My First Time in Antarctica (10 Day Expedition) 🇦🇶

An hour-long expedition video, and the longest single piece in the bundle. Harry sails from Ushuaia at the bottom of Argentina with Cameron Mofid — the seventh continent for both of them — crosses the Drake Passage in a storm, and spends seven days in Antarctica.

The premise he sets out in the first thirty seconds is that none of the hard things are the hard thing: getting there is. A storm holds the ship stationary for a night and turns a two-day crossing into three.

The two landings that matter are Deception Island, an active volcano with almost no wildlife on it, and the Antarctic Peninsula — where he sleeps on the ice without a tent, walks through a colony of 9,000 gentoo penguins, and kayaks past sleeping whales in Charlotte Bay.

Obs: the video carries a card sponsor and links the expedition company, a camera brand and an eSIM in the description. Harry says the trip is hard and expensive to get to and does not say it was free. These pages record what the expedition involves.

Key moments

• [00:00] The premise — the coldest water, sleeping on ice, the roughest ocean — and that the hard part is getting there.
• [00:36] Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, three hours’ flight from Buenos Aires. Not much English spoken; very kind people.
• [01:09] The memorial to the Argentine soldiers of the Falklands War, which he stands in front of and declines to comment on at all.
• [01:43] The high street is expensive, and the shop selling counterfeit outdoor gear that nobody told him about.
• [02:23] Boarding at the southernmost port in the world.
• [02:55] Cameron, and the seventh continent for both of them.
• [03:29] About 100 passengers, deliberately — big ships aren’t permitted to land people on the ice.
• [04:03] Two jackets provided, and the Drake Passage explained: several oceans meeting with no land to stop them.
• [04:34] The Drake Shake and the Drake Lake, and seasickness tablets started immediately.
• [05:08] The cabin — twin beds, a proper shower, and better than he expected.
• [06:17] Wi-fi all the way to Antarctica; an information pack on the wildlife; and the sick bags, which he’d rather not think about.
• [07:28] The staff have huge experience — some have done over 100 trips — and are the source for the wildlife, science and climate content.
• [08:01] A gym, and a sauna, which he singles out.
• [08:34] The bar. A Filipino bartender who has made around 60 crossings since 2021.
• [09:05] Confirmation of a Drake Shake, and the ship held stationary overnight to let the storm pass. The trip is delayed a day.
• [10:44] Into the passage anyway the next morning. Winds forecast up to 60 knots, and everything on deck lashed down.
• [11:54] Crew from the Philippines and Indonesia, on their own first trip to Antarctica, and just as excited as the passengers.
• [13:31] A viewer on board recognises him.
• [14:01] A bridge tour and the captain.
• [14:44] Day three, out the back of the storm.
• [15:04] The first iceberg, and humpback whales he can’t film properly on a phone.
• [16:15] Cameron is ill and calls the passage unforgiving. Harry, who took the tablets and wasn’t sick, says it’s mental; Cameron notes the tablets make you drowsy and that he took five naps.
• [17:24] Crew contracts — around five months a season, October to late March, then home to the Philippines.
• [17:58] Land after three days: the South Shetland Islands, with research bases from Russia, Argentina, England and France, staffed year-round.
• [18:31] Penguins swimming beside the ship in their hundreds, humpbacks, seals.
• [19:37] Chinese passengers, and the best answer of the trip: Antarctica is the farthest place in the world from China.
• [20:47] Deception Island — an active volcano with a hidden entrance, erupted over a hundred times in recent centuries.
• [21:20] Nathaniel Palmer, credited with the first sighting around 1820, and a sealer. Over 500,000 seals killed for fur sold on to China. All of it illegal now.
• [22:28] The reality of the landing: little ice this late in the season, abandoned sealers’ huts, one solitary penguin, and a distinct eeriness. Plan B, because they arrived late, and taken gratefully.
