Your voyage begins at the ice
The house
Travel with Terra Australis
64°50′S
Ships stay small. Landings stay unhurried.
The board
Next boats south
The book
Which voyage is yours?
Classic Antarctic Peninsula
Falklands, South Georgia & the Peninsula
Crossing the Antarctic Circle
Compare two voyages
Voyage calculator
Field guide
Who lives at the edge
Gentoo penguin
Chinstrap penguin
Adélie penguin
King penguin
Humpback whale
Leopard seal
Wandering albatross
Polar bear — Arctic sister voyages
From the log
Guests, in their own weather
I thought I had come for penguins. I had actually come for the sound the ship makes when it leans into a swell the colour of iron, and for the way a glacier front calves without asking anyone to clap.Helena V., Lisbon · Classic Peninsula, January 2026
South Georgia rearranged my idea of a crowd. A king penguin colony is not cute. It is civic. It is also very loud. I still hear it when a city bus brakes.Kenji M., Kyoto · Falklands & South Georgia, November 2025
Ask the ice
Four taps. No score. A recommendation.
The Drake
What you came for
The ship
The month
Two poles, one house
Explore the ice according to your appetite
The map
How far will the next voyage take you?
The ports
Where the voyage actually begins
The ice, still
A room of photographs
Before you pack
Questions we hear on the first evening
Films
The ice, moving
Three short reels from polar water. Press play. They travel with this file.
Open water
The colour of the Drake, seen from above.
Penguins on the ice
A colony that does not perform.
The Southern Ocean
The water that writes the Drake.
Where?
Ice decides the final landing list. These are the rooms of the south.
When?
Southern summer only. The rest of the year the sea keeps the door.
How?
Choose a tempo. The ice remains the editor.
The book of ice
Journeys
A printed itinerary in Antarctica is a polite fiction. What follows is the shape we sail toward. Captains and expedition leaders rewrite it for ice, wind, wildlife and the rule that only one ship may use a landing at a time.
Classic Antarctic Peninsula
The first continent, taken at walking pace. You leave the world’s southernmost city, cross the Drake, and spend five or six days among the South Shetlands and the western peninsula. Two outings are the daily ambition: a landing and a Zodiac, or two landings, or a long cruise when the ice is the attraction.
Ushuaia and the Beagle Channel
Embark in the afternoon. The town sits under the Martial mountains as if it had been placed there to end a map. We sail the Beagle at evening: imperial cormorants, a pilot on the radio, and the last mobile signal you will like losing.
The Drake Passage
Eight hundred kilometres of unconstrained ocean. The programme is lectures, seabirds and learning to walk with the ship. Wandering albatrosses treat the wake as a road. The first tabular berg, when it appears, is usually on the second afternoon and looks like a building that has come unmoored.
South Shetlands and the Peninsula
Possible rooms: Deception Island through Neptune’s Bellows; the gentoo slopes of Cuverville; Neko Harbour’s glacier; the Lemaire Channel if the ice permits a thread of water; Port Lockroy’s museum and post office; a chinstrap city on Half Moon. We do not promise a list. We promise attention. Biosecurity between landings is a ritual of brushes and disinfectant that becomes oddly satisfying.
North across the Drake
Recaps, a last whale if the sea is kind, and the strange feeling of missing a place you have only just learned to pronounce.
Ushuaia
Disembark after breakfast. The expedition desk can hold a night in town or a flight north. Many guests sit in a café and look at the canal as if it were already a memory.
Falklands, South Georgia & the Peninsula
The long Southern Ocean circuit. Three different islands systems, three different weathers, and the sense that Antarctica is a region, not a single white postcard.
Ushuaia to the Falklands
A night on the Beagle, then the South Atlantic. The Falklands arrive as low green hills and a wind that has opinions.
West Falkland landings
Saunders Island for black-browed albatross and rockhopper penguins on stone terraces. Volunteer Point, when the schedule holds, for a king penguin beach that feels like a rehearsal for South Georgia. Stanley is optional and civilised: a cathedral, a museum, and a pub that sells maps.
