A luxury Silversea cruise to Antarctica will give you close-up with iceburgs, penguins, orca, whales, breathtaking polar landscapes combined with the history of Ernest Shackleton's explorations from South Georgia.
Antarctica: Cruising the ends in the earth
If you've got Antarctica inside your bucket list, get accustomed to seeing it there. Not because you'll never go, but because whenever you do, even while you're always there, you'll be planning your return visit. Nobody ever crosses it well.
Part of what makes it stick out is the fact that it's hard to get to. That is, admittedly, a hard claim that they can maintain when you're on the way there around the Silversea cruise, along with your butler really wants to know your selection within the pillow menu. Though the Silver Explorer is officially a 1A-ice-class expedition vessel, there's no compromise on Silversea's customary inclusive service and opulent suites. Ernest Shackleton should have been so lucky.
This doughty explorer does though provide a theme for your journey. Like him, we begin our expedition in Buenos Aires, where we are flown by Silversea to Ushuaia, a colourful town at the southernmost tip of South usa. Boarding the Explorer there, we sail away and, because the evocatively-named Lighthouse at the End of the planet shrinks behind us, a mixture of excitement and apprehension causes us to be feel kindred spirits with the legendary Shackleton. Therefore we visit the bar, for cocktails before dinner.
This would be the pattern in the cruise: thrilling tasters of danger and exposure to the planet's most hostile environment, yet still time cushioned in comfort and flanked by reassuring expertise. The expedition staff, eagerly sharing their knowledge, make the cruise effortlessly educational. Cory-Ann is an expert on whales and seals; Anthony knows everything about Shackleton; Luke isn't without his binoculars, or stuck for that reaction to a problem about anything from icebergs to penguins. They deliver lectures, drive us inside the Zodiacs, guide us onshore, and therefore are always ready to share their passion for this very special place.
GETTING WILD
We sail first towards the Falkland Islands, and our first up-close encounter with penguins and albatrosses, because both versions, about this December cruise, are busily hatching eggs and feeding chicks. It's a barren, treeless place, and that we instantly respect both the wildlife and the those who have chosen to live there. In Stanley, we have a guided tour with a local, who's British to the core, out of the box the town itself using its red post- and telephone boxes, and it is pubs with warm ale on tap.
The harbour is full of picturesque shipwrecks, which we remember uneasily because the captain fights using a fifty-knot wind to slide the Explorer through the appropriately-named Narrows on our departure.
Two days' sail away we connect again with Shackleton. South Georgia is how his ill-fated Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 began and ended. The only people living listed here are scientists and the staff who serve them, and us. Picking our way past the seals, we have a tour around Grytviken, seeing the relics from the whaling days, hearing Norwegian sailors who could turn after-shave into hooch, and going towards the museum to examine home-made ice-shoes utilized by Shackleton's men, the soles pierced with screws.
Then we walk around the fringe of the once-busy harbour, and feel the white-painted fence to visit the grave of Shackleton himself. We form a circle round his rough-hewn gravestone and are led by among the ship's expedition staff inside a toast to “The Boss”. This is Silversea: it's champagne.
South Georgia is our summary of the glories in the Antarctic. You will find mountains, glaciers, seals everywhere, and big colonies of the continent's stars: penguins. Altogether, we'll encounter eleven species, many of them numbering in the tens of thousands of pairs, along with their fluffy chicks. These here are the largest we will have, King penguins, on the metre high and handsome utilizing their golden face markings. It's also our first proper introduction to those other distinctive options that come with penguin colonies: noise, and a pungent smell.
A Realm of WONDERMENT
En path to the Antarctic Peninsula itself, we stop off at Elephant Island, where Shackleton's men huddled as they, faultlessly guided by his captain, New Zealander Frank Worsley, pay on their own epic rescue mission to South Georgia. The rough sea that prevents our landing there provides some indication of the items they endured for four . 5 miserable months, being unsure of when rescue would ever come. We lurch in our Zodiacs, gazing with mixed disbelief and admiration at the foam-fringed finger of rock they clung to any or all that time.
Next morning, we get to Antarctica proper. We've already encountered icebergs, and our wonderment at these infinitely varied things of beauty grows and grows: shape, size, colour, texture, all of them are so different, and many types of so magnificent. They're usually embellished by assorted penguins and seals, which we have seen plunging into and in the sea, or arrowing through it. We have seen whales too: humpbacks bubble-net feeding. Orcas cruise past, dolphins ride the bow-wave.
We go ashore and acquire up close with penguins, that come and inspect us just like curiously after we observe them, pecking at our parkas, pulling on our zippers. The King penguin chicks are fledgling, as well as their fine brown down ripples within the wind because they wait patiently in large groups for their next feed.
There is really a hike through knee-deep snow to some cliff-top to look at a glacier calving in slow-motion. We visit an Argentine research base, walk around a desolate volcanic island where warm springs bubble across the shore, cruise within the Zodiacs around a glorious number of icebergs. We even allow ourselves to be sucked into doing the Polar Plunge, encountering the water, complete immersion essential to create the certificate. Many people choose to do it that individuals who went first can view others in the hot spa pool back on deck.
After 16 times during the sheer delight, our one consolation for heading back to Ushuaia and the end in our cruise, is the fact that Drake Passage, the roughest stretch of water on the planet, is perfect for us a millpond. It's the final treat of a cruise that has been so full of them, most people are addicted. I'll be back.
The writer was hosted aboard Silver Explorer
SAIL AWAY
Silversea Cruises is providing a number of cruises to Antarctica between November 2022 and February 2022, on board Silver Explorer, Silver Wind and Silver Cloud. All-inclusive fares for that Antarctica voyages come with an Early Booking Bonus of 10 %. The savings offer includes internal charter flights (where required), one-night pre-cruise accommodation, and transfres between airport, hotel and ship (where required, and it is on select voyages. To find out more, confer with your travel professional or Silversea Cruises on +61292550600, or visit silversea.com
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