AntarcticaArea: 14.2 million km²Time Zone: All

Antarctica has a human population of around 1,000 in the winter and 5,000 inthe summer. Year-round, it hosts animal populations including penguins, cormorants, blue whales, orca, leopard seals and many species of microscopic midge. The largest purely terrestrial animal in Antarctica is the flightless midge Belgica antarctica, which at its largest is 6mm long. The Gentoo penguin (first page) is one of eight species of penguins on the continent. The Gentoo’s Latin name is Pygoscelis papua, which means “brush-tailed”, for their tails that sweep from side to side as they walk.

“You Wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.” – Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963)

If there’s one place in the world to realise that Mother Nature always has the upper hand, it’s on a ship south of the Antarctic Convergence, bound for Antarctica.

The Convergence is a natural boundary where the cold waters of the sub-Antarctic meet the warmer waters of the north. The result is a wild and chaotic sea, such as that which surges through the Drake Passage, the notoriously rough body of water between the tip of South America and the edge of the Antarctic which boats must traverse on their way south. Prior to my departure on a two-week cruise of Antarctica, I found myself in a TikTok rabbit hole about the dangers of this stretch of ocean, its 40-foot waves, and the nausea this causes; videos discussing it inevitably reference Triangle of Sadness and its unpleasant but memorable seasickness scene. After the wild seas, there is the cold. How does a traveller prepare for such extremes? Before setting out, we ventured to 66°North – an outwear company that has been providing protective gear for Icelandic search-and-rescue teams since 1928 – for warm clothes, and loaded up on sea-sickness pills, and Yorkshire Tea teabags. I felt like I was headed to the moon.

On some level, as I was to discover, Antarctica is like the moon. It is the only piece of land on earth that was truly uninhabited by humans up until the 19th century. It has no permanent residents, no government and is a territory dedicated to peace – arms are outlawed – and scientific research. Visitors to the continent need to go through a process of disinfection, wear special clothes, and are forbidden from sitting down – let alone from smoking.

We set out each morning to see elephant seals on the beach and Adélie penguin colonies on the rocks; logging – that is, watching seals sleep like logs

The story of this continent, about 40% larger than Europe, reads like an epic of audacity and endurance. Cartographers and scientists in antiquity had long theorised the existence of a landmass at the bottom of the world, termed “Terra Australis Incognita”, the unknown southern land. In their circumnavigations of the world, Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan skirted the edge of Antarctic waters, Drake lending his name to the fearsome passage below Cape Horn. Antarctica was first sighted in 1820 by Edward Bransfield, Nathaniel Palmer and Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen. By the early 20^th century, Antarctica had become a new frontier of exploration with the famous Amundsen and Scott expeditions to the South Pole, which Amundsen reached in 1911. Scott’s expedition, of course, ended in the unrelenting cold, his final diary entry reading, “I do not think I can write more” – a chilling epitaph for human frailty against nature’s forces.

Mother Nature also triumphed here over any attempts at colonialism. The forbidding shores of Antarctica prevented conquest and, in the years after the Second World War, the Antarctic Treaty was signed to curtail potential conflict – and to advance scientific study on the continent. The treaty was a diplomatic triumph at the height of the Cold War that reserved the continent for scientific research, banned military activity, and suspended all territorial claims.

Remarkably, this fragile political framework has endured. The treaty, now with more than 50 signatories, has turned Antarctica into a kind of international commons, where scientists from all over the world converge to study everything from climate change to subglacial lakes. Antarctica remains ruled only by the harsh edicts of nature and the terms of the treaty.

The human stories of adventure remain revered here – Captain Cook, Nathaniel Palmer, Ernest Shackleton and are all the subject of lectures and handouts aboard the ship. Yet among the narratives of these great men, I find myself wondering about the continent’s hidden stories, many of which we will never be able to uncover. In 1985, a skull was discovered on Yamana Beach in Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands that belonged to a woman in her 20s who had died between 1819 and 1825 – perhaps a rare female sealer from Chile, pushed further and further south by commercial sealing in that period. She could well have been among the first humans to have stepped foot on Antarctica. More women have tried: at the time of Shackleton’s expedition, “three sporty women” applied to join, stating their willingness to “don masculine attire”. Their application was rejected, despite their statement that they did not see “why men should have all the glory, and women none, especially when there are women just as brave and capable as there are men.”

