While we were on South Georgia, the weather was fierce. It rained and sleeted and hailed at 30 degrees (F) for the four days there. But the wildlife was amazing. We were so fortunate with all we saw. This was just amazing – the angles and the positions of the three king penguins. There’s a larger version of this available too – click through to check it out.

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Antarctica is the land of ice, it contains the south pole, and is one of the largest continents on the planet. For list-checkers, it is (often) the last of seven continents to visit. It houses some of the most incredible wildlife, from emperor penguins who brave the entire winter to protect their eggs, to huge leopard seals who look and move like the big cats, only on ice and in the water.

There are three ways to get to Antarctica:

1. By cruise ship from New Zealand. The least popular route for two reasons: it’s a long way (three days across the weddell sea instead of one-and-a-half or two), and it’s on the side of the continent with fewer bases and wildlife.
   • Benefits: relative to other routes, you see a different area of the continent (not sure if it’s better). Also it’s less touristy (but the continent itslef isn’t very touristy).
   • Drawbacks: long, far away, and probably not very many viewpoints.
2. By plane from Ushuaia (or other airports). This is mainly the way that scientists and journalists get to McMurdo base – the American research station that functions like the capital city of the continent (albeit with a population of 1000-2000).
   • Benefits: fast. Also gets you pretty far inland to the main base. Very educational opportunity.
   • Drawbacks: not a cruise, don’t get the opportunity to see more stuff.
3. By cruise ship from Ushuaia. The most popular route, cruise ships leave Ushuaia’s port every day for trips that include some part of the Antarctic peninsula.
   • Benefits: well-supported, many travel options, probably less expensive than other routes.
   • Drawbacks: not always as fast, don’t get to McMurdo.

We went on a cruise ship from Ushuaia, and loved it. There are actually four categories of trips you can take from Ushuaia:

1. The Antarctic Peninsula (11 days total, 5 days of landings/viewings). This is the classic (and the shortest) Antarctica cruise. It’s also the most prevalent and the cheapest. Your 5 days of landings will include different spots, at least one on the continent (others on islands), and probably a visit to a research base. Lots of wildlife and icebergs. Since you’ll be on the peninsula the whole time, you’ll most likely see a few different genus of wildlife (penguins, seals, albatross, etc), but not as many different species (macaroni, emperor, king, gentoo penguins) within a particular genus.
2. South of the Circle (typically about 3 weeks). This cruise goes past 66.6 degrees south, usually in an icebreaker, and tries to get as far south as possible. I’ve never been on one of these, but my guess is that it’s all about latitude and doesn’t prioritize wildlife.
3. Seeing the emperor penguins (typically about 3 weeks). This cruise goes early in the season – November usually – in an icebreaker as far south as possible. Then, as soon as the weather is clear, everybody boards helicopters to fly to the emperor nesting grounds. This is probably one of the coolest cruises, but it is pretty much exclusively focused on one penguin species – the emperor.
4. Antarctica, the Falklands, and South Georgia (typically about 3 weeks). This covers two different island sets as well as the peninsula. It probably covers the greatest variety of wildlife possible, and certainly the greatest diversity of landscapes – from bright sandy beaches to icy/snowy/iceberg landings, all kinds of weather and conditions. This is what we did – and it’s almost three weeks long! We loved it.

Booking: cruises to Antarctica operate differently than any other kind of travel I’ve experience. Typical booking timeframes are a year or more in advance. Anything less than 3 months is considered last-minute. Why? It’s hard to get to Ushuaia, these are really expensive, and they’re long enough that it would be difficult to give only two weeks warning for a three-week vacation.

You can certainly book in advance, but if you can plan to take enough time off, it’s probably best to just go down to Ushuaia, plan to spend 2-3 weeks shopping around for a good cruise, and then the 2-3 weeks to take the cruise. You could probably save about 40-70% off the list price and still get the same cruise experience. Remember, there are only about 20 or 30 boats that go to Antarctica, and they’re operated by about 5 or 6 companies, so the market is pretty simple. Keep in mind, Quark Expeditions is widely considered to be the best company out there – that’s who we went with, and we had an amazing experience.

If I were to do it for the first time, I would do what we did – last-minute book an Antarctica+Falklands+South Georgia cruise. I would do it early (November) or mid-season (December or January) though.

Antarctica is incredible. It’s really an amazing place that is slowly dying as climate change takes hold of our planet. If you get a chance, visit – it truly is a place like no other! See our photos here.

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The Falklands Islands are a small group of islands about 500 or 600 miles of the southern Atlantic coast of Argentina. In addition to being a safe haven for Britishites around the world, they are really a beautiful collection of islands, with some amazing views and a really impressive set of supported wildlife.

