Sergey Vavilov.

Nimble, quick and quiet, theFinnish-built Akademik Sergey Vavilov was designed to travel quietly, during hydroacoustic research for the former USSR. Its deepest research cable was 100m longer than the deepest United States Submarine was capable of diving to, but today the Vavilov is used as an adventure tourist ship and embarks on adventures to both the North and the South Pole. The profits from these tours are then reinvested into funding scientific research, mostly about climate change and biodiversity in the regions, making it a show case for sustainability.

Because of the nature of the expedition the itinerary was never preset as the external factors like the weather and presence of the polar bears would decide what we could do. We could not do shore landings if there were bears, as they are predators and no one wanted to end up as a polar bears lunch even though (as the amused expedition leaders remarked) that would make for an even more memorable cruise. All ten of the exhibition leaders were specialists in their chosen fields and we kept company with historians, ornithologists, marine biologists and even seasoned ex war correspondents. All in all this was not what you would call a normal luxury cruise – we were all poised to be immersed in everything Arctic and then some.

Over the next eleven days we would circumnavigate Svalbard and travel north until we slowly moved between the Arctic pack ice at 80degrees54minutes767 north. The landscapes were consistently breathtaking, it was like being in a Tolkein novel one day and on another planet the next.

We would witness a colony of over 300000 Brünnich’s Guillemot (Uria Lomvia) breeding on heaven intent cliffs, and see glaciers and the effect that climate change is having on them. Wherever we went, animals from reindeer to walrus, Arctic fox to harbour seal would pose, as if wanting to show their best side to ensure you would never forget them. I haven’t, and doubt I ever will.

But it was an encounter with one of the polar bears that has changed my behaviour forever. While we were nudging our way between the pack ice some 500 nautical miles from the North Pole we came across a large adult male polar bear. He looked so at home in this barren world of ice and moved from one flow to the next like a ballerina - even though he weighed around a ton. As I was taking photographs a very out-of-place object caught my eye; an empty water bottle – probably thrown off a fishing vessel. Now it was lodged on the ice pack. That bottle I later found out was one of over 200 billion produced every year and that the average recycling rate for water bottles is 23.4%.

Bottled water consumption quadrupled between 1990 and 2005, with purified water the leading seller. On average consumers paid between 240 and 10,000 times more per unit volume for bottled water than for tap water. That’s basically tap water that’s been purified. Now that’s definitely not a case study in environmental sustainability.

When I returned from the land of extremes and headed back to my desk job at Ogilvy Earth and Zoom Advertising we immediately banned all bottled water from the building and have now put up that plastic water bottle (yes, some mad Russian fetched it off the ice) on display in our foyer to remind us that we all need to change and that it is not up to nature to manage our waste – we need to help and sort it out.

Deon Robbertze is the Creative Director of Ogilvy Earth - www.ogilvyearth.co.za. To read more about his trip, as well as see some stunning photographs, follow the link for issue 11 of the Life in Balance magazine on our home page.

Visit www.quarkexpeditions.com/arctic-expeditions to learn more about Arctic and Antarctic trips. The South African agent is Unique destinations. www.uniquedestinations.co.za