Jonathan & Angie Scott - Antarctica November 2006

The appeal of Antarctica is multi-faceted: the landscape, wildlife and history combine to make a journey there a unique experience, each day revealing a new layer of awe and complexity; the excitement of glimpsing your first towering iceberg, being stunned into silence by the raucous braying of a penguin colony, witnessing a pod of killer whales knifing through the water in pursuit of prey - and the chance to enter the world of the explorers as you step inside one of the historic huts.

Angie and I are no strangers to this icy world. Over the past sixteen years we have made more than a dozen excursions to Antarctica, initially as guest-lecturers on MS Explorer, the 'little red ship' that pioneered expeditionary cruising to the ends of the earth during the 1970s and is still sailing the southern seas to this day. In more recent years we have had the pleasure of lecturing and hosting photo-workshops on Ioffee and Vavilov, ice-hardened Russian research vessels that Peregrine charters during the tourist season for journeys to the ice. Each cruise lasts about two weeks - three if your destination includes South Georgia, the 'Serengeti of the Southern Ocean'. Here you find fur seals in their millions, hundreds of thousands of elephant seals, four species of penguins, nesting wandering albatrosses and a variety of whales. South Georgia may not have as much 'ice' as the Antarctic continent, but it certainly has the wildlife.

The quickest and most direct route to reach the continent is to head for the Antarctic Peninsula (the continent's spiny tail) from the tip of South America, a journey of nearly 1,000 km (600 miles). In this respect Ushuaia in Argentina - the southernmost city in the world - has for many become the beginning and end of an expeditionary cruise. Ushuaia has a charm all its own, a frontier town where the ambitions of travelers and adventurers meet at the edge of the great Southern Ocean and are best celebrated with a meal of fine seafood and a generous glass of blood-red Malbec. Many of the trips we have undertaken have made a detour to include the Falklands - the first opportunity to see penguins and albatrosses - before heading to South Georgia and then onwards to the Peninsula. In this way one can see how life has adapted to progressively colder climes, and how the early explorers must have struggled to make sense of what lay to the south of the pack ice.

The Falklands - or the Islas Malvinas as they are know in Argentina - are a composite of 700 scattered islands and islets clustered like the jagged pieces of a jigsaw around two main islands, known as West and East Falkland. The character of the landscape mirrors its isolation - stark, with gently rolling hills and craggy uplands marked by bare peat and scree slopes, a pattern that is repeated again and again - kelp-fringed islands with a belt of dense tussock grass giving way to a windswept treeless interior scored by narrow streams that meander towards the sea through peat-forming heaths and bogs. The Falklands' climate is influenced by cold surface currents flowing north from the Southern Ocean, with blustery westerly winds wafting sea smells of kelp and seals and seabird colonies.

While land-based tourism accounts for just a thousand visitors annually, the use of the islands as a departure point or port of call for some 80 cruise ships attracts 40,000 visitors traveling to or from South America, South Georgia and the Antarctic every year. The capital Port Stanley is home to nearly 2,000 people and has been the capital since 1845. There is a strong sense of British village life, with the supermarket and pub focal points for a chat or a pint of ale, and empanadas - tasty triangles of meat-filled pastry best eaten hot - about the only hint of the islands' proximity to South America. A picnic taken along the waterfront with kelp gulls and skuas as your companions allows you to see the charm of this incongruous outpost and to take time to reflect on the mysteries that lie to the south for travelers to Antarctica.

The Falkland Islands and South Georgia are visibly alive with seabirds and other animals - summer is their moment and to see them during that season is to see them at their most vibrant and beautiful. For many people, though, stopping here would leave their journey to Antarctica incomplete. Heading further south towards the Antarctic Peninsula - the northernmost tip of Antarctica - there is one objective only: to see ice, to satisfy the longing for a glimpse of the white continent.

Depending on ice conditions, it takes one or two days to reach the Antarctic Peninsula from South Georgia across the Scotia Sea; two if you head directly across from Ushuaia over the notorious Drake Passage, a journey of almost 1,000 km (600 miles). While sailing south, people gaze in awe and fascination as icebergs appear on the horizon for the first time. Far off in the distance a whale blows and is gone again. In places the water's surface is broken by the silhouettes of porpoising penguins and seals, hinting at how far from land these creatures can travel. Then eventually the South Orkneys and South Shetlands appear out of the mist to the north and northeast of the tip of the Peninsula. These two clusters of islands, together with the neighbouring South Sandwich Islands and South Georgia, form the spine of a submerged mountain range linking the Transantarctic Mountains with the Andes of South America - an archipelago known as the Scotia Arc that reaches 540 km (335 miles) into the Southern Ocean. This is a chance for more landings and more penguins: 5 million pairs of chinstraps breed on the South Shetlands, and Bailey Head on the cinder flanks of Deception Island's ancient caldera is home to the single largest colony in the region, the massed ranks of birds acting like noisy commuters hurrying about their business on a crowded street as they hike back and forth between rookery and sea.

You can also approach Antarctica from the other side of the world, striking out from Australia or New Zealand (both about 2500 km/1,500 miles away). This is sometimes referred to as the 'historic gateway' to Antarctica, as it was the route chosen by many of the early explorers. Both countries are keenly aware of their Antarctic heritage and the significant role they must continue to play in helping to preserve the southern continent. Visitors embarking from this side of the continent will have more days on the ocean, which may not suit everyone, but that is a small price to pay for the chance to visit the Ross Sea and a variety of sub-Antarctic islands such as Macquarie, Auckland and Campbell. Angie and I recently completed a semi-circumnavigation of Antarctica to explore the Ross Sea region. We were filled with excitement at the thought of landing at Ross Island and visiting the huts - preserved virtually untouched - that were used by Scott and Shackleton as their base of operations for their attempts to reach the South Pole. We were also able to pay homage to the emperor penguin, largest of the penguin tribe, which breeds on the fast ice at some 40 remote colonies scattered around the continent. These areas are inaccessible to all but the most intrepid - or those on board an icebreaker with a helicopter capable of landing on the ice. That means signing up for a trip with Wildlife Worldwide on the Russian icebreaker, 'Kapitan Khlebnikov' as Angie and I did for a month between November and December 2006.

This far south it is easy to be lulled into a comfortable sense that all is well with the world; that the only worry is to ensure you don't get caught out in the chill with nowhere to hide. Travelling within these regions, whether on an expedition overland or by cruise ship, the overriding impression is of a place distanced from any possibility of human impact, a land of such austere and frigid intensity that it appears at first glance to be indestructible. Yet this is a seductive illusion, Antarctica's beguiling beauty shielding the harsh realities of the changes that are being wrought - often unseen but now increasingly noticed - in the ocean, beneath the ice and in the air. We can no longer deny that this is so - nor that it would be both unforgivable and inconceivable to allow this icy world to melt away through our negligence.

For details of Wildlife Worldwide Cruises to Antarctica please click here or contact us for details of our next Signature Safari with Jonathan & Angie Scott.