They’re an independent British territory, and have been controversial territory for the two countries for about 400 years. Getting there is tricky, because you can’t fly there directly from Argentina. To get there, you basically have 3 options:

1. Fly from Punta Arenas, Chile. LAN flies to Stanley from Punta Arenas, and you can get to Punta Arenas from either Santiago (international airport) or Ushuaia (international airport, but if you’re coming from another country, you’ll probably land in Buenos Aires and them fly to Ushuaia).
   • Benefits: Easy flight to the Falklands. If you’re already in South America, this is the simplest way to get to the Falklands (and probably the cheapest, as well).
   • Drawbacks: this flight only happens once per week, on Saturdays. So not only would you arrive on a Saturday, you would have to leave on a Saturday as well. So you’d need to spend exactly a week there (or two, or three, and so on).
2. Fly from an RAF base in England. The RAF offers semi-chartered flights (with some tourist seats) to the Falklands from the UK on an irregular schedule.
   • Benefits: you can get there direct from above the equator (pretty far north in the northern hemisphere, actually).
   • Drawbacks: just about everything else about this flight is a drawback- there’s no published schedule, costs are pretty extreme, and it’s really really long.
3. Visit in a cruise ship from Ushuaia. This is probably the best option, and is included in certain Antarctic cruise routes (which is how we went).
   • Benefits: scheduled visit, at a reasonable cost, guided tours of the sites on your itinerary.
   • Drawbacks: may not be flexible enough to allow for independent exploration.

What to do there:

• Visit Stanley, the main town (of 3000 people), and check out the museums, some of the memorials (including an Argentine one, which is a recent addition), and some of the wrecks in te harbor.
• Visit some of Camp (the outlying islands and residences). The thing about camp is, most of it is on other islands. You can try to travel by boat, but the distances are often long enough to eat up a day of travel. There are a few private planes that you can fly to different locations from, and I assume flight costs are reasonable – although I know nothing about them. Be aware that travel around the islands is unpredictable an often weather-dependent, so you may want to have a few days of flex time if you are making the travel arrangements.

As I mentioned, the islands are really beautiful – check out some photos if you don’t believe me…

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Finally – the Antarctic Peninsula. We spent two weeks on the ship the Ocean Nova building to this point. And we’ve spent almost two weeks here on the blog talking about how the first parts of our cruise went.

If you remember, the weather on South Georgia had been up-and-down; some landings were easy, others had heavy winds, driving snow, and 10-foot waves crashing on the beach. Our ship pushed hard into a 15-MPH headwind for two days while traveling the 800 miles from South Georgia; the headwind slowed us down enough to cause us to skip the South Orkney Islands, which were to be our only research base landing.

But we’re here now. And when we first arrived at the Peninsula, we were having a rough time. The weather didn’t agree with us, either. We had a heavy mist at our first landing, Gourdin Island. Since it was late in the season, and since it’s known for supporting 3 different species of penguins, we were treated to the delightful sensory experience of an entire island covered in penguin guano. I don’t know how much experience you have with this stuff, but trust me, it doesn’t smell good. We did get to see most of our penguins though, including a few really interesting ones (both photos link to the rest of our photos from Gourdin):

Adelie Penguins

A Gentoo Penguin with a broken foot:

In the afternoon, we continued to Astrolabe Island, which we circled in zodiacs (intentionally as part of a zodiac cruise). We saw some of our first icebergs off of the Antarctic Peninsula here:

The next morning, we went to Mikkelsen Harbour, site of an abandoned Argentine research station. Here, we fought 40MPH winds and sideways sleet to walk around the island for a few hours. We weren’t the only ones, however – someone (we don’t know who) actually sailed a sailboat down to Mikkelsen!

Wow. But then, in the afternoon, the situation changed. We arrived at Portal Point, to be our only continental landing. Basically, most of the places we visited were islands, and some people who go to Antarctica go specifically to step foot on the continent, so they can confidently say that they have been to all 7 continents (Stef and I have each only been to 4 – the same 4, actually!). Brandon (our awesome expedition leader), expected our visit to Portal Point to last about 15 minutes on land, because he figured that the weather wouldn’t be great. However, it turned out to be incredible! We spent easily over an hour at the spot on land, hiking up and down, and shooting tons of photos. Here are two – check out the rest as well by clicking through:

Our final stop happened the next morning. We went to the Melchior Islands, and had amazing weather. Bright sun, blue skies, blue ice, white snow, no wind, no rain – it was incredible. Needless to say, everyone loved it. The kayaking group went out for one last paddle – we had an awesome time (I’ll put up photos from that expedition at some point later on this year). Here are some photos from the Melchior Islands:

At the end of the landing, a last-minute announcement explained that we would be able to do a “Polar Plunge” into the Antarctic Ocean. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. Here’s one of the photos, taken by our friend Jochem.

