dtvmacdonald

Thanks for a great review dtvmacdonald .....after nearly 12 months of researching we have now booked & we'll be doing the same trip you did :D :D

We will be aboard the m/s Expedition 'Quest for the Antarctic circle' 20th December 2014 & will be celebrating Xmas & New Year in Antarctica!!

 

Very excited,

G&G :):cool:

Have a great trip ... its been two years since I was there and I'm

amazed that this thread I started is still active! I'd

love to hear from folks if or how the experience on the Expedition

has changed, as I'm now considering a trip to S. Georgia, and my

selection criteria are quite diferent from before (it looks like I

wi8ll have to go to Antarctica, but I'm much more concerned with

the time spent at S. Georgia.

On a ship the size of the Fram, everybody gets to go ashore at every spot, its just that they have to do it in groups and so at some (but not all, such as Port Lockroy) places they will have less time ashore (but also, not necessarily only half as much time ... it could be 2/3 because there is usually not a big rush. More important is the exact ice class in determining getting places.

Now for ships much bigger than Fram (i.e. over 199 passengers) then things get worse rapidly. I was on a 134 passenger boat and we had zero problems.

I've stayed two different trips at Loi Suites Recoleta. You call them "not break the budget"? They are very nice indeed, you won't be disappointed.

Great location too. Don't sneer at the touristy meat eateries

around the corner opposite the cemetery. At the touristy "Montana"

steak house I had the best steak I ever ate.

It might be well to distinguish between expedition cruises that land passengers in Antarctica and larger cruise ships, like Veendam, that simply sail past for the view. I suspect that increasingly severe regulation of Antarctic visitation has had an effect on operators and might account for a reduction in the number of ships offering the expedition-tyoe trips. The only expedition sailing I'm familiar with is the Fram departing Buenos Aires on November 2 for the Falklands, South Georgia, and the Antarctic Peninsula; this is marketed by Vantage Travel. It costs vastly more than the Veendam trip and is almost sold out. Only one suite and insides are shown as available; we're in an inside and a portgole would have cost the two of us $4000 additional...now it's not available.

 

I wonder if the Veendam on December 20 is suffering from people's desire not to be away for Christmas?

This is a very very odd post. There seems to be no problem with the expedition type cruises! Remember that this is Cruise Critic: many sections simply do not consider these cruises! For example, there are very few expedition type ships for which one can write a formal "review", Fram

being one. For most small ships it is impossible.

However, they can be and extensively are discussed in the "ports" Forum

section under Antarctica. You just have to look in the right place.

I went on GAdventure's "Expedition" over Christmas and wrote a review there.

Its too late for this year, but no problem getting on a ship for

next year. Just search carefully to be sure you get on the right boat. Concerns are different than for big ships. Read lots of trip reports both here and on TripAdvisor. For example, I wanted to both land on the Continent itself and go camping and go south of the Antarctic Circle and see chicks hatching. This limited me to just one particular date on this particular ship! No other choice! And the cruise was a perfect success, all goals were met.

even if Southern Chile is a third-world rathole,

But is not! A few years ago I did a very long land-based trip to both Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia (Torres del Paine and Los Glaciers parks) and

everything went like clockwork, accommodations were all quite nice, and at

least on this trip food was wonderful: actually it was best while we were camping, real four star food.

evie0110:

 

Answers about the Expedition:

 

1) Did you experience much ocean motion? If so, could you walk around the ship comfortably?

 

2) Was there a lot of queueing?

 

3) Zodiacs: our naturalists were very good/careful; regardless, two of our passengers fell in water in two separate incidents going ashore. (Although perhaps voted "Most Likely to...", it wasn't me wither time.) I'm somewhat skeptical of the company's "never" claim. That said, the trickier bit for me will always be at the ship. How large/stable are the boarding platforms? Are there a lot of stairs?

 

4) More generally, are there a lot of stairs full-stop? Are the stairs steep, shallow, wide, narrow?

 

5) Are there a lot of grab bars in the rooms, and handrals about the ship?

 

Thanks very much evie0110, and to anyone else who chimes in.

1. On my trip, not much motion as Drake goes. Could I walk around the ship comfortably? 97% of the time yes. 3% of the time I felt the need to hold on tight to railings ... which don't cover 100%. I felt unsafe for perhaps a total of 30 seconds on the cruise, staggering across the spaces with nothing to hang on to.

2. There was a bit at the buffet line ... and note, some people were queued on the stairs. The queue never took more than 3 or 4 minutes. There were queues in the mud room that were much worse.

