--- type: Country title: Antarctica description: The continent nobody owns — three days across the Drake Passage to reach it, no fishing or whaling allowed, 5-metre rules around the penguins, and boots disinfected between every landing. tags: [antarctica, antarctic-treaty, expedition-cruise, wildlife, penguins, drake-passage, science] timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z --- # Antarctica *Obs: Antarctica is not a country and Harry says so on camera — it is a continent that no state owns. It has a page in this section because that is where country-level observations live in this bundle, not because the bundle thinks otherwise.* Harry's only visit is a ten-to-twelve-day expedition out of [Ushuaia](/places/ushuaia.md) in [Argentina](/countries/argentina.md), with seven days south of the Drake Passage. He calls it the most memorable trip of his life. His framing in the first thirty seconds: swimming in the coldest water on earth, sleeping on ice, crossing the roughest ocean on the planet — and none of that is the hard part. **The hard part is getting there.** ## The Antarctic Treaty The rules are the reason the place is still what it is, and Harry spends real time on them. - **No country owns Antarctica.** Over fifty countries agree under the treaty to protect it and leave it alone. - **No whaling and no fishing.** He notes that if he caught a fish while camping he would technically be breaking the law. - **No approaching the wildlife.** Five metres from penguins, and never touching one — contact damages their skin. - **Boots are disinfected** in a chemical bath between landings, to stop anything being carried from one site to another. Its history is the argument for all of it. **Nathaniel Palmer**, an American sealer, is credited with the first sighting around 1820 — Harry notes the claim is contested — and he was there to kill seals and sell the fur to China. **Over 500,000 seals** were killed in Antarctic waters. What is now one of the last genuinely protected places on earth is protected because of what happened when it wasn't. ## Getting there - **Ushuaia is the departure port**, and the crossing is the Drake Passage: the most dangerous stretch of sea in the world, because several oceans meet with no land anywhere to break them. - **Two names for what you get.** The *Drake Shake* is the bad version; the *Drake Lake* is flat water. Which one you get is luck. - **Normally two days. Harry's took three** — the captain held the ship stationary for a night to let a storm through, and the whole itinerary shifted by a day. Winds were forecast at up to 60 knots. - **Take the seasickness tablets before you need them.** Harry did and was fine; the trade-off is drowsiness. Cameron took five separate naps in one day and was ill anyway. - **Ship size decides what you can do.** Harry's carried about 100 passengers, and small ships are the ones permitted to land people on the ice. Going all that way on a big ship and not setting foot on the continent would, he says, be the thing to avoid. ## On board - **Better than expected throughout**: twin cabins, a proper shower, a free minibar, wi-fi the whole way to Antarctica, a gym and a sauna. - **Two jackets are provided**, along with thermals and an information pack on the wildlife. - **Four scientists travel with the ship** on Harry's expedition, giving talks on the science and the environment. Others are working on the islands, separately from the tourists — one team is **counting the penguins by drone**, with over 9,000 in a single colony. - **The crew are largely Filipino and Indonesian.** Contracts run eight months with two months off; the season runs roughly mid-October to late March. One bartender has made about **60 crossings since 2021**. They sometimes get ashore themselves, and for some of them this is their first season too. - **Passengers were mostly American**, with Chinese, Canadian, British and Australian travellers among them. One Chinese passenger's reason for coming is the best line in the video: **Antarctica is the farthest place in the world from China.** - **A lot of it is booked late.** Harry assumed everyone had planned for years, and found younger passengers who booked one to three weeks in advance. - **Life on board is a cruise, not an expedition camp**: a couple got married in Antarctica during the voyage, there was a karaoke night, a birthday, and a barbecue served outdoors with icebergs behind it. ## Conditions - **You get more time ashore than you'd think** — at least two and a half hours per landing, and usually two landings a day, weather permitting. - **The weather changes in an instant** and the forecast is not a promise. Harry is blunt that if it turned, he would do exactly what the guides told him. - **The sun sets around midnight and rises around 4am**, leaving about four hours of darkness. He got sunburnt and was applying sun cream at 9pm. - **Water is the one thing that isn't a problem.** You can eat the snow. Harry says it is as fresh as water gets anywhere in the world. ## Shackleton The story Harry stops the video for, because it is the one everybody thinks of. Ernest Shackleton set out in 1914 to be first to cross Antarctica on foot; his ship, the *Endurance*, was trapped in the ice. He and his crew survived roughly two years. Shackleton eventually crossed to South Georgia, near the Falklands, **with no map**, got help, went back, and got his men off. Harry's reading is that surviving two years anywhere remote is unbelievable, and that doing it here is another category. ## Places - [Deception Island](/places/deception-island.md) - [Antarctic Peninsula](/places/antarctic-peninsula.md) - [Ushuaia](/places/ushuaia.md) — the port you leave from *Obs: the video carries a card sponsor and links the expedition company, camera and eSIM brands in the description. Harry says the trip is hard and expensive to do and does not say it was free; these pages record what the expedition involves, not the recommendations.* ## Source - [My First Time in Antarctica (10 Day Expedition) 🇦🇶](/videos/dbOpaM25K8k.md) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbOpaM25K8k