A voyage to the fascinating, starkly beautiful White Continent is a thrilling and humbling experience that is never forgotten. And it’s not just about the penguins. Seasoned polar adventurist Stanley Stewart reveals 10 extraordinary reasons to fall in love with Antarctica.

By Stanley Stewart

Whales

If the stars align, you might glimpse a blue whale, like a refugee from the age of dinosaurs, ghosting beneath the ship, the world’s largest animal. But it is humpbacks who will become your new polar companions. From the decks you can watch them surfacing, breaching, lifting that great tail in slow motion to disappear again beneath the waves. In spite of their bad breath – when they are close you will catch the stench of fish from their blowholes – they are the romantics of the sea. The males love to play with bubbles, and use them for foreplay, blowing bubbles across the female’s genitals prior to mating. They are also renowned for their haunting mating songs, known to carry thousands of miles through the oceans. When a female chooses a bubble-blowing mate, it is really the songs she chooses.

Ice

Antarctic waters are one of Nature’s great art galleries – a parade of sculptural form. The beauty of icebergs, each unique, each an exquisite composition of fluid lines, almost overshadow the wildlife. If the shapes are often surreal, so are the colors. They seem to emit light as if somewhere in their cold hearts a switch had been flicked. Carved by water and winds, icebergs are categorized as castellated, tabular, and pinnacled. Ships need to be wary of them, penguins and seals use them like park benches, and when one parked itself in the harbor of Palmerston Research Station, they had no choice but to work around it, praying that one day it would sail away as mysteriously as it had arrived.

Abandoned Huts

In this wild place, the only continent without permanent habitation, abandoned buildings have a weird fascination. Scott’s hut is the most famous, still with its Edwardian supplies and brand names; it was from here they set off to their deaths. But there are a handful of others – research stations, abandoned decades ago. They are ghostly places, books still on the shelves, tins of Bovril still in the storage bins, tools still on the workbenches, cracked boots still under the beds. In these wild white wastes, these glimpses of tenuous human life, weirdly preserved in the dry freezer of Antarctica, are strangely moving. Who were these men, what were their lives, that they sought their destiny in this remote place.

Elephant Seals

Antarctica is a world of seals but none as extraordinary as the elephant seal. The giants of the seal world, the bull males are the size and the weight of a pickup truck. Watch for them making their way along the beach like massive caterpillars with vast folds of rolling blubber, pausing every ten yards to catch their breath. Breeding season is exhausting for these guys. With probiscis noses to amplify their bellowing, the bulls command extensive harems – sometimes up to a hundred strong – on a stretch of beach, mating with each female in turn while harrumphing up and down to keep other males at bay. Brawls are common; a third of male elephant seals never reach sexual maturity.

Zodiacs

The taxi service of the Antarctic, fleets of these sturdy inflatable boats carry guests ashore, zipping back and forth between the ship and the land, sometimes twice a day, for excursions among the penguins and the seals and the white landscapes. There is an adrenaline buzz with every outing – kitting up in your gear, heading down to the boarding deck, the camaraderie of the other people aboard, the brilliantly capable and knowledgeable guides on the A&K Expedition Team, the wind and the spray and the sense of adventure. Eye-level with the ocean, Zodiacs offer some of the best sightings of seals and whales. Aboard the mother ship, cocktails in hand, you are just looking at Antarctica. In a Zodiac, you are actually in Antarctica.

Birds

The Southern Ocean abounds with extraordinary sea birds. Most mate for life, though like us have a high rate of divorce. They wheel above the ship in a white sky – gulls, terns, and cormorants, fulmars, petrels, and shearwaters. The most ominous is the skua, the bandits of Antarctica, who sail low over penguin colonies looking for weakness – a neglected egg, an unprotected chick, a frail adult. The most spectacular birds are the Albatrosses with their vast wings spread to catch the slightest air currents. The most adorable are the snowy petrels, pure white, often seen in flocks on icebergs, one of only three birds – the other two being penguins – who nest exclusively in Antarctica.

Explorers

There are ghosts on any Antarctic voyage. You will learn about them in some of the lectures, and you can’t help but sense them when you are ashore, with the polar winds swirling about you. Antarctic was the last great stage for exploration. Men with frozen beards and thousand-yard stares competed with one another to explore the continent, to reach the South Pole, to lose their toes to frostbites and their companions to wind chill. Their heroic tales are the only human history this continent has. For them Antarctica was always much more than a physical place. It was a longing. It was here that they felt most alive, and many would return again and again.

Shackleton’s Grave

At Grytviken, the old Norwegian whaling station on the island of South Georgia – an island David Attenborough refers to as the Serengeti of the Antarctic for the density of its wildlife – there is a small Norwegian church and a cemetery. At the back of the cemetery is a modest cross marking the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Routinely cited as the most remarkable of Antarctic explorers, Shackleton sailed across the Southern Ocean – battered by colossal waves, freezing water, and frightening winds – 800 miles in a small open boat to get help for his comrades on Elephant island. In spite of this narrow escape from death, he would return to Antarctic some years later, hoping to recapture the excitement of the White South. He only got as far as South Georgia where he died of a heart attack. Visiting his grave in this remote place has the feeling of a pilgrimage.

Lectures

Not the first thing that comes to mind when planning a vacation, but on our Antarctic cruises the lectures soon become unmissable. Naturalists, biologists, historians and writers in the A&K Expedition Team take turns to inform, to entertain, to captivate in the lecture theatre. The speakers unravel a rag bag of strange stories and tall tales, from the exploits of Shackleton, whose ship was crushed in the ice, to the curious behavior of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the largest, strongest, and deepest ocean current on earth which influenced everything from the circumnavigation of Sir Francis Drake to the density of nutrients for whales. Along with the talks are wildlife films. Sink into your seat with a cocktail, and listen to the elaborate songs of the humpback whales in the darkened theatre – it will be one of the most memorable moments of the voyage.

And yes – Penguins

Penguins are the entertainment of Antarctica, the comic turn, these upright little figures in their formal attire, waddling past, Chaplinesque, or flopping down suddenly on their bellies to toboggan across the ice. On South Georgia colonies of King Penguins number in the tens of thousands, filling entire bays, stretching over the horizon. I became obsessed by the Adelie Penguin on the Antarctic Peninsula, hunkered on their stone nests, their backs to the wind, a mantle of snow round their shoulders. Or setting off to fish, at a half trot, full of plucky penguin enthusiasm. They don’t return our fascination. If our paths should cross, penguins pause, adjust their course, and skirt round us, as if we were of no more interest than an inconvenient boulder.