Antarctica

Crack open any Antarctica storybook, and you’ll find many a tall, frosty tale – of amiable eccentrics, adventurous madmen, and beautiful people doing wild things for good snow. In short, our people.

Take the 1903 expedition of Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Charcot. Preparing to set sail, and having secured sponsorship from Mumm’s Champagne, it wasn’t a real caper until he roped in a few friends. One future seaman, invited to venture into the unknown, simply replied: “Where you like. When you like. For as long as you like.” 

And was it ever. 

In a last-minute change of heart, Charcot redirected, not insignificantly, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. On arrival, he and his ship Le Francais were promptly suspended in hostile pack ice for six long polar months. Making the most of it, the men staged high-stakes ski competitions with tin cans for prizes, mounted vigorous chess tournaments, enjoyed daily rum rations, ate fresh bread three times week and croissants on Sunday – with, to be sure, lashings of Champagne to wash it all down. 

Now there’s the spirit.

On a nine-day Swan Hellenic expedition exploring the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, I learned a good deal about the highs and lows of these early adventurers. Daily lectures from glaciologists, ornithologists, and marine biologists are an intrinsic part of life aboard the SH Vega – a state-of-the-art Polar Class V vessel, one of just four of its kind in the industry, built in 2022 in Helsinki for the luxury market. What was clear from Charcot’s early French sortie – if it weren’t clear before – no one comes to Antarctica looking for humdrum.

It’s the grandeur, the silence… it’s the snow.

Even if you never click into a binding, Antarctica seduces. Standing on the prow, Day Three at sea, I spot my first iceberg off the starboard – a mass the size of a small opera house. Its curtain shifts from silver to turquoise to inky green as it floats slowly past, behind mountains shimmering in alpenglow. For photographers, naturalists, dreamers, this is cathedral en plein air.

It is snow as religion.

Some travel by dog sled, chronometer, and diary in hand. Some by high-test Zodiac, I-phones at the ready. Others arrive in what can only be described as super-bougie style. Recently, a Swiss billionaire traded the rolling slopes of Gstaad for a tricked-out Antarctic mega-yacht equipped with not one but two helicopters, and a quorum of his luckiest ski buddies. From teak deck to frozen drop-zone in minutes, this must be the most exclusive vertical on Earth. But even a $2.5 million boys’ break like that is uninclined to promise Bugaboo-light powder. Antarctica’s snow is old, and notorious for its sharp sastrugi ridges etched by relentless katabatic winds. Neither heli-skiers nor ski tourers come here for waist-deep tracks. They come for a glimpse of what lies beneath. 

Antarctica, after all, is spiritual home of the iceberg theory. Ninety percent of the world’s icebergs ply these seas. And, as every schoolchild knows, 90 percent of each one remains unseen by the human eye. As nimble as the SH Vega is – crossing 12-foot swells in the 625-mile-wide Drake Passage; four days later, squeezing dramatically through the seven miles of needle-thin Lemaire Channel, our flutes raised dancing to Ricky Martin on the forward deck – like most Antarctic adventurers, we will scarcely dust the tip of the 800-mile-long Peninsula. And, while at times it feels we’re surrounded by bobbing ice planets and carpets of penguins, it truly is the tip of the cosmic iceberg. 

Consider the mysterious Gamburtsev mountain range, a ghostly Antarctic massif the size of the European Alps. Off the visitor’s menu for obvious reasons, these peaks were discovered not with binoculars but via ice-penetrating radar, entombed as they are beneath more than a mile of primordial ice. Indeed, the continent is almost wholly covered in a permanent icecap with altitudes that rise well over 4,000 metres above sea level. Peaks on the Peninsula alone climb to 2,800 metres. In places, the snow hasn’t melted in 800,000 years.

Aboard the SH Vega, things run tightly. With around 120 passengers, there’s a 1:1 employee to guest ratio and staff are both plentiful and beyond helpful, ready to adjust and react as needed. By international convention, only vessels carrying fewer than 500 passengers are permitted to disembark onto the continent, though life can get in the way even of small-group expeditions. An afternoon hike around Port Lockroy – whaling station, then British Antarctic post, currenlty the U.K.’s most southerly post office – is nixed on account of busily breeding gentoo penguins. Instead, the post office comes aboard, complete with stamps and a little red mailbox. As expedition manager Brendan explained after the earlier organized frisson of a group polar dip, where, one by one the willing jumped, tethered to the ship, into the -1 Celsius water: “We start with plan A. In Antarctica, we often end up on plan M. And sometimes plan Z.” 

