Cruises are weird. They evolved from ocean liners, which were at their heart just a way of traveling from point A to point B. The luxuries — steam rooms, exercise bikes, swimming pools, fancy restaurants¹ — were just a side effect, a way to make that trip as pleasant as possible. As airplanes became ubiquitous, ocean liners became obsolete. No one wants to spend a week crossing the Atlantic when you can do it in six hours, no matter what the amenities are like.²

No one, that is, unless you really enjoy the travel itself. Stuff even more luxuries onto the ocean liner, stop trying to actually go anywhere and instead focus on enjoying yourself on board³ and you end up with a cruise ship. Modern cruises often travel in a slow, lazy circle and have larded on such amenities as carousels,⁴ 4D movie theaters,⁵ bumper cars,⁶ rope courses with ziplines,⁷ planetariums,⁸ and literal roller coasters.⁹ Swimming pools have become water parks. Restaurants have metastasized.¹⁰ It’s a madhouse out there.

To put it mildly, most of that sounds like a particular kind of hell to me. I don’t like crowds and the more cruise ships try to emulate amusement parks the less I find the appeal. I can put up with a theme park for a day or two.¹¹ The thought of being trapped in one for a week sounds dreadful. But as cruises have proliferated the population segments they target have as well; there’s cruises targeting families and cruises targeting drunk 20-somethings and cruises targeting couples and cruises targeting retirees.

The cruise line my father and I sailed on was Viking Expeditions¹² and Viking targets, for lack of a better term, explorers. Moderately sedate explorers, mind you, but the company prides itself on being “destination focused” and “culturally enriching” and chooses routes accordingly. This one ran from Ushuaia to the Falklands,¹³ then the awkwardly named South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, then the Antarctic Peninsula before heading back to Argentina.

“Expedition” cruises tend to split the difference between ocean liners and cruise ships. The ships are small as cruise ships go — the one I’m on had 365 guests and 256 crew¹⁴ — which allows them to go places larger cruise ships can’t.¹⁵ Some of them lean towards the bare-bones; they’re focused on skiing or mountaineering or hiking and the ship you’re on is the minimum you need to get to your destination.¹⁶ Viking Expeditions is relatively new, consisting at present of a grand total of two ships, and it’s about as luxe as an expedition cruise is likely to get. The most strenuous shore excursion was kayaking around the open water, and the longest hike offered was about a half-hour.¹⁷

This kind of thing attracts an older crowd. I’m not the youngest passenger on board¹⁸ but I’m easily in the lowest quintile.¹⁹ That’s reflected in the design of the ship. I’d call the philosophy behind the fittings and decor “sensible and elegant.” It errs towards cozy rather than flashy and incorporates a lot of natural fabrics and exposed wood finishes, borrowing liberally from the Nordic design tradition.

That’s very deliberate. The founder and CEO is Norwegian. and the company makes a point of incorporating a lot of elements from Scandinavian culture into the ship. That’s most obvious in the food; there’s fresh cinnamon buns every breakfast and a lot of seafood (including a raw bar) every evening.²⁰ The small café where you can pick up snacks is called “Momsen’s” and always has pannekaker and smørrebrød. There’s a proper Nordic Spa on board with a sauna and a steam room and a snow room with artificial snow gently falling on your head and the pools on the ship include a calderium and a tepidarium.

The ship’s also been designed to be more ecofriendly. They banished most disposable plastic and paper onboard.²¹ They no longer print a copy of the daily calendar of events for everyone. The ship’s engines are designed to run on less fuel and heat from the engines is redirected to the hot water system. There’s even a “bird mode” installed where blackout curtains are lowered automatically throughout the ship — including the cabins — to block out everything but the mandatory running lights so migrating seabirds don’t get confused overnight.

