Calm pristine waters, huge bergs and perfect silence.

After three days of seeing nothing but open water whilst crossing Drake Passage, it was absolutely incredible to wake up and see Antarctica for the first time. The captain had told us that we would enter Antarctic waters at around 3am so we set our alarms to wake up for the occasion!

After a few 'baby-bergs' we finally saw our first real iceberg.

There was a buzz of excitement all around the ship as the captain had announced that several icebergs had been spotted on the radar. People stood ready with cameras to try and catch a glimpse of our first real lump of ice. Nothing could have prepared us for what we sailed past!

Nothing can quite capture the excitement of seeing this pass by the ship!

Imagine you are sitting down for lunch, you're there with the other ninety or so passengers on your boat, nibbling on a bread roll, sipping a glass of wine.... Suddenly, someone yells to look out of the window and this huge piece of ice goes floating by with lots of penguins on the top. Do they know where they're going? Are they going to jump off? 

I hadn't really seen a seal up close before...

I spent a fairly large amount of time sitting on the shore watching this seal roll around on the pebbly beach. So long that I even named him Samuel and took his moving about to be posing for my many photographs. I think seals are definitely underrated in the animal world.

Attached to a Rope and Off We Go!

The trip to Antarctica which I was fortunate enough to go on, was called Basecamp. This meant that everyday there was an option to get off the boat and take part in various activities on the actual continent. One of those activities was mountaineering and what an experience it was!

Life wasn't always plain sailing

One night we ended up navigating our way through a passage of frozen ocean. It was incredible to hear the boat churning up the chunks of ice in order to make way for the vessel to get through. Not only that, it was also done at midnight and as you can see - it was almost full daylight!

Did you know that penguins are incredibly smelly?

Though super cute and absolutely hilarious to watch as they pottered around, penguins actually smell disgustingly bad! Despite that, it was amazing to get quite up close with them.

Whales to the left of the ship!!

It didn't matter what we were doing when the announcement came from the captain, if he said whales were in sight, we all leapt up to try and capture a glimpse of these magnificent creatures. One evening, they put on a spectacular show of breaching over and over again. It was amazing to see.