3. I was not aware of any incidents. But during all landings the weather factor was zero. The boarding platform at the ship is about 3x3 feet and

very stable. There are three steps down to the platform.

4. As mentioned, lots of stairs. Stairs everywhere. Some narrow enough to grab ahold of side rails on both sides at ones, some not. All steep. All shallow steps front to back. Could be a show-stopper, or not, sorry to be unspecific.

5. Yes, but as mentioned above, unfortunate gaps.

I tried to find suitable images of the stairs and failed. I took none.

Call GAdventures and simply ask.

As to mobility issues, I really don't know. Zodiacs are boats with flat hard floors surrounded by large rubber tubes. You sit somewhat awkwardly on the tubes unless you want to face exactly sideways, which of course you can, but then you miss on some views.

On our ship you got onto the Zodiacs by stepping down a couple of stairs to a platform. Then you stepped onto a flat plate set on the rubber tube, onto a flat stand on the floor, and then onto the floor. There were two people, one on the mother ship and one in the Zodiac to hold very firmly onto your arms.

Getting off at shore is different. You somehow get to the front of the Zodiac, sitting on the tube. Then you swivel around so you face out, raising your feet over the tube. Then you hop into the water. In no case on our trip was the water deeper than six inches. All our beaches were nice gravel, easy to walk on. Once on shore walking around is not a problem.

Somebody with mobility issues would have to ask the particular ship owner if it would work for them. On the MV Expedition, not being able to get up and down rather steep stairs is a complete show stopper since there is no elevator and the dining room, meeting room, and mud room are on different levels.

People with modest mobility issues can get ashore if on the right ship.

Since I mentioned leucistic penguins, I thought I'd post a couple of picture.

I hope this works.

No ship in Antarctica over 100 passengers can avoid serious "you may miss something" problems. That's because regulations prohibit more than 100 passengers ashore at once. The Nat Geo Explorer could avoid passengers waiting on the ship by sending the excess out on a Zodiac cruise, and on some occasions ours did too, but one group or the other will almost certainly miss out on something like whale sightings from Zodiacs, or the single Macaroni penguin "Mack the Knife" at Half Moon Island, etc. Even with a ship with only 50 people some will miss out on some things because the Zodiacs get separated a lot. And at some places even a 100 passenger ship can't get all ashore at once since they literally will not fit.

On our cruise nobody missed out on Mack The Knife since he was there the whole time, but many missed out on the leucistic (semi-albino) penguins at

Waterboat Point since they were coming and going and the exact location where they were could only hold maybe 10 people. And only my Zodiac had one swim right next to us underwater, quite a special show.

When I said I wanted more time on land, I forgot we camped, so we

had many, many hours. I only got 4 1/2 hours sleep it was so much fun.

It turns out that there is a video of this on Youtube.

I consider the Nat Geo Explorer, but none of the itineraries listed going south of the Antarctic Circle, so I excluded it. I later saw that on occasion it has gone that far south, but I wanted the best possible chance, explicitly included in the itinerary. And for me camping was a must. And I was completely satisfied.

In some cases our non-kayakers were indeed "waiting". In other cases they were spending the extra time on the Zodiacs. But on the good side some days we made three 1 1/2 to two hour excursions. Absolutely no one felt that the waits were a problem. Also, except for kayakers, there was never a "choice" of what to do: everybody else, without exception, got to do everything. The kayakers had a choice of skipping the kayak trip and doing what other people did. The only thing I missed was at least one much longer excursion, like 8 hours climbing a peak. But exceedingly few itineraries offer that.

Walking on sea ice is not "wonderful" ... its no different than walking on very flat land with snow on it, plus in our case seals.

The camping was mainly a "check off the list" thing for me. It apparently was a big experience for very many people as few had ever camped in a tent before and fewer still had camped on snow. I've done it a very lot. First to note is that we didn't eat at the camp site, only going there after dinner and returning before breakfast.

While we ate they 30 ferried tents, 60 sleeping bags and pads, and two mini-porta-potties to the site, which was at Damoy Point, right next to Port Lockroy and got the potties set up (one in a former rescue hut, one over a small hill). This is not on the mainland. Earlier on the ship they had shown people how to set up the rather standard two-man tents, of the four crossed stressed aluminum pole sort. These had "rain" flies and are staked down on the snow with very large "boat anchor" stakes. This is very easy in good weather, which this was. Then people put the pads and bags in the tents. The pads were somewhat of a joke, not the usual Thermarest foam ones but just crinkly aluminum foil!

