Antarctica : Tips and considerations

When to go

Can you tell the clouds from the ice
and the water from the sky?
Photo credit: Sally

In summer! Antarctica's summer takes place from October to March. From late October to November, you will see sea ice and penguins courting and building nest. In December and January, daylight hours are the longest and penguins begin to hatch. You can also see "feeding chase" where chicks run after (any) adults for food. In February and early March, there are the most number of whale sightings.

Does this not remind you of a face in a Picasso?

For further details, you may want to refer to http://iaato.org/frequently-asked-questions#what-is-the-season.

How to go

You can get to Antarctica via air or sea, from New Zealand or South American countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. 



Source: http://iaato.org/documents/10157/15716/IAATO_Fact+Sheet_2012-13_UPDATE.pdf

The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators ("IAATO") was founded in 1991 to "advocate, promote and practise safe and environmentally responsible private-sector travel to the Antarctic". It has about 54 voluntary tour operators members. To protect the environment, member tour operators coordinate with each other so that not more than one vessel is at a landing site at any one time, with no more than 100 passengers are ashore and maintain a 1:20 guide-to-passenger ratio while ashore. 

(Source:  http://iaato.org/documents/10157/15716/IAATO_Fact+Sheet_2012-13_UPDATE.pdf)

Not all Antarctic tour operators are IAATO members. To support the conservation of the area, you may want to ensure that your tour operator is a member of IAATO. (You can search if a tour operator is a member at http://apps.iaato.org/iaato/directory/)

IAATO also set up guidelines that determine where tour operators can land. The smaller cruise ships which carry less than 200 passengers have a broader range of sites to land. Those that carry more than 500 passengers are more stable in rougher sea conditions but they are not allowed to land in Antarctica. You may therefore want to check the itinerary and if there are landings/landing on the islands only/landing in both continent and islands.

For those who decide to depart from Ushuaia, Argentina, it would take at least 2 flights to get there. Do ensure you arrive plenty of time ahead of the cruise. More than a handful of people on my ship spoke of how it took them 2 days to locate their luggage (which got lost in transit). At least one of us set sail without her luggage (she managed to buy some basic items in Ushuaia). 

What to bring

Super-duper camera(s)

I was very impressed by the number of people with the number of high end cameras, lenses and gadgets on board (a $10,000 lens? totally understandable since most would never come to Antarctica again and it makes sense to get the best pictures from this trip). Someone even brought 5 cameras. I found out that even point and shoot cameras come in 21x zoom nowadays. My camera was really nothing compared to theirs. 

Check out my 8x zoom camera, looking really tiny next to Warrick's (I think his camera was not the biggest on our ship):

My camera vs Warrick's

Small and old as it was, I was happy with the photographs my camera was able to produce. However, from a photography point of view, it was really inspiring to see how and what everyone had captured at the end of each day.

My humpback tail (this is as far as I can zoom in)
I can only see the barnacles and water on the tail when I zoom in further on my computer

Mirza's photograph of the same tail

Bring a sports camera like a GoPro or a waterproof camera if you are going kayaking or camping. We had about 5 GoPro cameras in 11 kayaks and I was really impressed by the video and photograph shots taken with the camera. (There is also a really cool clip of a home-made rocket launched into space filmed on GoPro: http://metro.co.uk/2013/02/06/twelve-year-old-girl-launches-hello-kitty-into-space-3383397/) 

Hard drive or memory card/stick

Bring an external hard drive or memory card of some sort for photograph swapping at the end of the trip. I took about 2,500 photographs and videos in less than 12 days (many were panoramic sequences). Most people I knew took an average of 3,000 to 5,000 photographs (since each gentle touch on a SLR easily produced a number of stills).

Given that everyone took thousands of pictures, most did not bother to sort out photographs for specific people and instead let everyone copy a whole lot of pictures. This meant that I probably received 10,000 photographs even though I only copied from a handful of people. The external hard drive or memory card would come in handy for these photographs.