7 Things You Need to Know Before Going to Antarctica

1

Getting there is a full expedition before the expedition even starts.

The routing alone should tell you something. My travel chain looked like this: Ann Arbor to Detroit, Detroit to Miami, Miami to Buenos Aires (EZE), Buenos Aires to Ushuaia (USH), then board ship. Four flights over roughly 36 hours, clearing customs in Buenos Aires even as a connecting passenger (yes, you still have to collect your bag and re-check it — don’t argue with the signage, just do what the guy at the desk tells you), and then a final hop down to Tierra del Fuego on a small regional jet. By the time I landed in Ushuaia I had logged maybe four hours of sleep across the entire transit and my hip was already screaming from the bursitis I’d gotten a cortisone shot for the morning of departure.

Build in a full day in Ushuaia before you board. Non-negotiable. I had one afternoon and I used most of it running around town trying to find camera cables I’d forgotten to pack (my friend Nick, who was hunting for a men’s size 12 hiking boot — a quest that turned out to be equally futile — inadvertently gave me enough time to hit every electronics shop in the city). That leftover afternoon also delivered a T-bone steak with an Argentinian Malbec that was genuinely one of the better meals of my life. Don’t rush straight to the dock. The town earns the name fin del monde — end of the earth — and it deserves a few hours of your time.

2

The Drake Passage will sort out who’s actually a sailor and who just thinks they are.

The first two days are spent crossing the Drake Passage, roughly 800 miles of open Southern Ocean between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. Some crossings are calm — what sailors call “Drake Lake.” Others are not. Ours started at 15-knot breezes and manageable swells, then ramped up to 35-knot winds and 25-degree temperatures with snow as we crossed the Antarctic Convergence. A meaningful percentage of the 70 passengers aboard spent those two days horizontal.

I don’t get seasick. I recognize that this is luck, not virtue, and I try not to rub it in too hard when half the ship is green. But if you’re prone to motion sickness, come prepared — patches, Dramamine, whatever your doctor recommends — and get it in your system before you board, not after the rolling starts. The ship’s doctor can help once you’re underway, but prevention beats treatment every time out here. The reward for surviving the Drake is waking up in the South Shetland Islands to crystal slate-blue water and snow-covered coastline in brilliant sunshine. Worth it. Completely worth it.

3

Penguins at arm’s length is not a metaphor — it is a literal description of what happens.

Every nature documentary you’ve ever watched has conditioned you to expect wildlife at a respectful distance, observed through a long lens. Antarctica throws that framework out entirely. At our first chinstrap penguin colony, I was standing within arm’s reach of hundreds of them. Not one of them cared. They were busy carrying rocks to build nests, waddling up from the water, sliding on their bellies, occasionally hopping over each other, and — it being November, which is the start of their breeding season — doing other things I’ll leave to your imagination. The gentoo penguins at the South Shetland Islands landing were the same. You’re not interrupting their lives. You are simply an irrelevant large animal who happens to be standing in their neighborhood.

The protocol on shore is that you don’t approach within five meters, but nobody told the penguins. They’ll walk straight up to your boots and study you with the same intensity you’re studying them. The One Ocean expedition staff — genuinely some of the most knowledgeable and warm people I’ve encountered on any trip — briefed us thoroughly on the etiquette before every landing. Stand still, let them come to you, don’t reach out. Follow those three rules and you’ll have encounters that no zoo or aquarium can approximate.

4

The layering system for kayaking is approximately eight steps long and generates serious heat in all the wrong places.

I signed up for kayaking every day the conditions allowed, which turned out to be the right call. What I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer theater of suiting up. The sequence went something like this: fleece pants, running pants, two pairs of Smartwool socks, base layer, long-sleeve insulating shirt, vest, warm beanie, Michigan hat over the beanie — then walk to the mud room to add the dry suit, neoprene booties, PFD, and gloves. By the time I stepped out on deck I had generated enough body heat to fog my own sunglasses.

