Intelligent Travel

Tour Guide: See Antarctica in 12 Hours?

Want a quick way to check the seventh continent off your must-see list? An Australian company offers a 12-hour sightseeing flights of Antarctica. Since 1994, Croydon Travel (in conjunction with Qantas) has been taking tourists on air tours of the icy South Pole. During the flight (three hours getting to the ice, four hours over the ice, and the remaining time returning to departure cities Melbourne or Sydney), Antarctic experts talk about the history and environment of the continent and answer passenger questions. The price? Seats start at $999 each. That's a lot cheaper than any cruise to the area. But of course, there are catches.

Like any large aircraft, there are middle seats. While passengers on this Qantas 747-400 are assigned two seats—people in most of the cabins will get to rotate during the flight to give everyone a chance at a window seat—those paying $999 only pay for a middle seat and do not get to participate in the seating rotation. During the time over the ice, all passengers are allowed to get up to look out the windows, but, if you're like me, if I'm paying $999 for a view of the Antarctic, I don't want to miss a minute of it. The next type of seat offered (Economy Class Standard) goes for $1399. Ouch. And that doesn't even factor in the amount of C02 you're pumping out into the atmosphere as you're on board the flight. Conservation International's carbon offset calculator estimates you're responsible for 3.1 tons of C02 for the flight.

Eh. I'm with Gadling on this one. For a couple grand (plus the cost of a flight to Australia), I'd much rather save the money to take a sustainably-minded cruise instead. 

Photo: courtesy Croydon Travel

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On Board the National Geographic Explorer

"What other magazine has a navy?" asked Marilyn excitedly as we pulled up alongside the great blue hull of of the National Geographic Explorer, which was docked in the Alexandria, VA harbor last week. The recently refurbished expedition vessel, working in partnership with Lindblad Expeditions, is on its maiden voyage down to the Antarctic. Working together, Lindblad and National Geographic are aiming to inspire people to care about (and explore) the planet. But thankfully, doing so doesn't mean having to sacrifice your sense of style. 

The Explorer accomodates 148 guests in tastefully-designed cabins, but that's pretty much where the line gets drawn in terms of the cruise comparisons. Lindblad is committed to sustainable travel, and as you'd expect from National Geographic, the equipment on board is state of the art, meaning that you can hang out on the captain's bridge or watch video footage from the ocean's depths shot day-of from the Remote Operated Vehicle (a high-tech piece of equipment that our tour guide and marine mammal expert said make all of her colleagues insanely jealous). Food is sourced from local purveyors along the voyage, and the chef's presentation made us hungry. Marilyn and I considered becoming stowaways when we saw the observation lounge, a glass-enclosed library on the top deck that was perfect for both reading and stargazing. Take a peek at the photos we snapped while on the tour, and you may be thinking of stowing away yourself.*

*You can, of course, go on board as an upstanding member of society by booking at the Lindblad website.

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Speaking with Stephen Schneider

While attending the Rothbury Music Festival earlier this month, IT editor Janelle Nanos sat down with Dr. Stephen Schneider, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning climatologist who was running the Think Tank sessions at the festival. Schneider has been talking about climate change since the '70s, he's won the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and has served as an environmental consultant to six presidents. And now that seemingly everyone is (finally) talking "green," he was just as much a rock star at the festival as the actual rock stars on stage. Nanos spoke with Schneider about hybrid cars, celebrity compost, and how climate change can result in a cultural crisis.

I imagine you often speak at universities and other more formal situations, so this must be a different scene for you. Are you enjoying the concert to far?

I haven’t been to a music festival since I went to hear Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the '60s, it’s a completely different scene. But they're uniting different groups who have never talked to each other. They’ve decided to add a think tank with serious scientists, business leaders, technologists, and media, to talk about stewardship. And then they're bringing musical acts up on stage to play a few songs, and then we interview them and we get their feelings on the issues.

By getting people together and bringing disparate crowds that wouldn’t normally talk to each other you allow the building of a coalition. And coalitions are what makes politics, and politics is what makes rules, and rules make it possible to solve problems like climate change. They don’t solve themselves.

How has the crowd been responding to the think tank sessions?

