I sailed to Earth's lonely end where rare penguins toboggan on ice sheets

The Antarctic explorers could not have imagined life aboard a luxury cruise ship.

Our ship gives a shudder as it noses into the thick sheet of ice separating us from the frozen continent somewhere out in the distance, all concealed in white. We've come as far south as a ship can take us and we are, at this moment, among the few hundred southernmost people on the planet.

A zodiac ferries us the short distance from the stern to the ice, which will soon claim back the Ross Sea, hour by hour, day by day. It's still February but, yes, winter is coming.

The temperature out here is minus 21, but the wind is howling at us from the continent's interior, making it feel like minus 35. "Feels like" takes on new meaning here.

We step onto the ice and an expedition leader shouts safety instructions over the wind, like an extremely urgent flight attendant. If we find ourselves on the wrong side of a crack and suddenly adrift, we must stay in the middle of the floe. Someone will quickly fetch us, she assures us, but we do not want to be wet today. "Now go and enjoy yourselves, this is something very special," she finishes with a clap of her gloved hands.

Very special? C'mon, let's dial up the superlatives a bit. This is incredibly, outrageously, ridiculously special.

Over there, just a few metres away from us are standing about 70 emperor penguins. Emperors! These stunning creatures are not only emblematic of this place, they're enigmatic enough that we've been told we'll be lucky to see any at all.

Across the animal kingdom emperors are the very definition of endurance, living their lives on ice sheets like this one with no protection from the planet's worst conditions, save their own huddling together when the wind really blasts. They keep their precious eggs safe from the ice nestled up on their feet, incubating them under their bellies through the long, dark Antarctic winters.

And here we are living this David Attenborough moment in their presence. Look, they're bowing to each other, that ritual of their search for a mate. Here come more of them, tobogganing in on their bellies, pressing their beaks into the ice to help them stand up.

The naturalists with us are giddy at the sheer size of this gathering. We've all come a damn long way but this is dream-fulfilling stuff.

In these temperatures we drain our camera batteries quickly. When my first one dies, I take off my outer pair of ski gloves, one of three layers I'm wearing, and reach deep into my jacket for the spare I've been keeping warm in there like it's my own little egg. Within seconds my fingers start throbbing with pain like needles. I fumble with the camera haplessly; a task that should take a few seconds takes painful, frustrating minutes.

And here, at a latitude of 77'52 South, with the sun a low ball on the horizon obscured by a haze of wind-whipped snow, my thoughts turn from the penguins to Shackleton and Scott, and all the men they brought down to this otherworldly place a little over a century ago.

If I can barely withstand a couple of minutes fumbling about with a camera, still wearing two sets of gloves and hand warmers, how the hell did they manage to put up tents, light stoves, make navigational readings and do every other fiddly task needed to survive in conditions incompatible with all but the hardiest forms of life?

How did they find it within themselves to strap on heavy sledges, lean forward into the shrieking winds and march thousands of kilometres towards new discoveries, and for some of them towards their deaths?

Hundreds of cruise-ship visits have been made to Antarctica over the summer months, virtually all going to the jagged peninsula, which reaches up to almost touch the tip of South America like the fingers of the Creation of Adam.

That 1000-kilometre journey south from Chile across the Drake Passage is infamously rough, but it's quick. Most peninsula tourism happens outside the Antarctic circle, the area from 66 degrees south where at least one day a year the sun will not set or will not rise.

But we are going far deeper south than that, to the very bottom of the Ross Sea, to a more extreme and rarely visited Antarctica. This is the Antarctica of Ernest Shackleton, who came within 100 miles of the South Pole before choosing survival over glory and death. It's the Antarctica of Robert Falcon Scott, who made it to the Pole but was beaten there by wily Norwegian Roald Amundsen.

It will take us the best part of a week from leaving New Zealand just to reach Antarctic waters, via remote islands and through an ocean we share with humpbacks, orcas and fin whales. In all, we will have sailed 8500 kilometres by the time we return to port in Dunedin.

The pay-off for the early explorers in taking this very long way down was being able to land near a mammoth ice shelf, known to them as The Great Barrier. The size of France, with an 800-kilometre face of 15-50-metre cliffs rising from the sea, it is a giant welcome mat that, once crossed, would put an exploration party closer to the South Pole than anywhere else on the continent. But closer is relative. Scott and Amundsen's overland journeys from base hut to Pole were roughly 1500 kilometres. That's about Sydney to Adelaide.

While Amundsen used dogs to claim first rights to the Pole, the British way was mostly on foot, "man-hauling" heavy sledges past crevasses and pressure ridges of the Barrier, up the vast Beardmore Glacier, before slogging across the plateau, a cap of ice so deep it buries entire mountain ranges and renders the South Pole and hundreds of kilometres in every direction bleak and featureless.

