Ponant’s plush new icebreaker is making the white continent more accessible – and luxurious – than ever, writes Nicola Moyne.
As the first flakes of snow fall, I hug my fur-lined Parka hood around my ears and watch a churning grey wake dance from the stern. The sky is shot with purple; ice bergs rise around us, like sculptures erupting from the ocean. It’s 8pm in Antarctica and we’ve just spotted our first humpback whale fluke, a mottled silky tail rising and falling beneath the icy waters as snow petrels patrol overhead. This may be the most inhospitable place on Earth for mankind, but the white continent seems to be positively teeming with life beneath its dazzling layers of white and blue.
I’ve hopped aboard Ponant’s luxurious icebreaker, Le Commandant Charcot, for a 14-night polar exploration cruise around some of Antarctica’s most scenic bays and ice floes. The adventure starts in Ushuaia, Argentina, where we embark the 123-cabin vessel before sailing through the notoriously unpredictable Drake Passage to reach the Weddell Sea – a water mass in the Southern Ocean that provides a gateway to some of Antarctica’s iconic animals, including its majestic emperor penguins.
