Antarctica is about as exclusive as it gets for luxury travellers
Check out the chinstrap penguins, whales and leopard seals - but don’t opt for a floating palace
It’s commonplace these days to hear claims that there’s nowhere left that’s truly out of the way – a place with little chance of bumping into someone from home who’s equally trying to avoid bumping into someone from home.
Yet, there’s an entire continent that always seems to get overlooked in these discussions, and it’s one with no indigenous humans at all. Its 14 million square kilometres are occupied only by a few tiny colonies of cabin-fevered scientists, even fewer of whom stay year-round. Its rush hours are of icebergs jostling their way out to sea, and its queues are of penguins porpoising purposefully through the ocean to hop on shore and find a nesting place. The first human to set foot there only did so in 1821, and no more than a few hundred thousand people have ever landed on its shores in the two centuries since. Antarctica is about as exclusive as it gets.
A visit begins with the notoriously rough crossing from Argentina’s Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, across the Drake Passage to where a slender finger of land called the Antarctic Peninsula reaches up towards South America as if longing for warmth. Most Antarctic expeditions take place among the hundreds of islands scattered along the peninsula’s west coast where there are sheltered anchorages for landing on mainland and island alike, and channels of protected water for cruising.
The best choice of ship is not some vast floating palace but a well-stabilised exploration vessel such as One Ocean Expeditions' M/V Akademik Ioffe (oneoceanexpeditions.com), capable of putting its small complement of around 100 passengers on shore in remote places via a fleet of speedy Zodiac inflatable boats.
The two-day crossing is taken up with spotting pods of dolphins playing across the bow or tracking the wind-blown breath of assorted species of whale.
Albatrosses with three-metre wingspans wheel over the ship’s wake. Expert staff give safety instructions, lectures on ice and wildlife, and briefings on the code of conduct for landings.