Exploration teams would need every bit of time, supplies and luck to get the job done and return to their base camps before the bitter cold of March turned deadly.

Amundsen managed it. Scott did not. He and four of his companions died on the return journey, dejected, exhausted and starving. All five of them are still out there to this day, buried somewhere in the immense, lonely white.

"Whatever merit there may be in going to the Antarctic, once there you must not credit yourself for being there ... it is just the most comfortable thing and the easiest thing to do under the circumstances."

This was Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of Scott's team, describing the comforts of their hut at Cape Evans in his book The Worst Journey in the World.

Cherry-Garrard couldn't have imagined life aboard Le Soleal, the Ponant ship taking us on our 21-night journey. We're seeking to understand the men of what's known as the Heroic Age of Exploration. But we have to be honest; we are in what could be called the Age of Opulent Tourism.

Ponant is a luxury cruise company, which takes passengers on expedition trips in style, and at a hefty price. Le Soleal is a small ship, as all ships that want to land people in Antarctica must be, and on this cruise we are among only 155 guests, outnumbered by the 169 uniformly cheerful and attentive crew.

Our sea days are filled with pleasant diversions. Some mornings we use the exercise bikes, set up to look out at the sea, petrels and giant albatrosses gliding past as we raise a sweat. A massage in the spa is a delightful way to relax in the afternoon. When we come in from the cold of a zodiac excursion, or amuse ourselves and other guests with a dip in the outdoor pool when the air temp is minus 15, we warm back up in a steam room. And boy, do we eat and eat well. That big French flag flapping from the stern really means something.

We are upgraded to a stylishly appointed suite, a slight sore point with some of our new friends aboard, given we're guests of the company and they've sold a kidney to be here. But we earn some forgiveness with the odd late-night invitation to the suite for a nightcap.

"We" is me and a friend of 30 years, Mick, who jumped at the chance to join the trip when my wife could not. Mick's the sort of adventurous soul who would have thrown his hand up to join a polar expedition 110 years ago without a second thought, just like Irishman Tom Crean, who joined Scott's Discovery expedition at the last minute when another sailor punched an officer and deserted. (We have no such issues with Le Soleal's officers, who join us some nights at the bar for a brandy or two.)

Mick makes for good company and he joins me in a bit of explorer cosplay, intended to connect us just a little with their intrepid spirit. We pack pipes to smoke, pondering the Southern Ocean late at night over glowing bowls of tobacco as if we were Crean. We eat wedges of lemon with breakfast to ward off scurvy, the curse of the polar explorer. I try to grow an Antarctic beard, imagining it icing up in a blizzard. I abjectly fail, but like Amundsen to my Scott, Mick succeeds easily.

Aboard we make friends with couples and also solo travellers up for a chat or a game of cards. Some have booked early and avoided having to pay a single supplement (one reason why some are so loyal to this cruise line). A few solo travellers have partners back home who had wanted no part of rough seas or learning what minus 35 feels like.

It becomes clear to us that travelling deep into Shackleton and Scott's Antarctica is no ordinary holiday. For many we meet, it's about realising a long-held dream, expense be damned. No cost nor ambivalent spouse was going to hold them back from the call of the white continent.

My own Antarctic dreams are fed by the epic stories of polar exploration early last century, when planting a flag at the South Pole was akin to reaching the moon. To me they seem Tolkienesque. Journeys over thousands of kilometres, over vast mountains and glaciers riddled with hidden, seemingly bottomless crevasses. Stories of devotion and self-sacrifice, of misadventure and very consequential human failings. Some stories end in heroic survival and salvation, others in tragedy.

During the first days of our long journey south I find myself in a comfy chair in the forward observation lounge reading Shackleton's Polar Journeys. It's a hefty hardcover given to me by my wife two decades ago and I'd never imagined I'd be reading it on a ship heading at full speed in the imagined wake of Shackleton's Nimrod. As our ship crests the waves, I read his description of the raw power of a southern storm, how his ship "rose bravely, riding over the seemingly overwhelming mass, steadied for a moment on the other side as it passed on, seething and white, baffled of its prey". Scott's Terra Nova journey was even more fraught, his overladen ship coming perilously close to sinking in 10-metre-high waves, saved only by the frantic bailing efforts of the crew.

Le Soleal has heft and stabilisers neither of those repurposed whaling ships did. More importantly, it has the advantage of weather reports and satellite imagery to guide our way. Over our week-long journey south via the Macquarie and Auckland islands, our youthful captain, Pierre-Marie Ducournau, regularly adjusts course to avoid the angriest purple of the weather maps he shows to us in nightly briefings. Being taken into his thinking and decisions gives the cruise an unexpected dynamic feel.

