See all Posts in the Wanderlust – A Travel Blog Series

As an adventure traveler, I am surprised when people ask me why I would ever want to visit a cold, remote and inhospitable place like Antarctica. Polar exploration documentaries delight in telling you all the ways the landscape wants to hurt you.

On a continent larger than Australia and the United States combined, there is no native population. Only a few thousand visitors are ever there at any given time, so there are no bars, hotels, restaurants or even coffee shops. Ultimately, there is nothing to see except ice, rocks and critters.

For an adventure traveler, though, Antarctica is a magical place. It is precisely this unspoiled remoteness that makes it special. Additionally, the courage and fierce determination of early explorers like Drake, Shackleton, Amundsen and Scott, along with the unique geopolitics of the region, contribute to its appeal. You can’t travel to all seven continents without a trip to Antarctica. Getting there requires real commitment. It is neither easy nor inexpensive.

We traveled to the Antarctic Peninsula on an expedition cruise ship. Many cruise lines offer services to Antarctica at prices ranging from high to really high.

We opted for a sail/fly package that originated in Ushuaia, Argentina, on the southernmost tip of South America, sailed through the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula, and then flew back to South America from an air strip on King George Island.

The Drake Passage may sound familiar to you. Named after 16th-century explorer Sir Francis Drake, it is the most treacherous patch of water on Earth, connecting the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern oceans over shifting tectonic plates.

Sailing the Drake was two solid days and nights of rough seas. Our cruise ship was equipped with stabilizers that extended out either side of the ship, muting the effect of waves tilting us left and right. There are no front/back stabilizers, however, so when we hit a big wave straight on, we heaved up and smacked back down pretty hard. One of those waves caused the dining room piano to break from its floor clamps and flip over on its side. 

Fully half of the passengers on our ship were seasick, despite being medicated. One fellow traveler said he spent the first day fearing that he would die, and the second day fearing that he wouldn’t.

Once we reached the Antarctic Peninsula, the rough seas settled down, and the rugged beauty of the place immediately captured our imagination. We traveled in January, which is the dog days of summer in Antarctica.

Temperatures hovered around freezing, which at times was as much as 50 degrees warmer than back home in Minnesota. While we needed waterproof gear to get ashore in our rubber boats (called Zodiacs), the cruise line provided us with bright orange parkas, so we rarely needed our Minnesota cold-weather gear.

The scenery may be limited to rocks, ice and critters, but each of these was spectacular in its own way. The Antarctic Peninsula is a continuation of the geologically active Andes Mountains, chiseled by wind, snow and ice. If you have any interest in geology, the variety and scale of Antarctic rock formations are stunning. We especially enjoyed hiking along the caldera of an active volcano.

The ice exists in so many configurations that it is difficult to describe. Icebergs formed all around us in impossible shapes with luminescent blue highlights. We saw glaciers creeping and calving into the sea.

As a regular visitor to the area, our ship provided periodic maintenance to the “glacier cams” that document the ice receding into the Southern Ocean. Crumbled ice floes gently moved aside as we kayaked through the icefields. We hiked up a glacier amidst a colony of penguins for a fantastic view of the surrounding ocean and mountains.

Two species of penguins dominate the area we visited. Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins nest and raise chicks in colonies that run into the hundreds of birds. We were instructed to disinfect our boots carefully before and after each visit ashore to avoid spreading bird flu from one population to the next.

We saw multiple pods of Orcas every day we were there. They seemed to like following the ship.

Humpback whale sightings were another daily occurrence. At one point, a curious 40-foot humpback swam directly underneath our 20-foot Zodiac. If he had surfaced at the wrong moment, we would have been dumped into the drink.

We planned to fly home from an airstrip on King George Island, but the island was shrouded in fog, so our original departure date was scratched. We waited two extra days for the weather to clear before our charter plane service felt like they had a reasonable chance of landing and flying us back to civilization.

The unique history of Antarctica and the intrepid explorers who put it on the map add another rich dimension to any visit. The untouched landscape looks today just as it did to James Cook, Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen.

I read “The Wager,” by David Grann, and was awestruck by the courage of early explorers overcoming the obstacles Antarctica put in their way. “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage,” by Alfred Lansing, is another must-read.

If geopolitics is your thing, Antarctica’s political relationship with the world is unique. I delight in asking people how many countries there are in Antarctica. The correct answer is zero. Seven countries have territorial claims to parts of Antarctica, however, and many of these overlap.

The area we visited (the Antarctic Peninsula) has overlapping claims by three countries (Argentina, Chile and the United Kingdom). Each country operates research stations there, but there are no military installations.

The Antarctic Treaty (first signed in 1959) dedicates the entire continent to peace, scientific research and environmental protection. This uniquely successful treaty is renewed every 20 years and continues to protect this enormous and valuable natural resource for future generations.

The history, the geopolitics — and even the ice, rocks and critters — combine to make Antarctica an iconic place that we all might aspire to visit.