Part of the “Expedition” brand for Viking is that there’s Real Actual Science™ being done on the ship, with 35 crew members assigned to the science team. They’re partnered with the Scott Polar Research Institute and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (among others) and are participating in a variety of research projects, from using sonar to survey the ocean floor to recruiting passengers to spot birds and whales²² to launching weather balloons to record atmospheric conditions. It’s pretty cool.²³

I’m still deeply ambivalent about cruises in general and tourism represents a double-edged sword, especially for fragile ecosystems. But it’s not like there’s another way to visit beyond getting hired for some research jaunt. So I signed up in 2020, rescheduled twice in 2022, despaired when I thought I wouldn’t be able to fly in September, and found myself on a flight to Argentina in November.

The first day was not particularly auspicious. My father and I landed in Buenos Aires around 10am, strung out after an 11 hour flight in which I got maybe 4 hours of sleep. We found the transfer point and got to the hotel without any issues. And then there was a long line to check in, where we found out our rooms weren’t going to be ready until 4pm. And we had the rest of the day to ourselves, with strict orders to be downstairs at 5:30am for the transfer to our flight to Ushuaia.

Some people on the cruise immediately jumped at the chance to rush out and explore Buenos Aires. I wanted to as well²⁴ but I desperately needed to take a nap first, which I couldn’t because we needed to kill four hours in the hotel lobby before our room was ready. And by the time the room was ready it was time for dinner and with a 5am wake up scheduled turning in early seemed far more prudent. We ordered room service and collapsed. Very disappointing.²⁵ Thankfully it got better after that. We got a solid night’s sleep despite the early wake up and caught the 3½ hour flight down south.²⁶ And from there we got to get on the cruise ship.

The cruise ship was much better. The rooms were really well thought out. They weren’t much smaller than your average hotel room, and they had thoughtful features like wireless chargers built into the nightstands; a supply of toiletries which included sunscreen, hand cream, and lip balm; and a heated drying closet where you could put your jacket and boots without getting water all over your cabin.

The general amenities were a similarly high caliber. There was the usual all-you-can-eat buffet, which here included the raw bar, a sushi station, and a grill serving steaks and lobster to order.²⁷ There were also two separate restaurants (one contemporary, one Italian) where, for a small surcharge, you could get a five-course meal. The fitness rooms were filled with new equipment and kept scrupulously clean. Most of the common spaces were done up like hip Nordic bookstores with bars attached.²⁸ And for the first time I’ve ever seen on a cruise ship the WiFi was actually solid. They asked you not to stream video, but it was fast enough you could if you tried.

Viking provided cold-weather gear: boots and waterproof pants and a puffy jacket with a detachable waterproof shell.²⁹ And before any shore excursions, there was a lengthy biosecurity process. First, you had to have anything you were wearing examined for stray seeds or biological material. Then, as you were leaving the ship, you had to have your boots washed with biocide. Once back on board, you got the reverse treatment; they sprayed your boots down with power washers, then reapplied the biocide, then finally examined your boots to make sure there wasn’t any mud clinging to them.³⁰

Our first stop was West Point Island in the Falklands. West Point Island is a craggy rock not more than a hour’s walk across in any direction with a total human population of two. The two humans are the present owners of the island, who run a sheep farm and a kind of welcome wagon for the expedition cruise ships which come through every season.³¹ We boarded a Zodiac for the trip over and landed on the beach. There was a short and moderately steep hike³² over to a scenic bluff which was home to hundreds of black browed albatrosses nesting alongside hundreds of rockhopper penguins. I spent about an hour, then headed back, stopping at the owners’ farmhouse for tea and homemade cakes.

The next stop was Port Stanley, the only significant settlement we were visiting on the whole trip. And as luck would have it, one where the seas were too rough to go ashore. A handfull of groups made it in the first couple trips before the waves picked up³³ while the rest of us watched from the boat. They did bring aboard some inspectors with rat-sniffing dogs to make sure rodents weren’t stowing away³⁴ and after a clean inspection we set sail for two days.