In the bar one night, demonstrating an easy rapport between passengers and crew, the captain explains to me the need for almost constant course correction.

The ship can handle just about anything the sea can throw at her, he says. But the passengers, well, they cannot.

You soon give up expecting to see land or ships or any form of human presence on a journey like this. A ship-locator app confirms we are hundreds of kilometres in isolation for almost all of the three weeks.

Yet we're never lonely. The birds make sure of that. They are always with us, circling, trailing, swooping so close to the waves it's a surprise they don't take a dunk.

I have no doubt they would have remained "grey birds of passing interest" to me if not for a young couple, Lachie and Sabrina, who are part of the team of naturalists. On one of the first days they deliver a lecture in the theatre about the variety of albatrosses, petrels, prions and terns we'll see on our way south. We're encouraged to download an app to track our sightings and warned of the slippery slope from bird-watcher, to birder, to full-blown twitcher. With all the enthusiasm for wildlife of an Irwin, their sweet bird-nerd passion is infectious. We start to see grey birds quite differently.

The scope of expertise in our naturalist team is a happy surprise. Not having taken an expedition cruise before, I hadn't expected we'd have more than the two advertised experts aboard. It turns out we have 20, including experts on penguins and albatrosses and life under the ice. Antarctic veterans who have looked down into the volcanic heart of Mt Erebus. Historians who know everything there is to know about polar exploration. There's a botanist and a ranger who helped eradicate feral cats from Macquarie Island. Even the Kiwi government observer John Taylor, ostensibly with us to ensure the ship complies with strict biosecurity rules at each landing, shares his hands-on experience in restoring the historic Antarctic huts. Over the three weeks this group delivers almost 60 lectures, many deeply impressing on us the ways a changing climate is fast threatening the species and places they love and that we all depend on.

Given the many sea days of the journey, these lectures give shape to our days and deeply enrich our understanding of where we are and what we see and why it is so precious.

It's like being back at uni, without having to take notes and where dozing in class is permitted.

The physical change of water from liquid to solid is the defining feature of life in Antarctica. It dictates everything. We see it all around our ship as we glide into the smooth Ross Sea. Patches of the surface water take on an oily look in the soft, almost eternal daylight. We see belts of pancake ice forming, small discs floating in a freezing slush, colliding with each other in their evolution towards solid sea ice. The underside of that ice will provide a home for microorganisms, which in turn will provide food for masses of tiny crustaceans called krill, which becomes food for fish and ... well, you know the rest.

Ice is the foundation of the whole show and it was the great dramatic force of the Heroic Age.

Ice blocked landings at pre-supposed ideal locations. Ice trapped one of the earliest ships to head here, Belgica, forcing its crew (including a young Roald Amundsen) to become the first people to over-winter in Antarctica. Those poor souls almost went mad in the dark.

Ice foiled rescue missions. It stranded exploratory parties, forcing them to live like troglodytes in ice caves or travel hundreds of kilometres to rendezvous with their ships. Most famously it trapped the Endurance "like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar", setting off one of the greatest stories of human survival known to us.

Ice will define our trip too and give us the first true insight into what it must have felt like to explore in these parts.

Fast-moving sea ice forces us to abandon our plans to set foot at the first Antarctic land we sight at Cape Adare, so instead we cruise through an alley of giant, grounded icebergs (expedition touring in Antarctica is inherently a game of jeopardy and compromise).

Our plans to land at the Possession Islands, just inside the Ross Sea, are similarly delayed the next morning. But if we can't go through the pack ice, we can at least go into it. So the crew lowers the zodiacs and we head out into the maelstrom. Our driver Kyle uses his towering height to help chart our course, as we wend between the biggest chunks or nudge smaller ones out of the way. The entire ice field rises and falls with the swell (the rubbish compactor scene in Star Wars coming to mind). We hit dead ends and turn around and find another way through the maze. We feel safe, always, but we also feel how consequential it would be to stay in one place for too long.

"What the ice gets, the ice keeps," Shackleton wrote of the grip it took on his Endurance before crushing it and sending it to the bottom of the Weddell Sea.

We too are made small and humble amid this unstoppable force.

"Let's get out of here", Kyle says. He revs the outboard and we make our escape.

I feel some tightening in my chest, and it's not a result of my twice-daily visits to the patisserie-laden dessert bar. It happens the moment the clouds clear to reveal the trans-Antarctic mountains, giant and jagged and glowing a vivid white in the distance. I realise I'm having a physical reaction to what is surely one of the most magnificent vistas on the planet. Yes, it's achingly beautiful.

