Travel

Joanna Symons tells you all you need to know about visiting Antarctica, the glassy world of the last wilderness.

8:30AM BST 14 Aug 2013

Comments

It s hard to escape the rat race these days. There are queues to reach the summit of Everest, direct flights to remote Pacific islands and luxurious hotels in the rainforest. We ve tamed and colonised most of the world, but one vast stretch of the planet remains beyond our grasp: Antarctica. This frozen continent at the end of the Earth has never been permanently occupied by man. Accessible only from November to March, it has no towns, no villages, no habitation bar the odd research station or expedition hut; just grand, icy, unpredictable wilderness. Even if you re travelling there on a cruise ship, as most people do, the solitude and the emptiness will envelop you and bring you down to scale.

Not that solitude is the first thing that comes to mind when you re standing in the middle of a penguin colony on an Antarctic shoreline. When I visited, in early February, there were thousands of birds packed tightly on every rock, both shy gentoo penguins and the bolder adélies, which seemed happy for us to wander among them, our cameras clicking furiously at the grey fluff-ball chicks tapping their parents beaks to be fed. Adult penguins nudged each other into the sea and porpoised through the water like leaping salmon, their oiled white feathers gleaming silver in the sun. Later in the trip I saw chinstrap penguins on Livingstone Island, looking just as if they were sporting old-fashioned motorcycle helmets.

Adélie penguins leaping from an iceberg into the wind-whipped sea

But penguins are by no means the only stars of the show here. I found it equally thrilling to see a wandering albatross circling above our ship, dipping its great wings into the rolling waters of the Drake Passage. Or fat elephant seals lolling on the beach in a soup of algae, snorting and bellowing at each other like elderly members of a gentlemen s club.

Most exciting of all, though, were the whales. As the call went up from the bridge of our ship Humpbacks! we spotted three of them leaping from the water, their magnificent tails emerging and dipping as if in slow motion, so close that we could see their great barnacled heads, their eyes and blowholes.