Antarctic Emperor Penguin Adventure Explore the White Continent

Welcome to Cape Town. Your home for tonight is The Silo Hotel, an extraordinary hotel at the top of a restored grain silo. The lower half of the building contains the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Spend the afternoon wandering through the museum or exploring the art-festooned hotel. If you’re up for it, we can organise a backstage tour of the penguin exhibit at the nearby Two Oceans Aquarium. Otherwise, you can just relax.

Antarctica runs on its own schedule, and the weather gods answer to no one. Which means you may find yourself with a bonus day or 2 in what we'd humbly argue is the most beautiful city on earth. Twist our arm. Hike Lion's Head at sunrise, take the cable car up Table Mountain, swim in the icy Atlantic at Camps Bay, drive the dramatic Cape Peninsula, or do your very important due diligence at one of the winelands' finest farms.

Still here? Excellent. Cape Town has a way of making delays feel suspiciously like rewards. If yesterday was mountains and ocean, today might be the V&A Waterfront, a long lunch in the Bo-Kaap, or simply finding a clifftop somewhere and watching the Atlantic do its thing over a bottle of Chenin. Next stop, Antarctica!

From Cape Town, Antarctica is a 5.5-hour flight away on an Airbus A330 or A340. Fly over the Southern Ocean and miles upon miles of sea ice, before you touchdown on a blue ice runway (not as a deathly as it sounds). From here, you’ll be whisked off to your camp. Celebrate the start of this incredible journey with a cocktail chilled with 10,000-year-old Antarctic ice – casual.

Today, you get to head out onto the ice and explore your surroundings for the first time. Pick from a range of activities, from chilled hikes (geddit?) to ice climbing or abseiling. In the evening, you’ll gather for a talk to get the excitement flowing for tomorrow’s journey to see the iconic emperor penguins.

Today you’ll take a 2.5-hour flight followed by a ride on a PistenBully snow groomer to the emperor penguin colony at Atka Bay. Here, thousands of penguins huddle with their fluffy babies. Watch as the chicks take their first steps off their parents’ feet and onto the ice. Due to the colony’s remoteness, hardly any other people see these big, loveable birds – a really special experience that you can toast back at camp.

After breakfast, you’ll take a two-hour hike across icefields, eventually reaching a ridge line. From here, you’ll drop down into a valley, where you can enter the otherworldly blue ice tunnels. See how wind and meltwater have shaped the ice over time as you walk through these quiet, ethereal underground channels.

A nunatak is the exposed tip of a mountain that rises above the ice sheet. Today, you’re going to climb one! Join an experienced mountain guide for a glacier hike to the top of the nunatak. At the peak, admire the sheer scale of the Antarctic ice sheet rolling out in every direction around you.

After breakfast at camp, you’ll be transported to the airstrip to await the arrival of the plane that’ll fly you back to Cape Town. Hang out at Wolf’s Fang Ice Bar – as the name suggests, it’s a bar carved out of ice, decorated with ice sculptures of Antarctic celebs like the emperor penguins. Take one last moment of stillness and quiet to appreciate this totally unique continent, before boarding your outbound flight.