I rush to my room to grab my camera, chiding myself for leaving it behind. But I needn't worry that I'll miss the moment. This is a glow that lasts for hours and hours, at a time of year when the sun barely sets. I take my photos but then I take my time. You have to let your eyes (and, dare I say, your soul) absorb this place. Allow yourself to be moved by it. Because soon you'll be gone from here and the memories will feel distant and surreal.

Scott seemed taken by this type of feeling when he surveyed the view from Cape Evans, where he built his hut for his 1911-12 South Pole expedition.

"The golden light of this wonderful scene of mountain and ice satisfies every claim of scenic magnificence. No words of mine can convey the impressiveness of the wonderful panorama displayed to our eyes." I'm glad to hear he was as stumped at describing it as I am.

Emotions take hold again a few hours later as we cruise along the face of the mighty Ross Ice Shelf and Ross Island, the sun gold behind Mount Terror and the still-active Mount Erebus. Two passengers separately tell me they've shed tears looking out at this scene.

The ice shelf, popping bright white in the sun, is the product of the relentless flow of glaciers, pushing ever outwards from the continent's interior. The icebergs we first encountered hundreds of kilometres and a few days earlier were calved off this shelf, beginning their slow, drifting journeys towards melted oblivion.

Looking across the interminable plateau I imagine Scott and his final companions, Birdie Bowers and Edward Wilson, who were found in their tent, along with their diaries, eight months after their deaths. A memorial cairn topped with a cross was built around them, but it was soon obliterated by the winds and burying snow.

They're out there still, the three of them. And one day they'll reach the face of the ice shelf, calve off within an iceberg and make their final journey. A sailor's burial at long last.

I've been in plenty of historically important places. Some move you with their grandeur or their antiquity. For me, experiencing the intimacy of Scott's hut at Cape Evans, the morning after we encounter the almost unfathomable ice shelf, will forever rank among my favourite travel moments.

It is so moving and quite hard to absorb in the small amount of time the strict visitation rules allow us in there. A member of the expedition team assures me it will take days to process the experience, and I don't doubt it for a second.

But wait, there's more. No sooner are we back aboard our ship, an announcement is made that we're going to attempt a landing at Shackleton's hut that afternoon. For the many Shackleton admirers on board, it's the announcement they've been waiting for. Seeing emperor penguins is rare, but so too is making the treacherous landing to reach the Nimrod expedition hut. There is much to say about that visit (and if the editor allows it, another story) but having travelled so far, having spent days now in this alien environment, having pondered the vastness of the ice shelf and tried to imagine what lies beyond, it exceeds any expectations.

Three weeks pass, the last spent mainly at sea, with two sub-Antarctic island stops on the way home and a thrilling encounter with a pod of right whales, a species slowly fighting its way back from the brink of extinction.

On our final day we gently work our way down the pretty inlet that connects the ocean to the port of Dunedin, the same narrow passage Scott's ship took in its last contact with the outside world in 1910. Passengers gather on the front deck, basking in the warm sun, recalling favourite memories, reflecting on this mighty privilege.

We dock, farewell the crew and our friends, and I make my way to Dunedin airport and the humdrum of passengers and expedition staff scattering their many ways. Even the captain is jumping on a plane, leaving his replacement to take Le Soleal up into the warmer Pacific waters.

I join historian Gerard Baker at a table as he waits for his flight and I ask the Antarctic veteran about returning to the ordinary world with eyes that have seen the frozen south.

We talk of the men of the Heroic Age, who, once home, seemed forever restless, forever yearning to return. It was the ice that always called them back, Gerard says, telling me how Shackleton's trusty companion Frank Wild often spoke of the "little voices" of the ice beseeching his return.

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It's far too pretentious for a tourist like me to try and relate what I'm feeling to that deep, haunting connection.

The truth is, it all happened so quickly. We merely got to look through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia.

But then Gerard shares another story of the end of his first trip to Antarctica, as he sat beside a friend on the flight out towards home.

"She said to me 'I'd hate to think I could never go back'," he says softly.

"And every time I leave, those words ring in my head: I'd hate to think I could never go back."

Yes, that's it.

That's how I feel too.

THE SHIP: Ponant's Le Soleal

THE SIZE: 142 metres long, 132 staterooms and suites, 264 guests

GOOD TO KNOW: Le Soleal is one of four Ponant sister ships (Le Lyrial, Le Boreal, L'Austral) that visit the Arctic and Antarctica. Ponant's expedition flagship is icebreaker Le Commandant Charcot.

GET ON BOARD: Spend 21 nights on Scott & Shackleton's Antarctic Ross Sea Expedition from $35,730 per person. Dunedin-return cruises that are currently scheduled depart on January 26 and February 16 in 2025, and January 26 in 2026.

EXPLORE MORE: au.ponant.com

The writer was a guest of Ponant.