We sailed to South Georgia. All the territories we visited were two days away from each other, and there was surpringly little to do on the cruise ship between stops. I’ve been on larger ships which had trivia three times a day and Zumba classes and happy hours and pickleball tournaments all jammed in lest you find yourself with a moment to yourself. Ships with more passengers can accommodate more stuff, obviously. But I think much of it is a choice. Viking seems to expect you to find the expanse of the Antarctic Ocean endlessly captivating.³⁵ And there are regular lectures on scientific topics³⁶ and the usual tours of the ship to otherwise fill the time.³⁷

Our next stop was Grytviken, a former whaling station in South Georgia. It was used intermittently in the 1800s, but was settled and active from 1904 to 1966, by the end of which whale stocks had dropped so low it was no longer commercially viable. I’ve always imagined whaling to be primarily a 19^th century thing along with stovepipe hats and muttonchops, so 1966 feels incredibly late for it to be going on. But the moratorium wasn’t put in place until 1982.³⁸

The site’s been left to rust and it’s rather picturesque in a Freddy-Kruger-boiler-room kind of way.³⁹ Tourism has revived the place a little bit; there’s now a small population which stays there over the summer, running a post office and a small museum and keeping the church in good condition.⁴⁰ And of course it’s been recolonized by seals (elephant) and penguins (king).

The next two days in South Georgia were stops in Fortuna Bay and Drygalski Fjord, and the activities ended up being very similar to how we would spend our time in Antarctica. You could ride around in a Zodiac, either to get dropped off ashore or to tour the coastline. You could do some kayaking.⁴¹ Or you could ride in a Special Operations Boat,⁴² which also took you on a tour of the bay at high-speed, unless there were whales around, in which case you were limited in how fast you could motor around.⁴³

After that we sailed to Antarctica. We had four days sailing around the coast of the peninsula, stopping in Yankee Harbour, Mikkelsen Harbour, Neko Harbour, and Port Lockroy. But the wind picked up at noon cancelling both our excursions in Yankee Harbour, and the same thing happened early the day we were in Neko Harbour, so we really only got two days off the ship while we were there.⁴⁴

So what’s Antarctica like? It’s less cold than you’re imagining — about as cold as the winters I remember growing up in Ohio, although it is early spring down here. And it doesn’t snow very often; Antarctica gets the least precipitation of any continent. It only snowed once during the entire trip.⁴⁵ All those massive snow banks are the result of years and years of accumulation.

The most striking feature is the icebergs. They’re utterly alien, these massive, strange sculptures covered in snow. The bays are filled with shards from them, small crystalline rocks in various shapes⁴⁶ scaling up to these massive frozen edifices looming over your Zodiac. They’re often shrouded in snow, and you can see these deep blues radiating outward where the ice has had all the air squeezed out over thousands of years. They melt irregularly; the biggest danger is that a large chunk will break off underwater and the whole thing will flip over, catching you in your own personal tsunami if it doesn’t crush you outright.

And of course the shores are covered by wildlife, which inevitably means seals or penguins or both. Penguins on land are weirdly unconcerned about your existence. They’ll stand around or flop on their belly or waddle around gathering mud for a nest without paying any attention to a group of two dozen humans not 10 paces away from them.

That’s not the case with seals. Elephant seals, in particular, are very protective of their territory and have the additional unhelpful property of looking an awful lot like rocks until you get a little too close. I now know what it looks like to be threatened by a rock that weighs as much as a BMW, and I have zero interest in knowing what it feels like to be attacked by one.

Our last stop, at Port Lockroy, has a UK outpost which doubles bizarrely as a tourist trap. It was established way back when the race to Antarctica was still a thing and people thought having stuff like post offices would strengthen a claim for territoriality. It was abandoned for a long while, then reopened in the 90s. It currently operates for four months during the tourist season under the auspices of the United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust, staffed with four people who maintain the site along with a gift shop and the aforementioned post office. We couldn’t visit — too many people on our ship to safely land — but they came on board and gave a short talk about what life was like for them.

