A crackle on the radio is followed by a sudden change in direction of the rib. “A humpback has been spotted,” our guide explains, swinging the outboard around.
We race through a maze of bus-sized icebergs, Chinstrap penguins leaping in the boat’s wake like little oily dolphins. The sky overhead is brilliant blue, the snow-caked mountains tower above and the day is crisp with excitement.
Suddenly those of us onboard release our bated breath. A head breaks through the water’s surface, followed by a hump, a blasted column of water and then a great fluke, turned towards the sky in a languid wave as our whale returns to the depths.
A brief encounter, but a perfect one. Smiles stretch across our faces.
I am in Antarctica on a 10-day trip with Norwegian cruise firm HX Hurtigruten Expeditions. The seriousness of the 400 adult guests onboard the Fridtjof Nansen is constantly swapped for enthusiasm, wonder and a childlike hunger to learn more about this pristine, alien place. Yet, question marks would begin to cloud this simple joy come the end of the trip.
HX is one of 51 cruise ship operators sailing a total of 122,000 tourists to Antarctica every year. American sealer and explorer John Davis was the first to step on the frozen continent 204 years ago, and since then around one million people have made it to a landmass 110times bigger than the UK. That figure is rising fast, with annual visitor numbers quadrupling in a decade. All who have made it there have had to work for it, to greater and lesser extents, depending how Victorian your birthdate is.
I didn’t have to spend months sailing, but instead took an overnight flight from Heathrow to Buenos Aires, a layover, a 4am flight to Ushuaia at the bottom of Argentina, then on to the Fridtjof Nansen. We did, however, have to take on the notorious Drakes Passage.
Variously known as Drakes’ Shake, “the most dreaded bit of ocean on the Globe” and home to the world’s worst storms, the stretch has claimed the lives of countless sailors and cruise passengers as recently as 2022.
Our voyage over the Passage was mercifully calm enough for me to fill it with a reading of David Grann’s The Wager – a sensational account of a doomed Royal Navy expedition that came unravelled on the Drake – yet still buffeted by great hill-like waves that caused our ship to rise up then crash down into the sea’s valley for two days.
With the first glimpse of an iceberg from the port side, the swell calmed, allowing the spring to return to the steps of those who suffered from pallid complexions and a forced two-day fast. Excitement levels onboard peaked.
“I’ve been waiting for this almost my whole life,” one happy cruiser said to me as we sat in the ship’s engine-heated on-deck hot tub, watching hundreds of icebergs join the first, speckling the ocean with twinkling white swirls. Our ship had made it to the shelter of the Antarctic Peninsula. Now the juddering waves were behind us, and the third night on board was peaceful. We woke to find a different world. One of mountains, ice shelves that stretch ominously past the horizon, and penguins.
The first sighting from our ship caused breakfasting guests to drop their hash browns and rush to the window in an excited gaggle.
This was swiftly followed by our inaugural trip off the ship, where cheers for those stepping foot onto the seventh continent for the first time had to be muffled so as not to disturb a colony of Gentoo penguins.
Like the Chinstraps and Adélies we also encountered, the knee-high aquatic birds are as abundant on the Peninsula as pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and just as fearless.
The lack of any predators make them curious fellows who humans must give right of way to as they slide tummies-down along penguin highways to the water, where their clumsy prat-falls are switched for supreme elegance.
The only competition for seeing them up close in their natural habitat came from the ship’s glass-walled sauna, where the cold of the day’s expeditions could be sweated out while watching penguins dance and the humpback breach in the waves below. The sauna would come in particularly handy after two once-in-a-lifetime experiences. The first was camping.
One evening a team of 30 jumper-swaddled guests were motored off the Fridtjof Nansen on to a spit of land where we pounded on waist-deep snow until it was compact enough to hold our two-person tents.
While the bucket and flag toilet set-up for the night was a little comical, watching a pod of humpbacks circle the island from a tent porch as a false midsummer sunset pretended to welcome in a dark night was sublime in the extreme.
I peeked out of my tent at 4am to find stillness, crystalline glaciers and towering mountains surrounding our camp. It gave a small sense of the brutality of a continent that has killed 1000th of all humans who have ever ventured there.
We left our four-season sleeping bags and packed up at 5am, heading back to the ship for an early breakfast and steam.
The second was the ice plunge. Most Antarctic tourists today go to Deception Island, a volcanic rock once home to the worst of the whaling trade. Two metres of ash now covers up the preserved humpback carcasses abandoned on the beach. Magma below causes steam to swirl dramatically.
Sadly it doesn’t also warm the sea water, which hovered around 0C as I stripped down and plunged into the icy drink. The coldness hit me like a train. Seconds later I raced towards the waiting towel and then into the sauna, a cluster of nearby penguins seemingly unmoved by my pathetic attempt to join them in the shallows.
HX does not put on mega-ship style cruises with casinos and cabarets, but that doesn’t mean fun is in short supply. Guests can take part in citizen science projects and witness experts at work, including one whale researcher who collects humpback blubber using a crossbow.
In the afternoons, lecturers told us of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s obsession with a place that made him feel “like a speck in the frozen nothingness”. Slurping cocktails as the Drake caused the hull to shake, we learned how he died of a hole in his heart on a fourth doomed mission to reach the Pole – 11 years after Roald Amundsen’s success. The intensity of their adventures underscored how warm, comfortable and privileged ours was. All the while, one nagging thought proved difficult to shake. Should any of us be here?
Take only photos, leave only footprints is the unofficial motto of Antarctica’s tourism operators. More officially, visitors must have at most “a minor or transitory impact”, according to the Protocol on Environmental Protection of 1991.
Conservationists since then have fought to keep Earth’s most pristine, barren landmass as it is. They’ve enjoyed successes, such as a humpback population now up to 135,000 globally from a low of 10,000, and the implementation of strict rules by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators.
But as global temperatures rise in accord with the desire to travel somewhere novel, the ice recedes and the danger to Antarctica’s inhabitants grows. Right now, scientists are trying to see if it’s cholera or avian flu that is ripping through a penguin colony on the Peninsula. Humans must stay fivemetres from all Antarctic animals and touch nothing to avoid acting as vectors, but sadly, accidents happen.
HX work as hard as they possibly can to ensure they don’t and that the impact of tourists is at an absolute minimum. Every rule is followed to the letter. If anyone is qualified to take you to this fragile place, it’s them.
For all of the dangers overtourism anywhere can pose, it can also make powerful allies. Antarctica is the last place uncontaminated by the heavy footsteps of humans, yet somewhat ironically it is by stepping on it, feeling the brutality of its winds, realising it is in fact not empty, but teeming with whale and bird life, that it creates new defenders.
I stepped off the Fridtjof Nansen, clinging on to the awe Antarctica had filled me with, and hopeful that this beautiful desert at the end of the world can be kept as it is.
Book the holiday
- HX Hurtigruten Expeditions UK offers 12-day Highlights of Antarctica cruises from £7,238pp. Includes one night pre-cruise hotel stay in Buenos Aires, Argentina, flights between Buenos Aires and Ushuaia, transfers, all-inclusive drinks, wi-fi, expedition jacket, gratuities, professional photos and activities. Book by March 31 to save up to 15% on voyages through to March 31, 2027. Flights to Buenos Aires extra. travelhx.com/en-gb
- More info at argentina.travel bas.ac.uk/tourism
