Antarctic kicks

watching hundreds of icebergs join the first, speckling the ocean with twinkling white swirls.

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Our ship had made it to the shelter of the Antarctic Peninsula. Now the juddering waves were behind us, and the third night on board was peaceful. We woke to find a different world. One of mountains, ice shelves that stretch ominously past the horizon, and penguins.

The first sighting from our ship caused breakfasting guests to drop their hash browns and rush to the window in an excited gaggle.

This was swiftly followed by our inaugural trip off the ship, where cheers for those stepping foot onto the seventh continent for the first time had to be muffled so as not to disturb a colony of Gentoo penguins.

Like the Chinstraps and Adélies we also encountered, the knee-high aquatic birds are as abundant on the Peninsula as pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and just as fearless.

The lack of any predators make them curious fellows who humans must give right of way to as they slide tummies-down along penguin highways to the water, where their clumsy prat-falls are switched for supreme elegance.

The only competition for seeing them up close in their natural habitat came from the ship's glass-walled sauna, where the cold of the day's expeditions could be sweated out while watching penguins dance and the humpback breach in the waves below. The sauna would come in particularly handy after two once-in-a-lifetime experiences. The first was camping.

One evening a team of 30 jumper-swaddled guests were motored off the Fridtjof Nansen on to a spit of land where we pounded on waist-deep snow until it was compact enough to hold our two-person tents.