Once set up there is nothing special to do except go to bed, so some people went off to look at penguins, which were not extremely plentiful, but most climbed a large hill which overlooked Port Lockroy and our mother ship. Once on top snowball fights broke out and when that subsided people either walked back or slid down the hill or in some cases shoe-skied down it. Some people went up and down several times. Eventually people realized that they were not going to get darkness for sleep and went to bed anyway.

In the morning we simply took down the tents, restuffed them and the bags, and headed off to the Zodiacs to return to the ship for breakfast.

Many people didn't know how warm these sleeping bags get at 32 degrees F, inside a tent, and left their clothes on. They almost melted. Once nice thing: they did have extra long bags for those over 5 feet 10 inches.

It appears impossible to write a "Review" of a cruise on a ship that is not on Cruise Critic's list of companies, so this can't be a formal review, but I'll try to include all the "usual" comments.

This is for a cruise on GAdventure's ship "Expedition" Dec. 22, 2012 to Jan 3, 2013, titled "Quest for the Antarctic Circle".

First a few words about why I chose this particular Antarctic cruise on this ship. I wanted to get south of the Antarctic Circle itself. I wanted to go camping at least one night. I wanted a landing on the Continent itself, not just an island. I wanted a fairly long cruise, but not one to South Georgia. And I wanted to be there when penguin chicks were hatching. All this results in a rather tight time frame, as the chicks hatch just as the ice south of the Circle breaks up. I wanted, ideally, a ship with a smaller number of passengers. This is because only 100 at a time are allowed on land. So ideally one wants a ship carrying less than 100 people so all can at least theoretically be ashore at once. It actually turns out to be more complicated than this, see below, but I didn't know this before the cruise. This ship carries 125 to 135 passengers. Finally I wanted a single cabin, and was willing to pay and pay, but still, value is value.

This was also my very first cruise on a "ship". I've been on three cruises in SE Alaska, including Glacier Bay, and one in the Galapagos, but all four of these were on small boats with 10 or fewer passengers, and the Alaska ones were very upscale (e.g. fresh crab many days, like two hours ocean to table, thanks to arrangements with crab pot owners, plus fish caught onboard!)

So I spent a lot of time choosing a cruise. I tried numerous lines, but in the end only one offered what I wanted: the ship MV Expedition owned by GAdventures in Canada. This company does mostly land tours and does not have exactly the best reputation for being upscale. And oh yes ... the previous boat they owned actually sank a few years ago in Antarctica. So I checked very carefully recent trip reports, and they were all quite positive. So I went for it.

And the results were everything I had hoped for. I should add that I had checked and while it would have been nice, I found they never land on the Continent itself south of the Circle.

This cruise starts in Ushuaia, Argentina. At Christmas one always expects airline disaster starting in my home town, so I left Dec. 14 and spent one day touring the Everglades in Florida, two days walking around Buenos Aires (and missing a large and violent anti-government demonstration by about three minutes), and a day and a half in Ushuaia, taking a boat tour on the Beagle Channel and a bus tour to the National Park, both quite nice. A night at the Albatros Hotel was included in the price. Its a perfectly nice hotel of the rather ordinary blah sort. On the morning of embarkation we left our bags in the hotel lobby so they could be moved to the ship. Embarkation was at 4 pm. The Albatros is on the same street as the port and the ship would have been a four minute walk, but apparently the port requires embarking passengers to be bussed in, so we did that, two busloads. It was very efficient; the actual boarding at the dock took about 15 second per passenger. All they did was check our name on a clipboard and up the ramp we walked.

My room was the cheapest cabin on the ship which turned out to be an advantage. It was right next to the Mud Room where one goes to get on kayaks or Zodiacs, which is convenient, and that room has the mud room on one side and a utility closet on the other, so one has no neighbors to get loud. It is also on the lowest passenger level and exactly midships, so the rocking in bad weather is vastly less than on the upper decks, especially at the bow. The downside is that there is a modest hum from the diesel generators and a very modest exhaust smell. The Expedition is a refurbished ferry formerly plying the Baltic, and is what is called ice class Ib (IaSuper being "almost icebreaker", Ia heavy ice, Ib modest ice (up to 2 feet), Ic being even lower rated, and “big ships” being class 3.) As such, the rooms are not luxury. They are nice with bunk beds, a small bathroom with shower (which gets the whole floor wet), and a desk. On the lower level they have portholes, the upper levels having small windows. The rooms were tended by the staff twice a day. My cabin was very roomy indeed for a single, but would have been very cramped with the max of three people. On this ship (and indeed almost any ship in Antarctica) no one does anything in the cabin except sleep and rarely read a book, since if an announcement occurs "humpback whales directly ahead" it would take too long to get up to the levels with deck access.

