The White Continent is arguably the last virgin wilderness. To help keep it that way, visitors must follow strict rules while they're there. Not that that stops Laurence Mackinfrom having an unforgettable journey
A LAND OF SERENE, pristine beauty, carved by nature with its harshest tools; the last great unspoilt wilderness, a frozen continent that has fired the imagination of explorers for centuries. Antarctica has to be seen to be believed; it is a hostile terrain, larger than Australia, that boasts almost no land mammals and is practically untouched by development. The danger, the isolation, the formidable environment and the extraordinary creatures that manage to thrive there make it one of the most fascinating and challenging of destinations.
Most trips to Antarctica begin in the Argentine outpost of Ushuaia, the world's southernmost town. Its spectacular landscape goes some way to preparing you for the journey ahead - piercing winds rip in off the Beagle Channel to batter this former prison colony and the Andes that ring it. The weather changes in a heartbeat, from flurries of snow to blinding sunshine.
The continent itself is dreamy, surreal, terrifying and exhilarating. You can tell when you have reached Antarctic waters by the severe drop in water temperature, followed by the first floating hunks of ice on the ocean's stormy surface. Odd, somewhat disturbing shapes loom on the horizon. Gleaming white outcrops of inhospitable rock flicker off to sea, giving way to towering cliffs that hunch around immense glaciers, which bear down into blunt cliffs several times the height of our ship.
The seas surrounding the continent are home to collapsed, flooded volcanoes, inlets and bays filled with pack ice and elegant icebergs. Many parts are closed off by sheets of thick ice, and trying to breach it leads to a glorious grinding noise, which rumbles our ship and rattles the passengers. As this time of year, the Antarctic summer, daylight lasts for 20 hours and the midnight sun daubs the rolling seas in ghostly pinks and blues, dipping below the horizon only briefly.
The Arctic is not considered a continent, as it has no land, just a mass of frozen ice, but it is home to a variety of land mammals. The Antarctic is a frozen land mass but has no native land animals, save a few hardy moths. Along its shores, however, in dense, rowdy pockets, the place teems - and, it must be said, reeks - of animal life.
The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators has strict protocols on tourists' movements, limiting the number of people ashore to 100 at any one time. Passengers are ferried between their ship and the mainland or islands on small rigid inflatable boats for an hour ashore, and they are forbidden from bringing anything back with them. The gentoo, chinstrap and Adélie penguins use stones to build drainage beneath their nests, and if all of the 35,000 people who come here each year were to take away a stone, few would remain to protect the eggs. One US columnist boasted in print that, while travelling with the Norwegian cruise company Hurtigruten, he had taken a rock from an Antarctic beach for his son's garden. When the article came to the attention of staff, the rock was retrieved and returned to the beach he had removed it from.
The rules also say that tourists cannot go within five meters of the wildlife; luckily, the animals haven't read the regulations. It is a delight to watch penguins waddle past - or slide on their bellies - all the while tunelessly erping at each other.
At this time of year the colonies are heavily populated with nesting penguins; the males' main job is to gather stones for their mates' homes. This leads to plenty of inept skirmishes between rival birds.
"Who would believe in penguins unless he had seen them?" wrote Conor O'Brien, the pioneering seafarer, but these are the most anthropomorphic of birds. On the ice their stumbling and sliding seem like slipshod, hilarious impressions of us; then they get in the water and all hell breaks loose.
Watching penguins in the ocean is tricky, because they move like bolts of lightning, crackling and fizzing through the water, blitzing through the sharpest of angles in less than the blink of an eye to pluck a fish before a hungry competitor. They ... rise ... to ... the ... surface ... and spin ... through ... 360 ... degrees,
tumbling like gleeful torpedoes in an awesome display of speed and agility.
Sharing beach space with the penguins is a variety of types of seal. One enormous Weddell seal, grumpily slouching amid the rocks, lifts his head and tail into the air to perform an almost balletic movement before plunging deep into the water.
But the Antarctic landscape, one of the most dramatic in the world, is matched in stature and scale only by whales. At one point during our trip what look like two sei whales slip up, slow as glaciers, and elegantly breach on the starboard side, nosing around the ship before diving back into the depths, trailing air bubbles as they go. Being close to whales in the wild is a humbling experience, like seeing some mythical creature brought to living flesh before your eyes. It is worth the journey on its own.
Civilisation has known of the existence of Antarctica since the time of Aristotle, but it was not glimpsed by human eyes until 1820. It has formed the backdrop to some of the most heroic endeavours in exploration, and one of its most famous landmarks is Elephant Island.
