After your flight from Australia or New Zealand, arrive in Buenos Aires and be transferred to your hotel. The rest of the day is at your leisure.

To get you to your ship as soon as possible, your plane leaves Buenos Aires early in the morning, taking you to the southern port city of Ushuaia on the shores of the Beagle Channel. From the plane, you might be granted views over Lago Fagnano and of snow-capped Monte Darwin in Alberto de Agostini National Park to the west.

Hybrid-powered expedition ship MS Fridtjof Nansen will be here waiting to start your adventure together. You’ll get to know the ship well over the next few weeks and fondly see it as your comfortable home away from home. After boarding, you’ll attend a meeting with the Expedition Team who will take you through some key health and safety principles. Enjoy a welcome dinner, your first of many delicious meals on bord, before finishing the day with a stroll on deck looking for stars up above.

Welcome to Antarctica. This vast continent is almost entirely ice and snow. Ice shelves are the size of countries and icebergs tower over our ship as big as buildings. Glaciers cascade down through the mountains, crumpling towards the shoreline where they crumble ice into the water. When we arrive here, summer is coming to an end, and you can look forward to seeing these landscapes beautifully illuminated by breathtaking sunsets. This is also the best time of year to see penguins in their final stage of moulting and to spot different species of whales as they gorge on krill.

During your five days here, we plan to visit several possible sites in the South Shetlands and on the Antarctic Peninsula, based on when and where conditions are at their best. But this is no passive sail-by. The Expedition Team has big plans for you, as they will take you on ice-cruises and on landings ashore, bringing you to historic and scenic sites and to penguin colonies at a respectful distance. You may even get the chance to go kayaking with them among the icebergs, in an optional activity. They will also continue their lecture programme and you’ll likely also be busy cataloguing the various wildlife you spot as part of a Citizen Science project.  

The thing about expedition cruising is that the itinerary is not set in stone, allowing us to be flexible and adaptable, doing whatever is best at each specific point in the voyage.  Having sailed these waters for so many years, we know all the possible landing sites and when we should go to maximise the experience for everyone.

With green grass, white sands and farms, the Falklands are a world away from the barren white wilderness of Antarctica. Similar to Antarctica though, we will spend our three days exploring the islands with no exact itinerary, allowing the Captain and Expedition Team to pick out the best spots for each day based on the conditions at the time.

This is a paradise for birds, like ducks, geese, albatrosses, caracaras and wrens, not to mention the four different species of penguins to found here – king, rockhopper, Magellanic and gentoo. The latter normally hang out in large colonies around the islands, which you might be able to spot from the ship or even visit during one of our landings.

Stanley, the capital of the archipelago, is on the island of East Falkland and easy for the ship to access. Small enough to be explored on foot, it comes complete with familiar English red buses, inviting restaurants and pubs full of friendly locals.

Puerto Madryn was founded by Welsh immigrants in 1865, and late summer temperatures might make you want to visit the inviting beaches in the area. Puerto Madryn is also the gateway to dramatic Valdes Peninsula, and we hope to invite you on an optional excursion here to explore a stunning nature reserve that has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Here, you will get the chance to see marine mammals like fur seals, elephant seals, sea lions, and whales like the Southern right whale, baleen whale and orcas. There are also at least 180 species of birds living on the peninsula, so get those binoculars out and start looking for new favourite birds. If birds aren’t really your cup of tea, this is also a nice place to walking around, eat and shop for local arts and crafts.    

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and the same goes for your expedition cruise. It has been 19 days since the last time you were in Buenos Aires, but having experienced so much during that time, it will probably feel like it’s been much longer. This is your second chance to get a feel for the exotic Latin city which seems to pulsate to the rhythm of tango. If you don’t feel like dancing, you can also enjoy an optional post-programme to the famous Iguazu Falls, one of the largest and most impressive waterfalls in the world.