What it’s like to set foot on the seventh continent

Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego – the southernmost city in the world

Past the South Shetland Islands the sea turns to ink and it looks as if the whole world has been converted to grayscale

The world turns hard past 60 degrees. hard and bloody freezing. A minute or two in the water and you’d be dead

A black-browed albatross shows off its aerial skills

The end of the world is a non-stop sensory overload that takes place against a backdrop of black mountains, white frosting and blue skies

L’Austral is a small, ice-hardened luxury cruiser. It’s not a boat, it’s a boutique hotel on water

Antarctica’s pristine bays are so impossibly calm they form mirrors in a seascape of icebergs and frozen forms that would have inspired Salvador Dali himself

Encounters with massive tabular icebergs more than a kilometre long are mind-boggling. This massive fresh water entity, broken off an ice shelf or a glacier and made up of hundreds of thousands of layers of compressed and melted pure snow could be a millennia old

Neko Harbour is a place of unsettling beauty where even the penguins take time out to contemplate life – and the fact that they’re within walking distance of the South Pole

A twice daily ritual of of changing from comfortable cabin fashion into fully waterproof, foul-weather gear and disembarking on a rubber duck (Zodiac for the brand-aware) is what an Antarctic cruise is all about. Marina staff warned us not to look up from the safety of our parka hoodies on the trip over rough surf but I couldn’t resist. We hit swell and the spray smashed into my unprotected face as if some insane bartender had slung a bucket of crushed ice at me from point blank range

Both on the cruiser and the regular Zodiac cruises, the charismatic and resident naturalists provide a grand mix of education and entertainment. On this particular occasion we were introduced to black ice – possibly thousands of years old and so dense it almost disappears in the dark sea water

There are only two flowering plants on Antarctica: a hair grass and something called pearlwort, that might as well be moss. Seriously, these two green growths represent the entire floral kingdom of Antarctica

There are six species of penguins in Antarctica, but none have the comical genius of the Adélies. These ones on Brown Bluff were part of a massive colony that was about to double in size – check out the egg

I challenge anyone not to fall in love with penguins

The penguins on Antarctica are a non-stop improve comedy show. They’ll take advantage of people highways in a wink and it’s weird to feel as if someone’s following you, turn around and discover a line of little, black and white men stumbling drunkenly in your footsteps

Some glaciers trap oxygen inside the ice and the reflected light is such an insanely electric blue you start to question your faculties