We’ve finally made it back to South America after an amazing experience aboard the ship “Antarctic Dream” for our 10 day expedition to the Antarctic Continent. Before our expedition I used to struggle with the question “Where’s the best place you’ve been to?”. Such an open question, the answer for anyone would really be lots of places, for lots of different reasons. But now I’ve been to Antarctica all that seems to have changed and I feel quite happy to say “Antarctica”.

One of the first things that knocked me for six in Antarctica was the amount of absolutely stunning scenery, all over the place, from our porthole windows in our cabin to a trek up a small Antarctic peak, it was everywhere. Like the peaks of the worlds highest mountain ranges surfacing from a vast and endless icy lake, adding to that a creature as curious, cute and cuddly (boys!) as the penguin, it makes for a truly wondrous place.

Our ship normal holds about 80 passengers but November is low season so we were sharing with only 25 others. The service on board was truly first class, and for skinflint backpackers like ourselves it was a bit of a shock to be eating 4 courses for lunch and dinner each served like a piece of artwork, I didn’t know whether to frame my dinner or eat it.

Our daily excursion on the Zodiacs were also top notch! because of the small amount of passengers it was only a matter of minutes before all of us were ashore and hassling penguins for photos. Of the 10 days aboard 5 full days were spent in Antarctica itself, disembarking the ship twice a day for an average of 5 hours a day we were so very lucky to spend so much time on land.

In the end we ended up taking over 1500 photos and short video clips and it’s taken me an absolute age to go through all of them in Internet cafes and pick out the best ones, narrowing it down to about 200, and I’ve still got more on the camera that I haven’t taken off yet. I’ll be trying my best to get video up soon, but it might take me a while! You can see all the photos right here but it might be easier to watch them in a slideshow change the speed to “1 second” and you can get through the whole lot in a few minutes.

On our ship there was a PC which made taking photos much easier because we could burn CD’s every night full of the days photos. I also decided that I would write a post for the website everyday we were on board and I’ve now got them all together and live on the site, and added photos to them all, I’ve been in this bloody Internet cafe all day! If you want to know more about our trip then your welcome to read them all in order. You’d be best to start by clicking the following… Day 1-3, followed by Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9-10.

I think my favourite quote from all the ones we’ve heard about visiting Antarctica has to be that of our friends Phill and Sue who went there in January 2006. Sue said “Just being there makes you really appreciate the fact that you shouldn’t really be there” and that’s so true, like no where else there’s no culture, no architecture, no locals, no language, no government, no one owns Antarctica, and everyone owns Antarctica. It truly is one of the most special places on earth, which made our “big news” there, all the more special.

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