I could have used at least a couple more days in the Antarctic, but it wasn’t to be. We left to travel back north through the Drake Passage,⁴⁷ arriving back in Ushuaia for a final night on the ship before heading home. We even got in early, giving enough time for a late dinner the night in the city for those who were inclined. I wasn’t; another early flight meant I turned in early.

I’m now in the middle of a kind of torture-flight⁴⁸ back to the United States, in the layover in Buenos Aires after landing from Ushuaia and before the flight to Dallas and then on to Los Angeles, where I’ll be spending Thanksgiving. I was supposed to be going on to Canada afterwards but I thought better of it.⁴⁹ Instead I’ll be returning to New York City and spending the month there. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment scheduled for another followup on my heart before returning to Europe, and I’m going to use the pause to try and make some plans.

I feel like this is the part of the post where I’m intended to gush about the experience, if I were prone to that sort of thing. And it was absolutely an amazing adventure; I can’t deny that. Being able to stand on Antarctica is almost a spiritual experience. That’s how it felt for me.

But it’s undeniable that part of the reason for that is because it’s so endangered. Many penguin colonies are threatened by climate change.⁵⁰ Some whale populations still haven’t rebounded from the hunting nearly four decades ago. Microplastics are being consumed by krill and spreading throughout the entire Antarctic ecosystem.⁵¹ And of course, the glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate.

On this trip we haven’t been able to visit the places with thousands of penguins, because the risk of spreading avian flu is too great. Even then it’s only a matter of time before it arrives with some migrating seabird. The Antarctic isn’t what it was even a decade ago. It’s unclear how drastic the changes are ultimately going to be or if reversing the worst of it is even still possible.

So it’s a bittersweet visit at best. I can’t in good conscience recommend it unless it really calls to you. It’s far too expensive,⁵² it’s far too much time, and even if the cruise is a push environmentally the flights to get here certainly aren’t. You’ll get a better view of the wildlife from David Attenborough documentaries and you can trudge around scenic snow-covered mountains at a much lower environmental cost in Canada or Norway or Alaska.

It’s not the same, I know. I can’t fault anyone who yearns to visit. And if that’s you and you can afford it, by all means go. Go while there’s time.

Next: Los Angeles (LAX) to New York City (JFK)
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Footnotes

¹ All amenities available on the Titanic for its first-class guests.

² The ship I took between Southampton and New York City currently costs about $750 each if you travel with someone. Which is only about half again the cost of a one-way flight, let alone seven nights in a decent hotel plus food and amenities.

³ Or on carefully orchestrated shore excursions

⁴ Royal Caribbean

⁵ MSC

⁶ Royal Caribbean again

⁷ Norwegian

⁸ Viking. Okay, I’ve been on that one and it was pretty cool.

⁹ Carnival

¹⁰ As far as I can tell, the largest Carnival cruises have over 20 different dining options, including three different restaurants by Guy Fieri and a chicken joint from Shaquille O’Neal.

¹¹ Disney World maybe three to four.

¹² Viking started out as a river cruise company, so they have three different branches: Viking River, Viking Ocean, and most recently Viking Expeditions.

¹³ Or the Islas Malvinas, as the Argentinians call it. It’s rather nice to have a disputed territory which didn’t have any indigenous people living on it in the first place. The population overwhelmingly considers itself British and it’s not like Argentina has much of a historic claim on the place beyond proximity, so I’m calling it the Falklands.

¹⁴ It’s still almost ¾ the length of the Titanic, and large compared to most expedition cruises.

¹⁵ In the case of Viking that means the wilds of Antarctica and … the Great Lakes. They have to be somewhere during the off season, although I’m not sure there’s much competition between the romance of Tierra del Fuego and the likes of Cleveland, Detroit, and Duluth.

¹⁶ One expedition line to Antarctica offers camping overnight on the glaciers, which is the first cruise I’ve seen that advertised fewer nights on the boat as a selling point.

