Antarctica, Trip Background Information
Choosing a travel company
Luckily we mentioned our plan during a family gathering in England. Chris and Don, family friends, extensive travellers and keen birders (especially penguins) recommended Oceanwide Expeditions for travel to Antarctica. We checked out their website and liked the company's approach.
If wildlife viewing is a priority, as it was for us, the important thing seems to be to choose the smallest vessel you can for the journey. This allows more flexibility in the itinerary and an easier time watching penguins, whales, or whatever you come across. Vessels with large numbers of passengers offer less frequent landings and possibly a long queue for zodiac places.
We travelled on the Grigoriy Mikheev with 44 other passengers and found nothing we would have changed (except the trip duration; double next time!).
Trip expectations
Many people asked why we wanted to go to Antarctica. For us, the reason was to experience a continent unlike any other. A place of superlatives (highest, windiest, driest, coldest), visitor numbers are still low and the wildlife is abundant and unafraid. Watching penguins, seals and whales at close quarters was the main attraction, with a secondary goal of crossing off our sixth continent in the year (Niall's seventh in total; I've yet to visit Africa).
Trip realities
Leading up to the holiday I became fascinated by the history of Antarctic exploration and I was surprised to find that, once I was there, the journeys of the early explorers seemed incredibly present. The hardships and accomplishments of my great-grandfather's generation could still have been taking place around the corner and I kept expecting to run into some gnarly old whaler watching a red-stained sea.
The trip to Antarctica was a far more evocative experience than I'd expected. While the wildlife-watching absolutely fulfilled our expectations, the other goal of setting foot on the continent proper turned out to be rather trivial. I felt quite ashamed to attach so much importance to a geo-political "peak-bagging", when the basic issue of survival coloured everything we saw.
In summary, I'd definitely go again. The main thing I'd do differently would be not to be pregnant so I could take lots of sea-sickness drugs! We'd also love to visit South Georgia (this was highly recommended in advance by Chris and Don but we couldn't fit it in) and I'd like to get to the Ross Sea area where the real history is.