*

Before disembarking and boarding from the ship, everyone must step into a bucket of disinfectant to minimise the risk of bringing contaminates to the ecosystems on land. When on land, visitors are prohibited from sitting down or putting any equipment on the ground, too, in case they might transport organic material between sites.

Geoffrey Kent is one of the world’s great travellers, and one of the travel industry’s most innovative entrepreneurs. He founded the company Abercrombie & Kent in 1962 to offer customers exclusive expeditions across the world, beginning with safaris and gradually branching out to wilder shores. For the last few years, Abercrombie & Kent has partnered with the French ship-making company Ponant, owned by Kering. The result is one of the most luxurious expeditions imaginable, one that travels to the end of the earth.

There is something special about the Abercrombie & Kent experience. The team of experts seem to be a jolly band of learned misfits, all addicted to the experience Antarctica gives you in person. With 400 years of experience amongst them, as they like to remind the guests, they serve as our teachers, guides and Zodiac drivers. From Dr. Jason F. Hicks, the resident “rockstar” (geologist), to Maria Patricia, to David the Scotsman with his own adventure production company, or Hella Martens, the Dutch mammal expert – they host, let’s face it, wealthy punters who want to see the region’s equivalent of big game. And they know it: after one of the early evening briefings for the next day’s expedition, a guest asked, “When do we see the whales?” to which Marco Favero, expedition leader, responded, deadpan, “We’ve booked them for 8.30pm.” Nature is not fixed, and it’s something you learn quickly as a participant and witness.

Suzana Machado D’Oliveira has been coming to Antarctica for over 35 years, starting off on “a little red boat” and finally upgrading to Le Lyrial a few years back. Like a conductor of a philharmonic orchestra, she’s crafted a team of experts who balance education with entertainment, safety with adventure. “Antarctica always delivers,” she’s known to say, and she’s not wrong. Could Antarctica be one of the last remaining landscapes with the power to pull our faces away from our screens, and provide a vast, monumental blankness to rival the wires, cement and manmade sound our brains are now plugged in to?

On the expedition, Le Lyrial carried 144 guests and 145 staff. It’s a ratio that underscores the luxury of the experience. One crew member from Bali asked me why I’d come all this way to see ice, while a French-Algerian butler explained that she chose night shifts so she could join the activities during the day. On the second-to-last day, the whole crew came out to be applauded by the guests. One evening we happened to be on the bridge when the captain remarked, “It’s like… what do you say? Haute couture! We must make it bespoke.”

*

This seal lay anxiously across a heart-shaped floe waiting for a circling pack of orca to leave. After some time they did so, at which the seal presumably was much relieved.

Mother Nature makes herself known continuously throughout our journey through the wind. Or W-I-N-D, as Expedition Leader Suzana spells out whenever updating the guests about it, rather than testing the weather gods’ patience. Shackleton “lived life like a mighty, rushing wind.” The often-violent wind will always determine the plans for expeditions, queasiness levels and even landings back into port. 

On our expeditions to land, conditions change in a moment – it’s not about temperature but about wind and wind chill factor. We set out each morning to see elephant seals on the beach and Adélie penguin colonies on the rocks; logging – that is, watching seals sleep like logs –
on Neck Bay; and from the deck we see pods of killer whales, the “wolves of the ocean”. Only small groups are allowed on land at any one time, and we are carefully guided to cause minimal impact.

Every day, two Zodiac trips take around ten guests to land, accompanied by a guide and one of the ship’s experts. Before we set out our shoes and equipment are disinfected to reduce the possibility of taking contagious diseases onto the continent. For each trip, they craft a narrative, whether around the penguins and their nests, sea lions and their mating habits, or the history of some of the abandoned bases we pass. The experience is like an interactive David Attenborough nature show.