East toward South Georgia
Lectures thicken. Fur seals and wandering albatross appear in the water as if the island were already sending messengers.
South Georgia
Grytviken’s rusted whaling station and Shackleton’s grave. Salisbury Plain and St Andrews Bay, where king penguins occupy the gravel in numbers that make counting feel like a category error. Prion Island’s boardwalk among nesting wanderers, if the season is open. Gold Harbour. Stromness, where the boss walked in 1916. The island is steep, loud, and exacting about biosecurity: rats stay off, seeds stay off, and so do you if the swell on the beach is dishonest.
South to the Peninsula
The sea changes colour. Ice begins to look intentional.
Antarctic Peninsula
After South Georgia the peninsula feels intimate: narrower water, closer ice, penguins you now recognise as cousins rather than marvels. We land as the ice allows.
Drake and Ushuaia
Homeward, with a notebook that has run out of the right adjectives.
Crossing the Antarctic Circle
66°33′ south is a line on a chart and a mood in the light. We attempt it in December, January and February when the pack is more likely to grant a road. If the ice refuses, we spend the extra days in a peninsula that fewer ships are using. Either outcome is a voyage.
Ushuaia and the Drake
As the classic voyage, with a briefing on ice language: fast ice, pack, leads, and why a captain may turn around in a place that looks open from the saloon window.
Western peninsula
The usual rooms, taken slowly, while the ice charts for the south are watched like weather in harvest country.
Toward the Circle
Crystal Sound, Detaille Island, the quieter inlets below the Lemaire. Crossing is marked without theatre: a position, a photograph, perhaps a glass on deck if the wind agrees. The reward is not the certificate. It is the thinning of traffic and the thickening of ice.
North again
A last landing, the Drake, Ushuaia. Guests who came only for the line discover they came for the days around it.
Weddell Sea & the emperors
East of the peninsula the ice is older and more serious. We sail toward the emperor penguin colony near Snow Hill Island when the season and the pack allow. This is the voyage most likely to change. It is also the voyage guests remember as a privilege rather than a product. Helicopter or long ice walks may be used depending on the year’s plan. Nothing is guaranteed except the attempt and the honesty of the daily briefing.
Ushuaia, Drake, Antarctic Sound, Weddell ice
Paulet Island’s Adélies. Brown Bluff. Then the true Weddell: pressure ridges, tabular bergs the size of districts, and a colony that may be a day’s effort from the ship. If emperors are not reachable, the Weddell is still a different Antarctica — colder, wider, less photographed. We do not invent a landing to soothe a brochure.
Fly the Drake
A chartered jet from Punta Arenas to King George Island, then a transfer to the ship. You give up the albatross hallway and gain two extra days in the ice. Weather can hold a flight. We build a buffer and tell the truth when the buffer is used.
Punta Arenas
Briefing, gear check, a night in town. The Strait of Magellan is already a rehearsal.
King George Island
A two-hour flight, a gravel runway, research stations on a hill, and a Zodiac to the gangway. The first landing can happen the same afternoon.
Peninsula time
The classic sites, with more hours ashore than an 11-day sea voyage can spare.
Flight home
Back to Chile, then the world. Some guests book a night in Torres del Paine to let the eyes adjust.
How to choose
If it is your first continent, take the Peninsula or fly the Drake. If you want animals in opera, take South Georgia. If you want fewer ships, take the Circle. If you want a voyage that can say no, take the Weddell. If you want the ship to yourself, write to the desk about Silence.
The rooms of the south
Destinations
Antarctica is not a country. It is a treaty, a desert of ice, and a coastline that behaves like a living thing. Fourteen million square kilometres. Ninety percent of the world’s fresh water locked as ice. Average ice thickness near two kilometres. No cities. No indigenous people. A summer population of scientists and, at the edges, a few thousand expedition guests who are asked to behave as if the place were a laboratory that also happens to be beautiful.