One morning, as we wait for a weather window to kayak around Mikkelsen Harbour, I chat with Gigi, an engaging young snowboard instructor from Ushuaia, the funky Argentine outpost that welcomed many of the 80,000 travellers who set foot on Antarctica in 2024-25 alone. Ushuaia is also a famous annual haunt of many World Cup ski teams, in search of summer snow at the resort 20 miles from town. When she’s not teaching during the Southern Hemisphere winter, Gigi is an expedition guide, at sea for two months at a stretch during austral summer. 

Her long dark hair lashes across wind-flushed cheeks, the acid-yellow of her jacket vivid against a steel-grey sky. Together, we watch albatross dip and dive for krill – permanent nomads of the sea, coming to land only to breed, I learn. 

The voyage, I am discovering, is one of both adventure and the continual collection of esoterica. For instance, who here knows the proper way to measure ice? Brash ice? Small enough to put your arms around. Growlers? Five meters across or less. Bergie bits will bob from five to 15 meters above water and, after that, it’s a more prosaic small, medium, or large. (Proportions down here prove themselves again and again unlike anywhere else. We are told the extravagant amount of poop the 40 million-strong penguin community produces is visible from space.) Then, as if from the ether, on the horizon an enormous berg appears in front of a sumptuous 30-degree slope extending from sea to sky – an outrageous test of the prospects for the 90 percent rule.

“I hope one day I can ski here too,” says Gigi. “Just once.”

For others, the singular experience can turn into a bit of an addiction. For photographer Tamara Susa, it’s become a passion for the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth. She’s captured transfixing images of skinning up and ski touring down its flanks – and acknowledges the privilege of doing so. “It is said that fewer people have skied Antarctica than climbed Everest,” noted Tamara. She’s already rescheduled after two recent ski-touring expeditions, including one alongside Chris Davenport, the first person to ski all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000ers in less than one year. (Chris has indeed climbed Everest, then skied its Lhotse Face.)

Of course, in Antarctica skiing has always been more than downhill, it’s been a way forward. Long before skis meant après and corduroy, explorers such as Amundsen and Shackleton strapped on wooden planks to chase the edge of the map. For many, the chase still is the prize. “I’ll be back again because this place calls my name in a way no other place ever has for me,” said Davenport.

Since we’re on the numbers, I just had to ask. 

Generously invited for a looksee round the bridge of SH Vega, Captain Lyubomir Garciyanov tells me he’s stopped counting how many times he’s crossed the fearsome Drake Passage. And I believe him. With a maritime career approaching 35 years, he introduces me, in reassuringly human terms, to the NASA-worthy spread of high-tech engineering that navigates the Earth’s icy final frontier. Amidst the calm enclosure that is the nerve centre of the $115 million ship, two young men stand sentry, eyes to the horizon, on continual watch for hazards – primarily icebergs. My next question hangs unspoken in the air. 

In case of catastrophic failure, Captain Lubo explains, the vessel can do 1,500 nautical miles unassisted. She holds 50 days’ worth of fuel in reserve. Safe return to port is his number-one priority.

Still, no one can accuse him of not showing his passengers a good time. 

Heading for port, halfway through our two-day return Drake crossing – Captain Lubo’s umpteenth – he suddenly slows the engines, and dreamily the ship spins from north to south in a long languorous loop. Beside us a pod of 18 pilot whales dive and breach in the calm waters, as a Zodiac quickly speeds out to join them. Equipped with a hydrophone, expedition manager Brendan records their salty afternoon chitchat – an otherworldly soundtrack played for the after-dinner entertainment of a ship full of Antarctic converts. 

That creative donut manoeuvre – a first for Captain Lubo, and certainly for every other soul onboard SH Vega – captured in a cup the Swan Hellenic experience. Singular encounters: from measuring plankton as citizen scientist as penguins dip and dive around us; to waiters who know each passenger’s name and my butler, Midge, for whom no request was too tiny nor too great; to the privilege of standing in silence with a penguin, giving way as he gingerly negotiates his penguin highway. One of a kind, in a sea of firsts.

If you’re lucky enough to carve a turn off an untouched Antarctic peak, watch a leopard seal decapitate its lunch, or be side-eyed by a waddle of overdressed penguins—you’ve joined the rarest of clubs. It’s not easy. It’s not cheap. But as Monsieur le capitaine Charcot would concur, Antarctica is the detour of a lifetime.

Photography by Tamara Šuša