Originally Posted by
BadgerProf
We visited Antarctica in January of this year on the National Geographic Explorer. The Lindblad/NatGeo strategic alliance is a perfect match for our interests. If you want a ship with less than 150 passengers, interesting talks/discussions with naturalists, scientists, NatGeo photographers, etc. instead of a night club, casino, or show room, you might want to look into this option. They do a great job getting you off the ship multiple times almost every day. In Antarctica for us that meant walks, hikes, Zodiac (rubber boat) cruises, kayaking, etc. We are fortunate that we have been able to travel to all seven continents and over 100 countries. For us, our Antarctica trip was the best trip ever—hands down. Whales? Yep! Penguins? Double yep!! Incredible ice flow, icebergs, burgy bits, growlers? Triple yep!!! Calving glaciers from up close? Absolutely! The professional staff of naturalists, scientists, and photographers are all wonderful. The ship’s crew is amazing. We have done five expeditions with Lindblad/NatGeo in the last three years and all five were amazing. If you want a big ship, want to see things from a distance, and prefer seat reservations for meals over open seating, look somewhere else.
+1. We went with Lindblad in Dec 2017 and it was exactly like this. We are not Eco-groupies but Peter Hillary was on board and was a great guy with interesting talks. Antarctica is so good, we are going back in December on Silverseas with friends. We signed up for it when we were doing Silversea arctic KEF to TRO. Our last day in Antarctica, almost everyone was back on board, but there was an hour left of the shore time. My wife and I made snow seats and watched a glacier calving for an hour while the penguins ran around us. This was the day after we watched roughly 100 humpbacks feeding in teams for a couple of hours. If you are worried about evac, read the FT travel/trip insurance posts. And/or get one of these.
Satellite texting- Garmin inReach or others