64° south
The Antarctic Peninsula
A spine of mountains running north from the continent like a question. This is the Antarctica of channels: Gerlache, Errera, Neumayer, Lemaire. Glacier fronts calve into water the colour of bottle glass. Landings are often a beach of rounded stones, a gentoo commute, and a climb to a viewpoint that rearranges your sense of silence.
Paradise Harbour and Neko are the postcard names. They earn them. The peninsula is also where most of the world’s Antarctic tourism happens, which is why we keep ships small and days flexible. A famous site with two other vessels in the offing is a site we skip.
South Shetland Islands
Deception, Half Moon, Aitcho
A volcanic arc north of the peninsula, often the first land after the Drake. Deception Island is a flooded caldera. You enter through Neptune’s Bellows, a gap that looks too narrow for a ship until it is not. Inside: black sand, steam in the shallows on some days, the bones of a whaling station, and a walk to a viewpoint that smells faintly of the planet’s interior.
Chinstrap penguins keep noisy towns on Half Moon and Bailey Head. Elephant seals practise being landscape. The Shetlands are where many guests take their first step on Antarctic territory and then cannot remember the temperature because the mind was busy.
54° south
South Georgia
Not Antarctica by latitude, Antarctic by feeling. A crescent of peaks and glaciers in the Atlantic, famous for king penguins, wandering albatross, and the last walk of Ernest Shackleton. The wildlife numbers are not poetic exaggeration: hundreds of thousands of kings at St Andrews Bay; fur seals reclaiming beaches that once served a factory; elephant seals like fallen monuments.
Grytviken is the rusted paragraph everyone photographs. Stay long enough to read the gravestones. The island is a British Overseas Territory with a government officer, strict biosecurity, and a visitor fee that pays for rats to stay gone. We land where swell and wildlife allow. Some days the beach is closed by fur seals who have other plans.
The Falkland Islands / Islas Malvinas
A green prologue
Low hills, white beaches, and a wind that does not tire. The islands sit east of Patagonia and feel like Scotland after it learned about penguins. Rockhoppers climb cliffs that would embarrass a goat. Black-browed albatross nest on tussock terraces. Magellanic penguins commute from burrows. Stanley has a harbour, a cathedral, and the last newspaper you will read for weeks.
We treat the islands as a destination, not a fuel stop. Politics have names here. We use the names our guests use at home and the maps the landing sites require.
The east side
Weddell Sea
Shackleton’s Endurance sank here in 1915 and was found in 2022, three kilometres down, as if the ice had been keeping a secret in good order. The surface remains a maze. This is emperor country when the year is kind: Snow Hill, the ice edge, a colony that may require aircraft or a long walk. It is also Adélie country, fossil country at Seymour Island, and a place where a voyage can turn back and still have been worth the fare.
The far programme
Ross Sea
Reached from New Zealand or Hobart on uncommon, long voyages. The Ross Ice Shelf is a wall. Hut Point and Cape Evans still hold the stores of Scott and Shackleton under a conservation programme that treats a biscuit tin as an archive. Emperor penguins, orcas of a distinct ecotype, and a sense of distance that the peninsula, for all its beauty, cannot imitate. We open a Ross file only a few times a decade. Write if this is the Antarctica you mean.
The other pole
High Arctic
Svalbard in June and July. East Greenland’s fjords. The Northwest Passage when ice charts and Canadian permissions agree. Polar bears instead of penguins, walrus instead of fur seals, and a midnight sun that feels more gold than white. Same house rules: small ships, working naturalists, no pretence that the ice is a resort. The polar briefing list carries both calendars.
The ships
Vessels
Both ships are working expedition platforms that happen to be comfortable. Ice class is not a marketing word. It is a hull, a captain, and a set of limits we respect.
MV Aurora
Aurora is the house’s main instrument: small enough for IAATO Category 1 landings without splitting the day into shifts that feel like a queue, large enough for a science lab, a quiet library, and a dining room that does not require two sittings. Stabilisers for the Drake. An observation lounge that faces forward because that is where the ice is. A mudroom that takes wet kit seriously.