In 1914 Ernest Shackleton launched the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to much fanfare. He never set foot on the continent, however, as his ship became trapped in ice within sight of the shore; it eventually sank, after being crushed. He and his crew made it to Elephant Island, where most of the men waited for four and a half hellish months while Shackleton and five others made the most extraordinary small-boat trip in history, travelling a further 1,300km through the world's roughest seas in an open lifeboat, the James Caird.
The island is formidable; almost sheer rock faces wreathed in thick snow make for an awe-inspiring and terrifying view. Where the 22 marooned men had to wait out for their rescue is pathetic: a wave-drenched piece of rock with little more than a penguin colony for company, where the seamen lived under two upturned boats. Despite the horrific conditions, all survived to sail another day.
Early one morning we awake to find Elephant Island looming on our port side, with what the crew say is the largest iceberg they have seen on the starboard side. Almost 30km long, it is a thick slash on the horizon. We are now in the Weddell Sea, with fleets of tabular icebergs roaming the water. These long, flat stretches of sheer ice have broken off from larger formations or calved off from the ice shelves that form the northwestern edge of Antarctica. We dodge between these luminescent giants for several hours while pockets of penguins nonchalantly shuffle about the bergs. It is an astonishing encore from the White Continent, raw and brutal as the ice and rocks that make it up, as beguiling as the creatures that call it home.
Returning to Argentina, and the verdant green hills and birdsong of South America, my senses are jarred by nature, pushing and pulling for attention.
In Antarctica the wild is not a hustling, bustling thing; it is stark, brooding and isolated, and when the weather changes it can turn furious and implacable. It gets its hooks into you, and long after you've left the glaciers, the icebergs, the heaving seas and the teeming penguin colonies behind, a gust of wind or a particularly desolate landscape somewhere else in the world will whisper to you of the last great wilderness, waiting below the horizon, far off to the south. You can leave the vast expanse behind, but it never leaves you.
If this trip's for you, here's where to start
How to choose a ship
A number of companies operate Antarctic voyages, mostly leaving from the Argentine port town of Ushuaia. (See www.iaato.org, the website of the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, for a full list of members.) Ship sizes and itineraries vary widely, so do your research. Larger ships have more facilities, but smaller, more manoeuvrable craft can get to parts of the continent that bulkier ships cannot. Also, many operators give cut-price deals a few days before departure, so an excellent budget option is to make your way to Ushuaia and do the rounds of all the agents; you could be on an Antarctic cruise for a fraction of the normal price.
What to wear
The Antarctic summer is surprisingly warm, with temperatures typically ranging between minus five and five degrees. The wind ripping in off the sea can make it feel a lot colder than that, however, so be sure to dress properly. Lots of layers are the key, so invest in good base layers (or long underwear, as it is more accurately called), decent waterproof trousers and jacket, and hat and gloves. Polarised sunglasses are essential; they will help you see just below the surface of the water, so you can track lightning-fast penguins in the water.
What to bring
Bring plenty of camera film or memory cards for the hundreds of photographs you will inevitably take, and consider investing in a decent zoom lens for capturing wildlife you can't get close to. But don't spend all your time looking at the landscape through a lens.
What to beware of
Penguin colonies stink, so if you are feeling the worse for wear after the long sea voyage, and your first landing is at a particularly fragrant colony, you might want to put a scarf over your nose, to allow your senses to acclimatise.
What to expect
This is perhaps one of the most expensive trips you will undertake, and although our vessel, the MS Fram, is luxurious, it is not a typical cruise ship. Be prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but do not expect cruise-style entertainment or facilities. You are here for what's outside the ship, not what's on it.
What to read
This is not a trip for everyone, so reading a few books on Antarctic history and the wildlife should give you a flavour of what to expect. I highly recommend Shackleton by Roland Huntford (Abacus, £14.99 in UK), a supreme biography of one of the great Antarctic explorers that also gives a terrific flavour of the continent.
Go there
Laurence Mackin travelled on the MS Fram, part of the Hurtigruten fleet. The company operates a variety of 12- to 21-day Antarctic itineraries and is offering free return flights to join selected Antarctic voyages on selected dates next winter. www.hurtigruten.ie or call, 01-6074420.
Book with Project Travel (www. project-travel.ie, 01-2108391), Lee Travel (www.leetravel.ie, 021-4277111); Greystones Travel (www.greystones travel.ie, 01-2874488) or John Galligan Travel (www.jgt.ie, 01-2076555).