Polar Cruise Reviews

Hi. I would just like to say the cruise I went on before Christmas was sensational. Going to the Antarctic is like visiting another World. Deserted and desolate apart from the penquins that waddle about or the elephant seals that sit over each other. The boat was great and you got to know people easily as there was only about 350 people on the boat. You grew familiar with each other at meal times and when you went ashore in groups. The food was great and there were a mixture of buffet meals and set meals. Again you got to know people easily through this. It was very easy for me to book through Blue Water Holidays and whenever I rang they catered for my needs. I had a great time and made some good friends and saw some of the best scenery in the World, what more could you want. As well as all that the weather is the deciding factor and even though we had some pretty bad weather we got to go on all our landings due to the great staff that planned everything to perfection.

Having visited Spitsbergen last year, we have definitely caught the Polar bug and when the opportunity came to join the Hurtigruten's MS Fram for the Christmas and New Year 'Shackleton's Antarctic Cruise' to The Falklands, South Georgia and Antarctica, we jumped at it. It was everything we had hoped for!!

We set off on December 19th and flew via Madrid to Buenos Aires, where it was summer! We spent a great day touring this vibrant city, with everything very well arranged by Hurtigruten from the moment we arrived at B.A. airport. The next day we flew down to Ushuaia, where we spent another great day, before  boarding the Fram and setting off for the Falklands.

On arrival, we spent a day on Carcass Island and New Island, where we saw our first colony of rockhopper penguins, cormorants and albatrosses - an amazing sight, especially as many of the penguins had recently hatched their chicks.

The following day we arrived in Port Stanley and spent a poignant Christmas Eve there. Seeing Ross Road, the Governors House, the war memorial and the museum brought back memories of 1982 and several of our fellow travellers ventured out into the countryside around Stanley where evidence of the conflict still abounds.

The following day we set sail for South Georgia, which has to be one of my favourite places on Earth! The wildlife is amazing, with endless birdlife and seals and penguins. We visited Fortuna Bay and Stromness, where the famous walk across the island by Shackleton, Worsley and Crean ended in 1916 and started the rescue of the crew of the 'Endurance'. It is this story which drew me to Antarctica and to see the places where it happened is an experience I feel lucky to have had. The following day, we awoke to glorious sunshine in Grytviken, where Shackleton is buried and we spent a memorable morning visiting his grave and seeing round this former whaling station with its little museum and church.

We then sailed via the South Orkneys to Elephant Island, where 22 of Shackleton's men survived on a tiny beach for over 4 months until he rescued them. We were amazed at how small the beach is...

From there it was down into the Weddell Sea, Deception Island and the South Shetland Islands - in all of which we made several landings and saw several more species of seals, penguins and birds, many of which were lazing on passing icebergs.

On our travels between the various islands we were kept entertained by a splendid series of lectures on the wildlife, geology and people of Antarctica. The whole expedition team were very entertaining on their specialist subjects, so there was never a dull moment on board!

Our final days were spent crossing the famous Drake Passage and then 'Rounding the Horn' before we returned to Ushuaia and flew back to Buenos Aires for a final day of summer before returning to the English winter. Without doubt this was the trip of a lifetime and one that we would love to repeat one day.

"Spitsbergen? Is that Austria or Switzerland?" Maybe I should say I'm going to Florida, I thought, as for the tenth time I heard myself saying "Go from the north coast of Norway and head for the North Pole - half way there, you'll reach Spitsbergen." "That'll be cold!What on earth are you going there for?" Well, this is why...

Over the last few years, my girlfriend, Pip and I have become regular visitors to the Arctic. We've travelled twice on the Hurtigruten Norwegian Coastal Voyage - once in summer, once in winter and in 2007, we went to Greenland. There were two things we still wanted to see up there however - the Northern Lights and polar bears. The Northern Lights will have to wait for a winter trip, but we thought a trip to Spitsbergen might enable us to see bears. As ever with the Arctic, there was so much more to it than that...

