Compare Polar Cruises and Tours: Trips to Antarctica and the Arctic

The “ends of the Earth.” What could be more enticing for an adventure traveler than those four words?

With Adventure Collection, you can travel to the two extreme reaches of the planet that call to your daring heart — and which couldn’t be more different from each other. Whereas the Arctic is an ocean surrounded by continents, Antarctica is a continent surrounded by an ocean.

Nineteenth-century British poet Thomas Hood wrote in a work titled Ode to Captain Parry that the North Pole is “the peg on which the world is spun.” Explore this crucial tectonic support pin with a cruise aboard a tough-as-nails, Russian icebreaker. Reindeer, foxes, hares, lemmings, musk oxen, polar bears, seals, walruses, whales, wolves, and more than one hundred bird species inhabit this most northerly environment. Or plan an expedition to Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago above Norway and one of the most remote, wild realms anywhere. Dominated by rugged mountains, more than half the island is perpetually encased in ice. Here, massive glaciers flow in winding, frozen rivers to the sea. Just east of Svalbard, in the far north of Russia, is Franz Josef Land, an archipelago of 191 ice-covered islands. Discovered less than 150 years ago, this raw, Arctic landscape is visited by few people but home to Arctic foxes, beluga whales, polar bears, and walruses. And in the sub-Arctic lies the famous “Polar Bear Capital of the World”: the town of Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, where hundreds of polar bears amass every fall before the Hudson Bay freezes over.

At the opposite pole, in the distant southern reaches of the Earth, is the untamed island continent of Antarctica. This glittering land of icy mountains; immense, ancient glaciers; and gargantuan icebergs is familiar with thousands of whales, dolphins, seals, albatrosses, and penguins. Your Antarctic trip will allow you to not only get up close to the White Continent’s wildlife but its dramatic fjords, calving icebergs, mountains, and glaciers.

Where have legendary explorers — such as Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd, Edmund Hillary, William Parry, Robert Scott, and Ernest Shackleton — found adventure for centuries? At Earth’s ends. You will, too.