Category: Epic Adventures

The Antarctic Peninsula is a frozen finger pointing towards the far tip of South America. This is the Antarctica that most travellers are familiar with, cruising up and down its western coastline from the South Shetland Islands towards the Antarctic Circle. Far fewer visitors make it to the Weddell Sea.  Last season I joined Swoop’s […]

Tales from the heroic era of polar exploration have inspired travellers to Antarctica for a century. The names of Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton remain talismans for many people planning their trips today.  The huts that these early explorers used as bases for their attempts to reach the South Pole still stand today, […]

There are a few places in the world where you feel like you’re stepping into a BBC or National Geographic wildlife film, but South Georgia is one of these. Its enormous king penguin colonies are a photographer’s dream. In November 2022 I was lucky enough to make my first trip to South Georgia and fell […]

South Georgia is often described as the Serengeti of the Southern Ocean. It’s a title that speaks of the outsized attractions of this thin speck of an island, because when it comes to wildlife, South Georgia truly is the real deal. If you’ve ever considered the Galapagos Islands, the mountain gorillas of East Africa or […]

No figure towers over the history of polar exploration than that of Sir Ernest Shackleton. On polar expedition cruises, it’s a rare voyage there that doesn’t include a lecture about Shackleton’s life and the epic survival story of his Endurance expedition. It’s a story in which South Georgia plays a central role, and many visitors […]

Heralded as the ‘Galapagos of the Southern Ocean’, the stunning island of South Georgia is packed with both history and wildlife. For anyone who has ever watched a David Attenborough series on heaving king penguin colonies or battling elephant seals, it is likely to have been filmed on this remote island. My first trip to […]

If you’ve never visited Antarctica or experienced a Polar expedition cruise before, you may be wondering how you would spend your time there. Antarctica is totally uninhabited, excluding a few scientific bases, so the entirety of your time off the ship is spent outdoors in a vast white wonderland, with plenty of adventure activities on […]

Antarctica’s white wilderness has an irresistible magnetism for adventurous souls the world over. Around 40,000 travellers make the journey to the 7th continent each year in search of life-affirming and perspective-changing experiences, and they don’t return disappointed, but when is the best time to go? There are a host of reasons to voyage to one […]