Then you’re on the water, paddling past a penguin rookery, alongside ice fast where Weddell seals are lounging, with blue-white glacier walls rising on either side of you. The cold hits your face. Everything else is warm. It’s a genuinely disorienting combination of physical comfort and sensory overload. On one paddle I was close enough to a glacier face to hear the ice ticking and groaning. At Paradise Bay — and I’ll say right now that name does the place zero justice — we paddled among icebergs the size of apartment buildings in 20-degree air under full sunshine. Kayaking here isn’t an upgrade. It’s the whole point.

5

The polar plunge is both dumber and more memorable than it sounds — I have the numb fingers to prove it.

This is the one I need to own fully. At Deception Island — an old volcanic caldera with rusted post-WWII whaling buildings that give it the atmosphere of a ghost town someone forgot to close — the expedition team offered the polar plunge. It was around 9pm (still full light, because Antarctica in November), snowing, 20-knot winds blowing. I stripped off my foul-weather gear down to a pair of running shorts and my Michigan hat and sprinted into the Antarctic Ocean.

It felt exactly like Lake Superior in early May, which is to say it felt like being hit by a wall of cold so complete it bypasses the nerve endings and goes straight to panic. I was in and out in maybe 15 seconds. Rushing to redress, my fingers were so numb I couldn’t work the zipper on my jacket and had to ask someone nearby — a fellow passenger whose name I never caught — to zip me up and buckle my PFD for the zodiac ride back to the ship, which was maybe a minute away. Would I do it again? Absolutely. But go in knowing that your hands stop working almost immediately, so either pre-clip your gear or make a friend first.

6

Internet does not exist here, and that’s not a complaint.

The Akademik Ioffe runs satellite internet shared across 70 passengers through an email-only portal. That’s it. No streaming, no social media, no video calls. Sending a short blog post took patience, a Guinness, and sometimes a second Guinness. My field notes from those days are full of half-sentences and mid-thought cuts because I was writing on satellite time.

This turns out to be one of the best things about the trip. For ten days you are genuinely unreachable by the outside world in any meaningful way. The only humans you’re talking to are the ones on the ship with you, plus the expedition staff — a crew of naturalists, historians, and photographers who between them know more about this corner of the planet than you could absorb in a week of lectures. I did an eight-day photography course with one of the ship’s professional photographers while shooting with a Nikon D200 I’d borrowed from my friend Gino. I spent every evening reading the camera manual, and the staff photographer gave me enough in the way of specific technical advice that I came home with shots I’m still proud of. The enforced disconnection made all of that possible.

7

This is the most logistically complex and expensive trip I’ve ever taken — plan it like it is, not like a regular vacation.

Antarctic expedition cruises are not cheap. The Akademik Ioffe with One Ocean Expeditions, the ship and operator I used, runs anywhere from roughly $7,000 to $15,000+ USD per person depending on cabin class and season, not including flights. Getting from anywhere in North America to Ushuaia involves at minimum four flight segments. The gear list alone — dry suit rental is typically covered by the operator, but your own layering system, waterproof boots, and weatherproof outer shell are not — can add several hundred dollars if you’re starting from scratch. Then there are the things I forgot: camera connection cables, the right outlet adapter, various small items that sent me sprinting around Ushuaia the morning before boarding.

Do a proper gear check with someone who has actually done this before. The One Ocean staff are reachable before your trip and will answer specific questions about what to bring — use that resource. If you have questions about what operator to book, what cabin class is worth the premium, or how to route your flights from wherever you’re starting, the specifics matter a lot and vary depending on your situation. The best resource I can point you toward for that kind of detailed, trip-specific advice is Ask WildWilliam — put your actual questions in and get answers based on real experience, not a brochure.

Antarctica is the seventh continent for a reason. It’s the hardest to reach, the most extreme in every physical dimension, and the one that operates entirely on its own terms. No amount of preparation will make it feel normal. But the gap between what you expect and what you actually find there — the scale of the ice, the indifference of the wildlife, the silence when the zodiac engine cuts out and there’s nothing around you but glacier and open water — that gap is the whole point. Go ready for it to be difficult. Go anyway.