Our favourite holiday wasn’t a holiday at all. It was an expedition.
In February this year, after sixteen years of planning, we spent two unforgettable weeks in Antarctica.
The distinction matters: a holiday is predictable, comfortable, designed for relaxation.
An expedition is something else entirely — about discovery, challenge, and growth. It stretches you, surprises you, and sometimes even confronts what you thought you knew.
Sixteen years earlier, we decided to celebrate a milestone birthday for my wife by making her childhood dream come true. She had always longed to see Antarctica. So we made a plan: $25 a week, invested and compounded over sixteen years. Small steps, faithfully taken, carried us all the way to the edge of the world.
We love wild and beautiful places, and Antarctica did not disappoint.
Everything there is big beyond imagining: towering mountain ranges, sprawling glaciers, endless fields of sea ice. We saw icebergs that dwarfed anything we had ever encountered — vast, sculpted, and endlessly shifting. To give a sense of scale: one iceberg, A23a, recently began drifting toward South Georgia. It is three times the size of New York City, stands 300 metres tall, and weighs a trillion tonnes. We didn’t see A23a, but even the smaller icebergs we encountered left us in awe of the forces that shaped them.
There was wonder — and laughter, too. One day, an Adélie penguin launched itself out of the water and landed, startled, in our zodiac. For a few moments, penguin and humans stared at each other in mutual disbelief, before it flapped back into the sea and made its escape.
There was danger. Originally, we were meant to travel on a different ship — one that was damaged by rogue waves in the North Sea a year before departure. Waves as high as 12–15 metres battered the vessel, forcing it to be towed back to port for extensive repairs. It was a stark reminder that the ocean does not yield easily to human ambition.
We were fortunate: weather conditions were close to perfect for us — calm seas, clear skies, safe landings. That’s not guaranteed. Expeditions before and after ours faced much rougher conditions, with some forced to change plans and explore different regions when the weather closed in. Antarctica demands respect, and it does not always cooperate.
There was raw confrontation with the wildness of nature. One morning, we witnessed a brutal clash between a pod of orcas and humpback whales. I will spare you the details, but it was a bloody, sobering reminder: in nature, survival often comes at a cost.
It was, without question, the most extraordinary journey of our lives — carefully and patiently planned over more than a decade, and yet still full of surprises that no plan could contain.
It moved us deeply:
- To watch my wife live her childhood dream — and have it exceed all her hopes — was a profound joy.
- To stand in landscapes so vast, so unspoiled, was awe inspiring.
- To glimpse the delicate interconnectedness of life, and to reckon with the consequences of human greed, was sobering and heartbreaking.
Joy, beauty, grief — Antarctica gave us all of these, woven inseparably together.
Enough to bring you to tears.
Enough to change you.
Perhaps you would like to get a taste from this video produced by the professional photographer on our trip:
The Afterword 
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