W is for Wilderness

Karl Lagerfeld has said that if he can't get there by private jet, he doesn't want to go. So that's Antarctica off his list, since cruise ships are the only option, something that hasn't put off Mr Mars, of chocolate fame, chartering the 96-berth Explorer this spring.

For those who've done the world's private island resorts, who've clocked Java's rarest parrot but not the albatross, Antarctica remains the last great aspirational destination, an epiphany of such unutterable beauty to seduce even the travel weary.

'Antarctica is beyond fashion,' says Glen Donovan, tour operator to Jade Jagger and friends. It is an otherworldly place of silent, desolate whiteness, where glacial lips slink between bald and shadowless slopes, the only colour from cobalt icebergs and blue veins frozen deep inside towering ice cliffs. There's no Versace, no McDonald's, no polar bears (that's the Arctic, and a faux pas you will want to avoid). A wilderness twice the size of the US - unowned, uninhabited bar the odd lonely scientist - Antarctica remains one of the safest places in an uncertain world, a virginal space where the mobile phone blessedly ceases to work. Put simply, it is a place that makes you glad to be alive.

The Innuit, it has been said, like to get their end away. Despite their icy territory being at the other pole, it makes sense when you see Antarctica in all its seductive flesh. Ice has an uncanny sex appeal. It's not an issue of deprivation (at Antarctica's scientific research stations, women should avoid proffered tours of the greenhouse; the bearded scientists have been holed up for the past six months). Nor is there any deviant eroticism in bone-numbing cold. The effect is more peculiar, something to do with the landscape's raw energy and centuries of myth-making that conflate ice and romanticism. And, of course, there's that Antarctic pin-up, Shackleton, the 20th century's most enduring hero.

In the past ten years, Antarctica, the world's least-visited continent, has seen a 308 per cent increase in tourist arrivals. This has much to do with the fact that visitors no longer have to rough it in bunks and share cold showers. Boats are getting posher. For the upcoming austral summer, when the sun bobs above the horizon for a three-month day allowing ships to break through hairline cracks in the loosened pack, Explorer, already one of the best of the lot, is set to get the five-star makeover, replete with upholstered suites and Veuve Clicquot cellar.

Getting there, though, is no Concorde. There are two options: five days at sea, sailing from New Zealand, rolling in a Russian icebreaker; or two days via the Drake Passage, 500 miles of the world's angriest stretch of water, accessed via the horned tip of South America (this is the route Explorer takes, a double-hulled ship that is less efficient in pack but doesn't throw you out of bed). Snow falls horizontally. Force nine and up is not uncommon. You will get sick - sea legs or no - and, even in two weeks, barely get a degree south of the Antarctic Circle. In fact, cruise ships only nose the very tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It's bitter (cold is cold; degrees mean little). Chattering colonies of penguins hunker down out of the 200mph winds and seals cosy up like slugs. Out of the mist, icebergs emerge like ghosts. Ride a Zodiac powerboat deep into a crack and that intense spot of flaming blue will become the best travel porn money can buy. Even Mr Lagerfeld would have to cede private jet travel for a rush this good.

W is also for a Weekend at the North Pole

A-Z travel guide for 2002