Preparations

While choosing a trip to Antarctica there are many possible itineraries that fits a wide variety of people. You might be a curious traveler who wants to go as far down south as possible or your goal is to just cross the Antarctic circle or you might be a wildlife enthusiast. I even heard of people visiting Antarctica to get married!! Since wildlife / nature was the priority for this first trip of ours to the southern waters, we decided on the following itinerary which seemed to offer a good mix of wildlife viewing and varied landscapes.

Ushuaia -> Falkland Islands -> South Georgia -> Antarctic Peninsula -> Ushuaia - for 18 days on a Russian vessel "Akademik Ioffe". We booked with Quark Expeditions which was highly recommended by one of my friends.

In my opinion, visiting Antarctica requires good preparations if you want to thoroughly enjoy it. There are a few cruises each year that take visitors to Antarctica in the southern summer months of Nov - Feb. I did my usual research this year, contacted a few agencies, even made reservations for Dec 2010 but unfortunately due to some other priorities it almost looked like we might not make it. Just two months ago I received one of those spam emails advertising a trip to Antarctica and we gladly signed up for it after some initial thoughts/planning.

The time was short for the preparations and we still decided to go ahead. Most importantly I had to beef up my camera + lens collection and ended up getting a Nikon D700, 17-35mm f2.8, 24-70mm f2.8, 70-300mm f4 along with some filters, flash and a pair of good binoculors. Of course we do need a lot of warm layers and hoarded these mostly from Patagonia and North Face. Not to forget, as a part of the preparations we did end up making a lot of todo / checklists, reading blogs and books, watching movies/documentaries about Antarctica (see below for a list), etc. Looking back it seems like a lot of work but we enjoyed the process. Even after all this, while writing this on our flight from SF to Lima, I still have some uneasy feeling, somewhere in the back of my mind, that we might have forgotten something. During this whole phase, I came to realize that there is never enough time to prepare for your dream trip that you so much desire to make it close to perfection. Eager to find out? Read on...