The ship has a large public room on the top cabin level which is used for meetings, talks, movies, etc. which holds all the passengers at once in swivel chairs at tables suitable for snacks. This room always had coffee, tea, and cookies available, and at times near meetings there is bar service. This room has windows all around with great views. Above it is the dining room, which also seats all passengers at once. It too has all-around glass. On the same level as the dining room, at the aft end, is a bar open in the evening. Above this level is the bridge, which is usually open for visitors, a small (very small) fitness room, and lots of open deck space. There is in fact open deck space all around on the top three decks, mostly open to passengers, but sometimes the parts on the sides of the ship require ducking ones head to get under fittings for lifeboats, etc. There are enough covered lifeboats for all passengers plus quite a bit, and enough rafts, etc. for all passengers and crew to get off using only one side of the ship, as best as I could tell. Considering the fate of the company's previous ship this is reassuring. All these public areas are nice, but not really upscale. Its not clear how much was remodeled when the ferry was converted. It is clear that the outside of the ship was merely repainted as areas show where the previous layer was chipped. And when wet it is very mildly slippery.

But the bottom line for the design for the ship, for its current purpose in Antarctica, is simply SUPERB. All that outside deck space, all around the ship, open bow to stern, allows all the passengers to get out on deck, on the same side, near where the wildlife action is, no matter where it is. The open deck areas bow and stern are each, by themselves, large enough for all the passengers.

About food: I am a real "foodie" and willing to pay (and pay I did, $180 for one meal at "La Bourgogne" in Buenos Aires, for a seven course dinner with wine) for the best. And even in my small town (Champiagn, IL) one can, on occasion, get really five star food. I was not expecting any of that, but rather solid two or three star food, and that's what it was. As expected, all "fresh" produce has to be trucked from Buenos Aires so its not fresh. Breakfast and lunch are buffet. Breakfast is standard American fare, eggs, bacon, etc. plus lots of semi-fresh fruit, canned fruit, cereal, pre-made pancakes, made to order waffles (poor), and lots and lots of sweet pastries, which were very very good and kept hot. Lunch had various "meat" things, as well as usually some pasta and Asian items, and salads, in great profusion, but only 25% changing from day to day. It was all Ok and good, but clearly nothing special. Dinner is sit down service. Two appetizers, two main courses, and two deserts were offered each day. Apparently vegetarians were offered special things. The main courses were varied, and were generally of a much higher quality than lunch, but most emphatically not gourmet in 2012 terms. They would have fit in perfectly in 1980 at a high scale catered banquet. Desserts at dinner were lackluster. Oh, did I mention, it was high calorie? It was.

About drink: wine and beer were offered with meals, and in the bars. I didn't have wine, just beer. The local beers were of, at best, maybe, "Sam Adams" quality, more often, Bud quality. The foreign beers offered were no better. Guiness Stout was considered the epitome of upper scale. (gag!) Beer was $4, mixed drinks, also lackluster, $6. Soft drinks were $2 (ouch!). The good news: there was no prohibition for BYOB (or BYO coke or pepsi) to be consumed in the rooms. There was was a corkage fee for BYO wine in the dining room. If you bought their wine bottle and didn't finish they would somehow save it; I didn't see how this worked. The bars were not always open. When they were not, you could carry your own drink up to the public areas and they didn't care. A hint: they didn't officially offer free ice except when the bars were open, but they didn't care if you snuck behind the counter and got some yourself. Also, if you had a suitable bag, you could chill drinks by hanging them off a railing just outside a door in the Antarctic's free icebox.

About “service”: Lots of reviews here make a big deal of “service”. For this cruise, with these passengers, it is a nonissue. Except in the dining room, there isn’t any (except room cleaning). After all, one night we had to build our own home (the tent). For dinner in the dining room, it was good but not absolutely perfect. Food orders were done 100% correctly and promptly, but sometimes drink orders were slow, especially at breakfast. For breakfast I gave up asking for a Coke (which is available then) and brought one from my cabin, cooling it outdoors first and getting ice from the bar.

Dress code: casual, very very casual. They provide rubber boots for shore excursions and, for this cruise only, due likely to the fact we paid extra for Christmas, they provide a quite nice (but heavy!) two-layer duck down parka for everybody, which we got to keep. I guess they paid perhaps $125 wholesale for this discontinued model ($500-700 retail for current models).

Laundry: they did laundry OK, but expensive.