Cabin & suite
All rooms have a window or balcony, a proper desk, and blackout for the months when the sun forgets to leave. Suites add a sitting room and a bath you will use after a wind that found every gap in a jacket. There are no inside cabins. Polar travel is about looking out.
Dining
One restaurant, one sitting, no formal nights. The kitchen cooks as if the day involved cold air and a climb. Wine is present and not theatrical. Special diets are a conversation with the hotel manager before you sail, not a surprise at 62° south.
Rooms for thought
A library that prefers paper charts to screens. A lecture theatre that is a room, not a cinema. A small spa because shoulders remember Zodiacs. A gym that faces ice. Wi-Fi exists and is imperfect, which we consider a feature.
SV Silence
Silence is a polar yacht for families, museums, and houses that want the landing to themselves. With 36 guests the beach is never a committee. The ship can linger when a whale works a bay, or leave when a site feels crowded by someone else’s itinerary. Most weeks she is under private charter. A handful of published cabins are released each season for travellers who want the yacht without owning the week.
How a yacht changes the day
On Aurora a landing of 100 is still a landing of 100. On Silence a landing of 30 is a walk. Kayaks launch without a lottery. The dining table can be one conversation. Children, when they sail, are not a programme. They are part of the watch.
Charter rates depend on season and whether you want the Peninsula, South Georgia, or a Circle attempt. The desk will not send a price before it has asked how you like to travel.
Walk the ship
Tap a room. The day is built around these six places.
Shared practice
Zodiacs
Rigid inflatables, professional drivers, and a rule that the sea has a veto. You will be taught how to sit, how to step, and how to keep a camera strap from becoming a story.
Mudroom
Boots live downstairs. Parkas — loaned, numbered, returned — hang in a room that smells of rubber and snow. Biosecurity brushes are not optional choreography.
Medicine
A doctor sails on every departure. Evacuation insurance is required because the nearest hospital may be a flight and a border away. We will ask for a medical form and we will mean it.
Ashore and afloat
Experiences
The ship is a base camp. The day happens outside. Everything below is offered when ice, wind and wildlife say yes. Nothing is a ticketed attraction. There are no queues with lanyards.
Zodiac and shore
This is the grammar of polar travel. A driver reads water the way a climber reads rock. You step onto stones that move, walk a marked path, and stop when a penguin decides the path is a road. Landings last one to three hours. Some are a colony. Some are a silent cove and a glacier that sounds like furniture being rearranged in another room.
We aim for two outings a day. We cancel without apology when a swell would make the step dishonest.
Kayak
On still mornings a small group leaves the ship in sit-inside expedition kayaks. The ice is louder at water level. A curious gentoo becomes a colleague. You need a confident wet exit and a willingness to be cold around the wrists. Places are limited and reserved before you sail. Silence carries kayaks as a default. Aurora offers them on selected departures.
A night on the ice
Camping is a bivouac on a permitted site: a bivy bag, a sleeping bag rated for honesty, and a briefing about not leaving anything, including a footprint you could have avoided. The ship stays nearby. The luxury is the sound of the continent without a generator in the next sentence. Offered only on certain nights, never as a stunt.
Photography without a circus
Dedicated photography departures keep the same landings and change the tempo: earlier Zodiacs, longer sits, a naturalist who knows when to stop talking. We do not stage animals. We do not allow drones in Antarctica. The light is already doing the work. Bring two bodies if you can; cold eats batteries and so does greed.
Citizen science
Guests log cloud types for NASA’s GLOBE programme, count seabirds on transect, and help a researcher filter water for phytoplankton. None of this is compulsory. All of it is real. The data leave the ship. You will not be given a fake certificate for looking at a glacier. You may be given a spreadsheet.
Polar plunge
A ladder, a signal, a brief and complete conversation with 0°C water. Optional, watched by the doctor, celebrated without speeches. Some guests do it once and become philosophers. Some dress warmly and take the photograph.
Snowshoe
When the snow is deep and the slope is kind, snowshoes turn a landing into a ridge. No mountaineering. No ropes. A guide who knows when a cornice is a sentence you should not finish.