That’s it for the moment. In case you’re curious, I shot about 2200 photos during our three weeks on the ship, of which about 400 were worth keeping. Right now (since we’re still traveling), I’ve only posted the 40 or 50 best. But don’t worry, we’ll keep them coming later on…

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South Georgia was the second major stop for us in our Antarctic cruise on the Ocean Nova (We passed Shag Rocks on our way, but it was a driveby – literally a float-by). This island also has a really interesting and colorful history:

• The base for all Antarctic whaling activity from the early 1900s until the 1960s (when most of the whales in the Southern Ocean had been hunted).
• The finish line of Shackleton’s spectacular rescue of his Endurance crew, after:
  • A 50-mile hike across the island, without sleep
  • An 800-mile lifeboat journey (where any slight navigation miss would have caused them to completely miss the island) from the Antarctic Peninsula
  • A 40-mile sledge pull of lifeboats off the Endurance
• It’s now one of the main research sites of the British Antarctic Survey, and supports a population of 89 researchers (nine, that’s correct)

We were able to spend four days in and around South Georgia. We made landings in incredible weather – both good and bad. We saw several spots on the 100-mile island, including (click each photo to see the rest from that landing):

• Salisbury Plain, one of our coldest landings (40+MPH winds, and a driving rain). We saw a lot of King Penguins here, as you can see from the photos.



• Fortuna Bay, where we got to see some more penguins. But, there were also a few reindeer there:



• Stromness, the site of one of the abandoned whaling stations on the island. We also saw Shackleton’s waterfall – the waterfall he and his men climbed down when they finally realized that they could be saved.



• Grytviken, capital of the island, where the British Antarctic Survey is based. It’s also the former site of the biggest whaling station on the Island, and where Shackleton is buried. Even the driving snow made it more difficult to see, we did see our first Chinstrap penguin.



• Gold Harbour, where we had beautiful weather. We saw some elephant seals, a lot of penguins (of course), and some great fur seals.



• Cooper Bay, the site of our only Macaroni Penguin landing.

Enjoy!

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Our cruise to Antartica took us the long way, which we were really excited about. Our first destination (after 1 and a half days at sea) was the Falklands Islands (Islas Malvinas for the Argentines). There are a couple of things you should know about the Falklands (and traveling to them):

• They have been disputed territory between Argentina and the Falklands (technically British territory, but the Brits say they let the Islands run themselves) since the mid-1800s.
• In 1982, Argentina invaded (in an effort to improve national morale), with a moderately bloody result (a couple hundred fatalities, in an island range with about 3500 inhabitants) that was nullified when the Brits responded with strength and retook the islands.
• At the end of February (when we visited), everyone believed that the Falklands were full of huge oil reserves. Kristina (Kirchner, current Argentinian president),  was once again raising the Argentinian “territorial integrity and proximity” claim to the Falklands, which has Falklands residents in an uproar.
  • In fact, when I asked a shop owner what she thought of the oil prospects, all she could talk about was “her” (meaning Kristina); she didn’t have anything to say about the actual possibility of oil.
  • Note, as of yesterday, drilling in the Falklands seemed to be producing poor results (Source: BBC).

As a result, it’s very difficult to travel from Argentina to the Falklands. There are no flights, and our ship spent an extra hour in Ushuaia customs before leaving port because we had the Falklands on our itinerary (this may have been made slightly more difficult with an Argentine expedition team member and another Argentine passenger, I’m not sure). You can only fly to the Falklands in two ways:

1. An RAF flight from Brize Norton (in the UK, via the Ascencion Islands), which is essentially a military charter flight, and as such doesn’t have a well-defined public schedule.
2. A Saturday LAN Chile flight from Punta Arenas, which means you must spend a week on the islands.

Regardless of all this, we spent about a day and a half in the Falklands Islands, and saw some places that are rarely visited. We went to:

• Steeple Jason, one of the most difficult landings in the Falklands, as it has a rocky shoreline (there is no beach, just a lot of really big rocks). This was our first landing, but the water was like glass, so it wasn’t as difficult as it could have been. We saw the world’s largest albatross colony (about 100,000 pairs, plus chicks and adolescents, plus the requisite penguins.



• Saunders Island, a beautiful beach landing where we got to see Rockhopper Penguins, some amazing Commerson’s dolphins, and a great sunset. The weather for this landing was beautiful, too.



• Port Stanley, capital of the Falklands, which had been a repair stop for many whaling ships in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s. There are some pretty impressive wrecks there. Our morning in Stanley wasn’t as much fun as our other landings in the Falklands, because the weather was pretty foul – cold (just above freezing), high winds (30+ MPH), and a lot of rain early on definitely dampened our spirits. But, the museum was very interesting, and we got to stop at a few different, funny, photo points.

The Falklands were cool, and have a pretty strung-out and involved history – the Spanish, Portuguese, Argentines, and Brits all fought over them. We’ll talk more about it later on. For now, enjoy the photos! (click each one above to see the others from that location).

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