Antarctica is empty and still, yet at night the ice creaks and the wind howls around us. The night sky is overloaded with stars, and as it is summer the sky never gets dark, remaining a deep inky violet-blue. The smell of penguins – like oily, rotting fish – punctuates our trips to land and somehow never quite recedes. On the bridge, watchmen still use the naked eye to evaluate the dangers of the ice; no technology yet developed has the capacity to discern between dangerous and innocuous glaciers.

The ship is littered with paper maps, which the captain likes to use alongside radar. Antarctica was first named as such as early as classical antiquity; the Greek geographer Marinus of Tyre reportedly used the name in his world map from the second century CE, which has since been lost.

A mural at the US-run Palmer Station on Anvers Island, which usually hosts between 20 and 45 people depending on the season.

The captain remarks to us that no two of his trips have ever been the same. The ice, weather and location of animals shape the journey. One morning we are on deck when the crew sight a blue whale nursing its calf. Suddenly, the waves froth as they are surrounded by a pod of orcas. A chase begins as the mother whale steers its child away from danger, the orcas follow and behind, Le Lyrial gives chase. The experience is electric; the whale and calf escape. Later we learn from our sea mammal expert that this was just a training exercise – the orcas were mostly too young to safely hunt but were learning how to do so from their mother.

Time and again, reality breaks through luxury. We make an excursion to an abandoned British base, Port Lockroy, where the cold bites through the buildings in which the army left behind cans of ham, Penguin Classics and woefully inadequate equipment. Later, we visit the research scientists at the US-run Palmer Station, bringing them fresh vegetables, which only arrive twice a year or so from passing boats. Palmer Station has a jetty where container ships can dock, but over the winter a giant glacier has blocked the inlet. The scientists have tried to blow it up with dynamite, a process that further lodged the iceberg against the jetty. The scientist team is young, made up mostly of PhD students on this strange posting at the end of the world. Given their frugal life it feels strange to return to the luxury of our ship, and surreal when, a few days later, Rich, our expedition leader for the day, takes out a bottle of champagne in the Zodiac while an icy wind screams in our face.

Truly, this is a region of the world that sets human against nature. The albatross, the high sea’s most iconic bird, is today endangered, victim of the thousands of hooks set by fishing trawlers. The populations of fur seals and whales have only just stabilised after being decimated by hunting for generations. When I ask Suzana what has changed over her 35 years of coming to the ice continent, she is clear. “Glacier calving has been more frequent. Gentoo penguin populations have moved, but whales are gaining in numbers. It used to be rare to spot whales and now they are plentiful enough that there needs to be a whale speed zone in place.”

Clearly, the greatest risk to this otherwise untouched continent is climate change and the gradual erosion of the glaciers. No matter how closed off Antarctica might be, the actions of those on the other continents of the world are visible here. In this context, it is natural that people might question whether tourists should travel to Antarctica. In response, Suzana has this to say: “The concept of wilderness is being forgotten. Antarctica is a continent that is dedicated to science and peace. It’s the closest thing to being on another planet. It’s very well managed. So, the 100,000 tourists who visited Antarctica this year have now become 100,000 advocates for the land and for the wilderness.”

The individuals who joined us on our trip came armed with spectacular camera equipment, clearly following Geoffrey Kent’s dictum to “hunt with a camera, not with a gun.” In a world in which luxury travel can often feel homogenous, dominated by the hipster-coffee-shop mode of globalisation, Antarctica is a true escape from the rest of the world. Perhaps one would expect nothing less from a trip to the ends of the earth, but it is hard not to leave without feeling transported, changed, in some way different.

After ten days on Le Lyrial, it’s a discombobulating experience to touch down at Heathrow, make your way through the e-passport gates, order an Uber to take you home and pay with contactless for your milk and eggs at Tesco. The urban vistas of the drive home reveal a metropolis of steel, concrete and plastic. Neon lights blink everywhere, on the wheels of scooters and at the end of vapes. It makes you think about all the stuff that makes up our lives, made in a factory on one side of the planet and shipped over the same oceans to our shops on the other. Antarctica’s emptiness feels like a utopia. If only our government was dedicated to peace and science. If only we could all visit Antarctica, where Mother Nature rules and W-I-N-D can make or break your day. .