Open bridge
Most hours, the wheelhouse is a classroom. You may watch radar blooms of ice, listen to the exchange between captain and officer, and learn why a channel that looks empty is not. Quiet voices. No flash. Coffee if offered.
The journal
Field notes
Field note
How to cross the Drake without mythology
- Eat lightly and early
- Stand on the centreline
- Look at the horizon, not the screen
- Midships cabins are kinder
The first iceberg arrives on the radar before the window.
History
Port Lockroy and the unfinished war
- Walk where the staff walk
- Do not move a nesting stone
- Do not ask to hold a chick
- One ship at a time
The continent was never empty of politics. It was empty of cities.
On board
Why a 36-guest yacht changes the landing
- A landing is a walk, not a queue
- Kayaks without a lottery
- The yacht can move for a whale
- Same five metres from a nest
Privacy does not purchase proximity. It purchases time.
Advantages
The polar brief
Read this before you fall in love with a cabin photograph. Antarctica is simple to visit if you are well prepared and complicated if you are not. The desk would rather answer a careful question now than a wet one on the gangway.
When to sail
The operational season is late October to March. We sail November to early March. November is courtship and unused snow. December and January are chicks, long light, and the most reliable channels. February is whales and the penguin moult. March is low sun and a quieter sea. South Georgia is at its most overwhelming from November through January. Circle attempts belong to high summer. Emperor voyages belong to the Weddell and to ice charts we cannot fake.
If you are coming from the Northern Hemisphere, remember that this is our summer and your winter. Book flights into Ushuaia or Punta Arenas with a buffer night. Patagonian weather cancels planes with the same indifference the Drake shows ships.
What to pack
We loan an expedition parka and boots on Aurora and Silence. You bring the rest. Layers, not armour: merino or synthetic base, a fleece or light down, waterproof trousers, warm hat, two pairs of gloves, sunglasses that mean it, and a buff for the Zodiac. Sunscreen at 65° south is not a joke; the ozone hole is a history lesson that still has a chapter. Bring a small dry bag, spare memory cards, and more batteries than you think. Cotton jeans are a poor idea. Fashion is a poorer one.
Evenings on board are neat, not formal. One jacket if you like. No black tie. Binoculars will be used every day. A walking pole helps some guests and is welcome. Drones are not.
Packing list
Tick what you have. It stays on this device.
Fitness, medicine, insurance
You should be able to stand on a moving platform, step into a Zodiac, and walk on uneven snow for one to two hours. We do not require a gym habit. We do require honesty. A medical questionnaire is part of booking. A doctor sails on every departure. Guests with recent surgery, unstable cardiac conditions, or a pregnancy that has entered the later months will be asked to wait for another year. This is not unkindness. It is geography.
Evacuation and medical insurance with polar coverage is mandatory. A medevac from the peninsula can cost more than the voyage. The nearest full hospital is in Punta Arenas or Ushuaia, after weather agrees to a flight. Travel insurance that excludes “expeditions” is not insurance here.
IAATO and the Treaty
The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 set the continent aside for peace and science. The Environmental Protocol treats it as a reserve. IAATO — the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators — turns those texts into landing rules. One hundred guests ashore. One ship at a site. Boot washing. No food, no smoking, no souvenirs of bone or stone. Distances from wildlife that keep the animal’s day intact. We follow this because it is the law of a place that has no police station, only reputation and the next operator’s restraint.
You will be briefed before the first landing and again when you forget. Biosecurity protects South Georgia from rats and the peninsula from seeds that would like to become a problem. The continent has no cities to absorb a mistake.
How close is too close
Drag the distance. The animal keeps the day.
Five metres. Closer, and you are in their commute.
Private charter
Silence is designed to be taken whole: families, foundations, a university chair, a house that prefers one table. Aurora can be chartered in shoulder weeks. A charter includes the expedition team, the doctor, the Zodiacs, and a programme written around your reason for coming — a birthday that should not look like a hotel, a board that needs to think without a city, a film that needs patience. Write early. Ice calendars fill from the inside.