This cruise ship can go where other ships cannot

The emperor looks ignoble. In its defence, I have not come by appointment, but it’s hard to ignore the tattiness of the moulting bird. I am not complaining – I hadn’t expected to see them during the trip, much less up close and surrounded by other regents.

Ponant’s 28-day Between Two Continents itinerary aboard Le Commandant Charcot does not promise emperor penguins, in part because the route is so new that the expedition team does not know what to expect. I am on their first-ever sailing from Argentina to New Zealand, an ambitious route in lonely waters far from the increasingly hectic crowds swarming the Antarctic Peninsula.

Ponant’s Le Commandant Charcot can go where other ships cannot.

I have been coming to Antarctica for over a decade on ships of varying sizes and I have spent most of that time promoting it as my favourite place on the planet. That is still true, but it would be hypocritical of me to now complain that it’s getting too busy. With over 50 ships under flags from around the world crossing the Drake Passage each season, there’s a growing sense that the Peninsula is reaching something like capacity. In part spurred on by the busyness, and in part because they now have the most ice-capable passenger ship in the world, Ponant have started looking further afield.

“I think you book this trip if you’re really interested in Antarctica,” expedition leader Florence Kuypers tells me at one point. “I think the long trip is nice because people really unwind and understand that we can’t plan every moment. If you have a shorter trip, you want to try and squeeze everything in and people can get stressed – if you do a 10-day trip and have bad weather 80 per cent of the time, you’re happy to make any kind of excursion.”

In pushing further around the continent Ponant is not quite alone. As we sail ever west along the infinite Antarctic coast, we are more or less following two other ships operated by rival companies. Unlike them, however, our French ship can push through pack ice and into regions of seas typically only reached by military or scientific vessels. Meanwhile, the others must stay further out at sea, unable to see land, much less set foot on it. Put simply, Ponant’s Le Commandant Charcot can go where other ships cannot.

Human visitors are a rarity for the emperor penguin on Siple Island.

This includes Siple Island, which is where we find the emperors, perhaps two dozen or so, in various states of disrepair during what’s known as their catastrophic moult. We find them where we might expect, on fast ice, a few hundred metres from the coast. Captain Stanislas Devorsine wedged the ship into the ice overnight, meaning we could begin our hike to the penguins by simply walking down a gangway. Mount Siple, a volcano whose peak is estimated to be over 3000 metres, is so rarely visited that these birds won’t have ever seen humans before.

Back on board, the service is as slick as anything you’d find in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, and the menus at least as indulgent.

Restaurant Sila, Le Commandant Charcot’s buffet restaurant.

The full list of amenities and activities is too long to write here, but a typical day might include options to join a morning yoga class, learn how to make a French pastry, attend a lecture on Antarctic geology, have a late morning glass of champagne, attend lunch at the buffet restaurant (champagne optional), join an afternoon strength training class (if you aren’t too full of champagne), learn some origami, have some more French pastries on the observation deck, go to a themed afternoon tea (champagne again), try to stay awake for a lecture on pelagic seabirds, head to the bar for live music (where the magnums of champagne remain bottomless), then catch the day’s recap and briefing for the following day, before heading to the Alain Ducasse-designed fine dining restaurant on deck five, where walking in for the tasting menu without a glass of bubbles would be downright weird.

Despite the relentlessness of the excess there’s still a sense of adventure among the travellers. For the majority this is not their first time in Antarctica and the knowledge that the route would take them to places few others have ever been was a powerful motivator to book. Even with the extraordinary bragging rights, however, for our voyage the ship has fewer than 70 passengers, meaning its occupancy is around just 30 per cent.

Between excess is adventure.

There are strict rules about the number of people allowed ashore in Antarctica, with landings typically limited to three hours per ship with no more than 100 passengers on land at a time. Had we had 200, we’d have had to split every landing to comply, but the low occupancy means we can maximise every opportunity that comes along.

This will not typically happen during these mammoth expedition cruises (the one following ours has twice as many passengers) but we make the most of it on Sims Island with tens of thousands of Adelie penguins, at the little-explored Brownson Islands, and most triumphantly of all, at Captain Scott’s hut at Cape Evans, where the men of his disastrous Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole had lived in unimaginable hardship and misery from 1910-1913.

Captain Scott’s hut in which the men in his group lived in unimaginable hardship.

Another missing element that will come later is the hybrid fuel system, something which Ponant have touted loudly as an environmentally friendly (or at least less damaging) feature of their remarkable ship. Unfortunately, while the Charcot has the capability to run on liquefied natural gas, the bunkering facilities have not yet been developed in the Argentinian port of Ushuaia. Additionally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent the gas price into the stratosphere and the desire to develop transport around it in the opposite direction.

Captain Devorsine is disappointed not to have the alternative fuel at his disposal. Often found on the bridge working long hours, chewing an amount of gum I’d estimate to be the size of a golf ball, the captain is very public facing, personally making most of the announcements to passengers throughout the day, and happy to answer any queries on his decision-making.

When we speak in his office at the end of the month on board, he’s understandably happy with his work. His expert reading of the weather and command of the ice has seen us reach waters not sailed in by other ships in over a decade. We’ve seen 20-strong pods of orcas, the incredibly rare Ross seal, and penguins beyond count. It is his first time completing a semi-circumnavigation of the continent, too – his first time navigating the mighty Ross Ice Shelf, the ice around Mount Siple, and the haunted waters of the McMurdo Sound.

“One day I’d like to do a full circumnavigation,” he says when we speak in his office at the end of the cruise. Having spent over a decade working on icebreakers, he thinks it would be possible in three legs, with stops in Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa. “I hope so, but we will see. This ship can do it, for sure. If we needed to, we could keep going for weeks even now.”

The details

Cruise
The 2025-26 season for Le Commandant Charcot features two itineraries travelling to Charcot Island and the Bellingshausen Sea. In the wake of Jean Baptiste Charcot from $32,640 a person in a Prestige Stateroom; The Emperor Penguins of the Weddell Sea from $33,280 a person in a Prestige Stateroom. Ponant’s 2025-26 Antarctic season will include an almost full circumnavigation of the continent.

The writer travelled as a guest of Ponant.