¹⁷ The shore excursions were ranked “easy,” “moderate,” or “demanding” and the ratings were completely useless. Some of Viking’s “demanding” shore excursions are eight-hour walks up and down steep hills. Others are relaxing hour walks across cobblestones.

¹⁸ There were a number of years, going on cruises with my father, where I was reliably three decades below the median.

¹⁹ That’s helped by the fact that Viking doesn’t allow anyone under the age of 18 on board. It does ensure that kids aren’t going to be running around the dining rooms or making noise during the lectures, but I suspect it’s as much to do with safety concerns and planning as anything. Without kids you don’t need to design rooms which can host four people, you don’t need to think about kid-friendly meals or activities, you don’t need to stock children’s life vests, etc, etc …

²⁰ Not so great for vegetarians

²¹ The only water in plastic bottles is distributed if you want to bring some ashore, with stern admonishments to return them empty to the ship.

One of the things I absolutely love is that there’s sparkling water available throughout the ship from taps. Even in the staterooms, you can request having carafes of sparkling water instead of flat ones made available to you.

²² Far more useful than it sounds. We know so little about the range and population of so many species that any observations, especially those from remote areas, can be valuable.

Last cruise season a passenger spotted an extremely rare giant phantom jellyfish and Viking became the first cruise company to publish a scientific paper.

²³ I simply don’t know enough to comment on the actual ecological value of any of this. If you were only in it for the science there’s bound to be better ways to spend the money than by dragging 350 tourists along with you. On the other hand, we know so little about the Antarctic that every ship gathering data is contributing a lot.

²⁴ Having been in Buenos Aires for an unexpectedly long period of time I really wanted to visit Colonia del Sacramento, a city in Uruguay just across the Río de La Plata. There’s frequent ferries. I would have done it before, but pandemic.

²⁵ I suppose what I was hoping for, besides an early check in, were a few optional activities from the cruise company. A bus tour of the city, or maybe a dinner out? I could have managed something brainless, but I was in no state to think after that flight.

²⁶ Delayed an hour, due to weather. The crew handed out barf bags after about 45 minutes so I spent the rest of the flight certain we were going to hit something incredibly nasty. We never did.

²⁷ If I’m going to knock the food, it’s that the food was surprisingly meat and seafood-centric. That hadn’t concerned me on past cruises, where I could reliably stuff myself on side dishes and desserts, but now that I’m also trying to cut out sugar and fat it was notably disappointing. Breakfasts for me were fresh fruit and/or muesli, lunches were often salad from a decent if repetitive salad bar, and dinners were maybe a soup or maybe a stir fry or maybe a couple sides of roasted vegetables. Yes, I would have greatly preferred the Dauphinoise potatoes or the eggplant parmigiana or the goat cheese tart and there was enough wine circulating the dining hall to float the ship back to Argentina at any point, but I abstained. I was trying to be sensible.

²⁸ Seriously, there are a lot of books on this ship, all hardcover and primarily about Arctic exploration, most clearly unread. It’s a sign of the crowd that there’s no nightclub but there are at least three different tables set up throughout the ships with jigsaw puzzles set out for you to work on.

²⁹ Although no hats or gloves, and they didn’t even sell a decent assortment on board. They would have been nice, but we got lucky and it wasn’t that cold. You got to keep the jacket.

³⁰ The primary fear currently is avian flu, which hasn’t made it to some of the islands yet.

³¹ The very first expedition ship visited West Point Island in 1968, meeting the exact same family and launching the tourist industry in the Falklands.

³² Steep enough that my father and I waited for a Land Rover to ferry us there and back instead.

³³ And later had to be rescued

³⁴ South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands is one of the few places where invasive rats have been successfully exterminated, saving countless generations of penguin eggs.

³⁵ It typically is

³⁶ Whales! Seals! Seabirds (part I and II)! Shackleton! Krill!

³⁷ One thing I have been appreciating is the “Expedition Diaries,” an irregularly scheduled event where one of the expedition team meets in a cozy space below decks to tell a story about something adventuresome that happened to them. The crew sets up a small bar with Scotch and Bourbon so you can sip while you listen, and it’s just a nice time all around.

