Antarctica

The most accessible part of the Antarctic continent, the Peninsula stretches toward South America and concentrates the greatest diversity of Antarctic wildlife — chinstrap, gentoo, and Adélie penguins, leopard seals, crabeater seals, and humpback whales — in an extraordinary landscape of glaciers, ice-cliffs, and sea-ice. Zodiac landings among penguin colonies of tens of thousands of birds are the signature Antarctic experience.

The most biodiverse island in the Southern Ocean and a place of overwhelming, almost aggressive natural abundance, South Georgia hosts the world's largest populations of king penguins — 500,000 breeding pairs — alongside enormous fur seal and elephant seal colonies, and millions of nesting albatrosses. Salisbury Plain, where tens of thousands of king penguins stretch to the horizon, is widely considered the greatest wildlife spectacle on earth.

An 11-kilometer passage of near-perfect beauty where cliffs of ancient glaciers rise hundreds of meters from perfectly still, ice-filled water on both sides, the Lemaire Channel is the most photographed location in Antarctica. Passing through it on deck in the long summer light in midsummer — in the golden perpetual light of the Antarctic summer — is one of the most surreal and beautiful experiences in travel.

An active volcanic caldera — the sunken cone of a collapsed volcano — whose rim can be entered through a narrow gap called Neptune's Bellows, Deception Island contains geothermal hot springs on its black sand beaches where visitors can bathe in warm water surrounded by Antarctic scenery. The remnants of a Norwegian whaling station, abandoned in 1931, add a layer of industrial history to this extraordinary geological phenomenon.

One of the few places on the Antarctic continent where expedition ships can dock directly to land — as opposed to anchoring offshore — Paradise Bay is named for its extraordinary visual perfection: a protected anchorage surrounded by glaciers that calve house-sized icebergs directly into the bay. Argentine research station Brown sits on the rocky shore, and the bay's shelter makes it one of the most reliable places for calm Zodiac cruising.

The world's largest body of floating ice — the size of France — and the primary gateway to the South Pole, the Ross Ice Shelf's towering white cliff face rising 50 meters from the sea was the first sight that greeted Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton. Expedition voyages to the Ross Sea, operating from New Zealand, visit sites including Cape Evans, Cape Royds, and the preserved huts of the heroic era expeditions, left almost unchanged since 1912.