Last November I was lucky enough to visit Elephant Island, that bleak mountainous outcrop at the farthest tip of the South Shetlands that points the way from the Antarctic Peninsula to South Georgia.  Elephant Island is forever famous as the location where the stranded men of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition sheltered while ‘the Boss’ […]

One of my favourite places in Grytviken in South Georgia is somewhere overlooked. Tucked into an anteroom the Norwegian Church is the old whaling station’s forgotten library. After browsing the shelves, you can flick through 1950s registration books to discover which whalers were the most avid readers. It’s a gently moving experience: while nature rightly […]

At the end of 2022 I was able to tick off one of my big bucket list destinations when I travelled south to join an expedition cruise sailing to South Georgia and Antarctica. While I packed up my warm clothes and checked my spare memory cards and batteries for my camera I was bubbling over […]

There are a few places in the world where you feel like you’re stepping into a BBC or National Geographic wildlife film, but South Georgia is one of these. Its enormous king penguin colonies are a photographer’s dream. In November 2022 I was lucky enough to make my first trip to South Georgia and fell […]

South Georgia is often described as the Serengeti of the Southern Ocean. It’s a title that speaks of the outsized attractions of this thin speck of an island, because when it comes to wildlife, South Georgia truly is the real deal. If you’ve ever considered the Galapagos Islands, the mountain gorillas of East Africa or […]

No figure towers over the history of polar exploration than that of Sir Ernest Shackleton. On polar expedition cruises, it’s a rare voyage there that doesn’t include a lecture about Shackleton’s life and the epic survival story of his Endurance expedition. It’s a story in which South Georgia plays a central role, and many visitors […]