We travelled in late June, flying via Oslo to Longyearbyen (Population 2500), the capital of the archipelago known as Svalbard, of which Spitsbergen is the largest island. We arrived at nearly midnight to be greeted by sunshine and the Midnight Sun, which would play havoc with our body clocks for the next few days!We stayed that night at the Spitsbergen Hotel and spent the next day exploring Longyearbyen, until late afternoon when we boarded our home for the next week, the 5000 ton ice breaker. 'Polar Star'.

We had booked a standard cabin, but this was surprisingly spacious, with 2 comfortable beds, a desk, an en suite shower room/loo and storage space everywhere! It was even handily positioned right opposite the ship's well equipped gym - a facility that somehow, we never got round to using...

Within the first 24 hours we had visited the 2 other setllements on Spitsbergen - Barentsburg, which is a mining town with a population of about 500 Russians and Ny Alesund, a research centre with a few hundred mostly scientists living and working there.

Barentsburg has a feel of the 50's and 60's about it and as we were shown around by a local guide, I can probably best descibe it as thought provoking... We ended up at the hotel however, where it would have been rude not to join the locals in trying out the Russian vodka... In hindsight, probably a mistake...

Ny Alesund is the most northerly human settlement in the world, and it is from here that many of the expeditions of Amundsen and Nobile started. We spent an interesting morning here and then sailed north - and didn't see another human being for the next 5 days... What we did see however was pods of walrus, seals, polar foxes, reindeer and millions of birds - I can now identify guillemots, fulmars, kittiwakes, eider ducks, little auks and skuas - and you can't trust a skua...!

To see many of these things, we travelled in the Polar Star's fleet of Zodiac boats which enabled us to get ashore on beaches, some of which had not been stepped on for several years... On one such trip, we were approaching a glacier when we saw a polar bear on the shore, about 100 metres away. He was a young male and we watched this magnificent creature for about half an hour as he patrolled his empire... Pip has a thing about polar bears and she cried as she watched him... quite a lot... It was that sort of day...

The other big highlight of our trip was watching the Polar Star show what an ice breaker can do. We sailed to the east coast of Spitsbergen, but as we could not circumnavigate the island due to ice further south, we headed north to a group of 7 small islands in the north of the archipelago. We were soon in the sea ice and I spent most of one day hanging over the bow watching the ship break through ice which was several feet thick, sending cracks in all directions. When we got to 80.34 degrees North, the Captain decided that the ice was too thick for us to go any further north, but just thick enough for him to 'park' the ship in the ice so that we could all disembark and spend the best part of an hour walking on the ice! This was an incredible experience and standing there alongside the ship brought to mind all sorts of stories of adventurers of the past who have been iced in for the winter on their polar expeditions...

There were 90 passengers on the ship from about a dozen different countries, but our common experiences made it very easy to form friendships. We were very lucky to have Anya from Spitsbergen Travel as our head guide for the expedition - the course of our journey was dictated by weather and ice conditions, but wherever we ended up, she and her team had an adventure waiting for us...

This is not a cheap holiday, but for the memories it has given us - several of which were 'things to do before we died' - it was worth every penny.

My visit to Antarctica in Dec2007/Jan 2008 was the realisation of a lifetime dream and one which far exceeded my expectations.

I have selected photos which show the changing moods of the Antarctic during our journey, from threatening snow filled clouds to bright blue skies and sparkling iceburgs.

What will I always remember?

The range of the climate we experienced; the wonderful colours...people tend to think it's all white...far from it, the gracious, proud and yet often comical penguins; the stillness in some places; the unbelievable noise of displaying penguins in others.

I felt priviledged to be in what truly is the world's last wilderness. I remember on our first landing at Deception Island that my eyes filled with tears at the beauty of it all.

This trip has had a huge impact on me. Even now , two months after our return, I think about it almost every day.

In April I have organised a reunion with another couple on our trip, to share our experience again with our photos, movies and memories.