I’ve been thrilled at the response of the crowd. I don’t usually give talks where people whoop and holler and have a good time. I can see why these rock stars like to go up there and play. For me it's usually the nerds talking to the nerds. It was fun to follow up Michael Franti (of Spearhead), so I changed my line to get people engaged and then got back into some more serious stuff. That was really cool, I really enjoyed doing that, it was fun.

But what’s really important is the networking that’s been going on. Michael Kang—used to play with the String Cheese Incident—now plays with Pangea. He was on a panel with me, and I learned that he had taken courses at Berkeley at the Energy and Resources Group, so he really understands this stuff. Having him in the front of the room while we’re having a serious discussion about stewardship and ecological threats makes the audience say, "My god, this rock guy, he knows his stuff." It makes it more important in their brains. That’s what’s making a difference in the world. Sure it’s very nice to get us together, to change consciousness while we’re here. But what really matters is networking people who are connected. So now we’re getting people connected. I view that as my most important function.

Have you had a chance to actually see any of your rock star panelists perform? 

Yesterday I was in the tent with a bunch of rock stars who I’ve never heard of and I wouldn’t recognize if I tripped on them. I’m the worst gaper on the planet, I don’t know any of these guys. Give me Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, I know every phrase of every song they’ve ever written. But not this group. But it’s great to watch. And these guys, who are pretty self-inflated in some cases, they’re all sorting out their garbage into compost. And they’re doing it alone, they’re not having their underlings do it. That’s important. That says that nobody is above nature. And I thought that was a terrific symbol I was watching in that tent. There were no stars in there, it was everybody doing their thing. You sit there and watch Snoop Dogg compost and that’s pretty good.

Antarctica's White Noise

During college, I spent a couple of sun-blistered summers as a camp counselor in eastern Iowa. One of my all-time favorite things to do while leading hikes was to tell my charge of campers to cozy up to a cave and listen carefully. As they snuggled with the limestone, looking expectantly, I'd say, "Hear that?" They usually burrowed a bit deeper, with me standing by, encouraging. Just as a confused and defeated expression shadowed their faces, I'd explain: "Nothing! It's the sound of nothing!"

Though the gimmick generally garnered nothing more than eye rolls and groans from my troop of hikers, the concept was rooted in something inherently special: Out there in the middle of nowhere, you really could appreciate the sounds of nature—which, more often than not, meant a blissful lack of noise. And I swear I can still remember the particular strain of white noise that emanated from those caves.

Scientists at the Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean understand this concept, and have bottled the sounds of the Antarctic for the world to appreciate with "an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape."

BLDGBLOG explains:

This "live stream" is recorded via hydrophones attached to "an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf." ...its purpose is "to record the underwater soundscape in the vicinity of the shelf ice edge over the duration of several years."

As BLDGBLOG points out, the Institute strangely reminds listeners that the live stream is not intended for entertainment, but rather for scientific research. Even so, the Antarctic's white noise beats the keyboard tap-tap-tapping from neighboring cubicles any day.

Photo: Dave Walsh

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Climate Change Voyeurism?

Now, we may not have had as many issues with the New York Times travel section's list of 53 Places to Go in 2008 as some of our peers, but the article that accompanied the piece,  which discussed trips for tourists "who want to see the effects of climate change for themselves" did seem to be a bit off. We at IT have had a lot of conversations about the paradox that exists when attempting to visit endangered places (as exemplified in the sinking of the Explorer last month), but something about this piece seemed less about experiencing a place and much more...voyeuristic. Check out this excerpt about trips to Greenland:

The most popular destination for Americans is the Ilulissat ice fjord, a 45-minute flight from Kangerlussuaq and the site of the fastest retreating glacier in the Northern Hemisphere. A few years ago, the fjord was 25 miles long, but the melting of the glacier has lengthened the fjord to 31 miles, a change that has made it one of Greenland’s most visible examples of climate change.

The fjord is full of icebergs, calving from the bordering mountains of ice, and cruises to see the ice crack and fall are popular.

Now, we try not to frame everything in the context of carbon offsets, and certainly don't promote reining in your travel to avoid contributing to global warming, but the piece does little to acknowledge the ways this newfound tourism is impacting the area – and helping to further the climate change along.  In fact, it goes on to quote Dennis Schmitt, an American explorer who discovered Greenland's Warming Island, and whose view on the subject is slightly depressing.