• [22:59] Onto the Antarctic Peninsula, and camping.
• [23:37] Sun cream at 9pm, because the sun doesn’t set until midnight. He’s already burnt.
• [24:43] Snow or rock — wet or hard — and no third option.
• [26:30] No tents. Tents don’t keep you warm and no rain is forecast; the sleeping bag, bivvy and mat do the work.
• [27:02] Dig a flat area — which he admits should have come first.
• [28:34] Build a low wall against the wind.
• [30:22] The sun sets around midnight, up around 4am. Four hours of darkness.
• [30:54] His framing: a genuine test, but a touristy one, and he says so rather than pretending otherwise.
• [31:25] The rant — do uncomfortable things on purpose, it’s the kind of fun that isn’t fun at the time, you’ll appreciate the warm bed you stopped noticing, and he has never regretted one of them.
• [32:32] And the companion rule: never complain.
• [33:06] The camp toilet, number ones only, hands washed with snow.
• [33:41] The practical problem nobody mentions: after using it you can’t find your camp.
• [34:12] Water is free everywhere — you eat the snow. Fishing would technically break the Antarctic Treaty.
• [35:17] The weather can change in an instant, and his honest answer about what he’d do: exactly what the guides said.
• [36:58] Layers come off inside the sleeping bag, because the insulation works with body heat. About 0 to −1 °C, feeling like −5 in the wind.
• [38:01] 4:50am, packing up. He slept all right but kept waking convinced he’d rolled onto wet ice.
• [39:47] The gentoo colony — the largest population in the world.
• [40:19] Why the rules exist: no country owns Antarctica, it is a continent and not a country, and over fifty countries have agreed under the treaty to leave it alone. No whaling, no fishing.
• [40:52] Don’t touch the penguins — it damages their skin. Breeding season, and chicks identifiable by fur.
• [41:22] Parents alternate hunting and regurgitate for the chicks. One seal species hunts them and takes enormous numbers; about a 40% survival rate.
• [42:23] The five-metre rule, enforced by the guides.
• [42:58] Booking windows: he assumed years of planning and found people who booked one to three weeks out.
• [43:30] Penguins propose with pebbles, carry them up from the beach, get rejected, steal one from another nest, and try again. Typically monogamous.
• [44:34] The expedition leader on what the job is: chaos, and watching people change over the voyage.
• [45:05] Four scientists on board giving talks; others working on the island counting over 9,000 penguins by drone.
• [46:10] A couple’s wedding held in Antarctica, a karaoke night, and Cameron’s performance.
• [46:42] Kayaking — optional, and you sign up before the ship leaves.
• [47:19] Whales sleeping on the surface, a few minutes at a time with the blowhole clear.
• [48:25] Charlotte Bay: full of whales and almost nothing else. Whales are sensitive to sound, so the rule is quiet.
• [50:00] The guides’ knowledge, and that you turn up and everything is ready.
• [50:32] Crew contracts again — eight months on, two off.
• [51:16] The best view he has seen anywhere: ice, a mountain peak, glaciers audibly cracking.
• [51:46] Shackleton — the Endurance trapped in 1914, two years’ survival, the crossing to South Georgia with no map, and going back for the crew.
• [52:51] Water is never the problem here. The harshness is.
• [53:22] Penguin highways down to the ocean.
• [53:56] At least two and a half hours per landing, twice a day weather permitting — far more than he expected.
• [54:59] The one spot where you can sit down and touch the snow, and he eats some.
• [55:31] Gratitude, at length, and honestly.
• [56:37] Four years of YouTube — daily videos for six months, and the Kaizen idea of improving 1% a day.
• [57:50] A barbecue outdoors with icebergs behind it, and a whole ribeye.
• [58:24] The polar plunge.
• [58:59] The verdict: the most memorable trip of his life, and a once-in-a- lifetime thing he promises nobody will regret.

Extracted pages

• Places: Ushuaia, Deception Island, Antarctic Peninsula
• Countries: Antarctica, Argentina
• Person: Cameron Mofid