Type clientele: People who really want to go to Antarctica. I don't know the actual counts, but it just felt like it was 45% USA/Canada and 45% Australia with 10% other, such as Japan and Croatia. Ages varied fairly smoothly from college students ("semester at sea") to old agers. Since its an "active shore visit" cruise, everybody, without exception, was very able-bodied indeed. Equal numbers of P&S and dSLR cameras with very long lenses, many white (for you who know what that means), were seen.

Lectures and entertainment: This being Antarctica, they had a seasoned Antarctic staff. The cruise director was "Julio" and he was very good. The penguin expert was Frank Todd who literally wrote the book. And while the others could not beat Frank, they were all excellent, really truly excellent. The key is that these folks were not "trained tour guides" they were real experts, and it showed. I'm a scientist and I can tell. One way is how often they say "we [sic] don't know" at the right time. Like "how do penguins sleep at sea?". There were lectures most days, and on days at sea only, two or three a day. All were very good. Every evening there was a recap of the days events and sightings, with pictures.

There is a small library with one bookcase of novels and two with a complete set of Lonely Planet for the whole world. Actual entertainment was sparse, with numerous showings of Antarctic-themed documentaries and the occasional regular move at night. Since this was a Christmas/New Year's cruise, there were events for those, with guest participation, like the penguin dress-up-alike contest. There was a singer in the bar most late evenings. Most of the passengers were not real party people, except some Aussies and the college agers.

Our Drake passages were uneventful, with mostly quiet seas. I did have a seasickness scare one evening, but taking one extra pill quickly fixed that permanently. We saw lots of birds and whales at sea. We didn't have much of the sun shining, except the last day, but never had bad weather.

Our first encounter with land was our Circle crossing. We were the first ship this season to make it, but didn't make a landing. Instead we did a Zodiac cruise and spent a good amount of time walking on sea ice and seeing seals there.

I'm not going to discuss every shore excursion, since these were the usual suspects for a cruise going this far south. They included Vernadsky Station, Petermann Island, Port Lockroy, Jougla Point, Waterboat Point, Cuverville Island, Deception Island, and Half Moon Island. There were also several Zodiac cruises. Some folks signed up for kayak trips instead of some landings and Zodiac cruises, but I did not as I wanted the most land time. Since this ship had more than 99 passengers (and fewer than 35 kayakers) we all could not be on land at one. We were divided into four groups, two of which were ashore at one time. These were staggered as to which was first and which went with which. Most landings were in the 1 1/2 to two hour area. The big question is, therefore, "was this enough"? Or would three hours, which could be done with a sub-100 passenger ship, be better? For most of the places we went, the answer is that longer would not have been better, since we saw all there was to see. Also, there are places where 100 people simply cannot physically fit, so one would need a 40 passenger ship to get all ashore at once. For a couple of places, especially Deception Island, I would have liked much longer. We didn't get to do any really long hikes, which was a downer. I had checked before signing up and had found that few, very few ships and fewer cruises offer things like actually climbing a (modest) mountain. And there were none that met my other requirements.

The camping was for me merely a “checklist item” but for lots of people it was the highlight of the trip, as they had never camped before. Lots of people stayed up sliding down a hill on the snow until well after midnight (and it was, of course, still light.)

We saw all the expected wildlife, and then some, including a lone Macaroni penguin, and a leucistic (white semi-albino) gentoo penguin, which I was able to photograph "flying" underwater. We also got our camping in, 60 people in 30 tents (!) near Port Lockroy. At the very end we got to within 2 kilometers of Cape Horn, which is unusual.

Our debarkation was trivial ... I just got off, picked up my luggage and put it on the proper bus, and headed for the airport.

Was this trip up to my expectations? Yes, absolutely, in every way. Could a cruise be better for me? Well, for me, the only thing better would be long hikes, like climbing a small mountain, and a longer cruise with fewer than say 60 passengers and more landings. Will I ever go back to Antarctica? No. But I will make it to South Georgia and the Falklands. Would I use this ship to do that? Probably not, as I will try for a much much smaller number of passengers. Is this the cruise for you? If you want what I did, absolutely yes.

Since there are no “Reviews” for this ship, I’ll give my rankings here, but add comments.

Dining: 3 (based on 5 for a first rate land restaurant)

Public Rooms: 4

Cabins: 3

Entertainment: Movies, live music, etc: 1 Nature talks: 5+

Spa and Fitness: 3

Shore Excursions: 5

Embarkation: 5

Service: 4

Value for money: 4

Overall: If I could give a separate overall impression, rather than an average, weighted for what matters, its a 5-.