“People sense the Arctic is going to change,” he said. “There is something in human nature that likes to watch things die, a morbid curiosity of human beings."

Explorer Sinks, but Launches Debate

For a video about the rescue of the Explorer passengers, visit NG.com

The sinking of the cruise ship Explorer in Antarctic waters last week has lots of people talking about how tourism is changing in the region. Over 35,000 visitors now travel way way down south, five times the number who trekked down there fifteen years ago. They get there on ships that vary in size from the 100-passenger types like the Explorer, to the huge cruise liners which transport thousands of passengers.

But since Antarctica is still one of the last unclaimed territories (seven nations claim to control portions of the region) there's difficulty in regulating the size and safety standards of the vessels that pass through the waters. A treaty group has been established as a kind oversight government for the area, and according to the New York Times, they're increasingly aware of the potential pitfalls for the tourism industry. The Times reports:

[W]ith the rapid rise of ship tourism in Antarctica — perhaps the last major ungoverned territory on earth — the sinking was not unanticipated. Both the United States and Britain warned a conference of Antarctic treaty nations in May that the tourism situation in the region was a potential disaster in the making.

...While the rescue may have been a success, the consequences for the Antarctic’s fragile environment of having a submerged ship that is estimated to be holding 48,000 gallons of marine diesel fuel sitting off its coast are unclear.

And while the frontier nature of Antarctica is a large part of its tourist appeal, it also means that the region is a legal muddle. There are no obvious answers about who is responsible for dealing with any environmental damage the Explorer may cause or how methods can be created to prevent future sinkings.

“There’s been kind of an explosion of tourism in Antarctica,” said Jim Barnes, executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, an association of environmental organizations that participates in Antarctic treaty meetings. “Do we want this to become Disneyland or do we want some controls?”

IT's Directorial Debut

Here at National Geographic Traveler, going to lunch at the cafeteria can mean sitting next to a filmmaker just back from the Serengeti who's more than willing to regale us with their travel tales. But, while we're always up for a good story, we can get a little bit jealous from time to time. That's why we were pleased to see that the NG website now features a new Wildlife Filmmaker program, which lets us act on our directorial ambitions. You can edit clips and add music, sound effects, and captions to make short documentary films. As a result, we may have spent a little too much time "working" on our films this morning...

Send us your own filmmaker efforts and we'll have our readers vote on which one ranks best!

Tourism and the Big Melt

As soon as we saw March of the Penguins, a few of us began charting a course to the nearest coast of Antarctica to see the lil' waddlers. Having shed more than several tears over the baby penguins, you’d have thought we’d be organizing a new protection agency. Instead, we looked at cruise routes that offered ice walks and penguin peeping.

Good thing we wised up.

Tourism to the polar regions has grown significantly over the last decade. Some say that these folks aren't just visiting to dance with Mumble and Ramon from Happy Feet, but rather to witness the effects of global warming.

In "Tourism Threatens Antarctica," The London Times writer Oliver Tickell explains:

This year 33,000 people will visit the Antarctic region, up from about 7,400 a decade ago, according to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, which promotes responsible tourism practices.

Scaling the Ice Caps (While We Still Can)

Sure, we spend the majority of our time in our D.C. offices editing writers' and photographers' work from far-flung locales like Hue, Vietnam, and Boise, Idaho (hey, it's far-flung to us). But sometimes we get the assignments.

Take, for instance, Traveler senior photo editor Dan Westergren's upcoming expedition to the North Pole with Bernice Notenboom, one of our contributing editors. The expedition, led by veteran Doug Stoup, will include an international team of eight explorers. Starting on April 17, the group will trek over the frozen Arctic Ocean to the Geographic North Pole, GPS 89.999°N, i.e. the top of the world. To do it, they'll have to cross numerous pressure ridges and leads (open water), as well as fast-moving, drifting ice. Upon completion they will be flown back to their starting point at Ice Station Borneo and connect to their flight off the ice.

The group will be delivering live video updates via a satellite phone that can be seen here. There will be a new video every day of the expedition. Check National Geographic Traveler's index page for details.