³⁸ Everything about the whaling industry is horrific. It turns out for a long time whale oil was used in margarine (labeled “hydrogenated oil” because who would buy it if they knew?) so it’s unlikely but entirely possible I’ve eaten the stuff and the generation older than me almost certainly has. Capitalism in action!

³⁹ Particularly fitting considering what kinds of things went on there — they used to just dump the whale carcasses in the bay and let them rot.

⁴⁰ The church was prefabricated in Oslo and erected in Grytviken in 1913. Whalers turn out of be not all that religious, as one of the pastors complained, and for a while it was used to store potatoes.

⁴¹ I did not do any kayaking. It sounded suspiciously like exercise.

⁴² The Special Operations Boats on board were reportedly designed by the Finnish military, who likely know a thing or two about getting quickly from one place to another in icy water. They reportedly cost $1.3 million each. That didn’t prevent one from getting tangled up in some kelp and stranded.

⁴³ We did see some whales on the trip. I saw the plumes from a group of humpbacks in the distance, and later in the trip there was a day when a pod of fin whales passed by and you see their dorsal fins slide in and out of the water when they came up for air. But whether you saw any or not depended on how long you stood on deck staring out at the ocean, and it was cold out there.

If you want to see whales, you’re better off choosing a specific whale watching tour, and you don’t need to be in Antarctica to do it.

⁴⁴ This is a very common occurrence, albeit not one that’s advertised prominently on the promotional material. My advice: book all your excursions for early in the day, and if at all possible show up hours early and try and get onto an earlier trip.

⁴⁵ There was some brief snowfall the final day, which really disturbed our guide, since it’s really not supposed to do that when spring rolls around. It’s snowing more and more late in the season because it’s more humid, and it’s more humid because of climate change. If it snows in the early spring the penguins have to wait longer for it to melt before they can lay eggs. The later they wait, the fewer eggs get laid. Last year had fewer eggs laid than they’ve ever seen.

⁴⁶ Some of the guides admitted to plucking tiny ones out of the water and using them to chill whiskey. They’re fresh water if you rinse them off.

⁴⁷ The Drake Passage is notorious for rough seas, as it’s where the Atlantic meets the Pacific and there’s no land masses stopping the currents down there from flowing freely. But the cruise ship was outfitted with some supposedly state-of-the-art stabilizers and the weather turned out to be pretty calm. The first night we were bobbing around a bit, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I understand it can get a lot worse.

⁴⁸ Roughly 19 hours in the air

⁴⁹ I was considering going skiing. I am no longer considering going skiing, especially not alone.

⁵⁰ Besides the late snows preventing seasonal breeding, the overheating ocean is pushing sea life farther away from the nesting ground of some species of penguins. This forces the parents of penguin chicks to swim farther and farther away from shore in order to fish. The fear, if that keeps going on, is that it will eventually be too far and the chicks will starve to death before the parents make it back.

⁵¹ Incidentally, microplastics are now detectable in human blood. We have zero idea what the long term effects on that are going to be, but early evidence is that they attack the cardiovascular system causing “abnormal heart rate, cardiac function impairment, pericardial edema, myocardial fibrosis … hemolysis, thrombosis, blood coagulation, and vascular endothelial damage.” More heart attacks for everyone, in other words.

⁵² A brief search reveals there’s significantly cheaper options than the cruise I’m on, including what seems like a shockingly low last-minute rate of $4,500 for a 12-day cruise. Granted, they put you in a bunk in a four-person room, and I’m willing to bet the ship isn’t outfitted with the kind of stabilizers that makes it tolerable for someone who gets seasick relatively easily.⁵³

⁵³ If seasickness is an issue for you, there’s another cruise line that offers a two-hour flight from Punta Arenas direct to a ship already in Antarctica, neatly avoiding the whole Drake Passage.