This week’s dream: Antarctic adventure

Antarctica "defies even the best-laid plans", says Ian Henderson in the Sunday Telegraph. On a continent that does not have a single proper town or airport, suffers from the very harshest weather and is cut off from the rest of the world by a notoriously tempestuous sea, you can forget about travel schedules. You might spend days waiting for flights in freezing air-craft hangars, or sitting out ice storms at sea – but the rewards are worth it. There's a "genuine sense of adventure" and the place is both "endlessly fascinating" and "utterly ravishing" – "an otherworldly vision of sea, ice and cloud-wrapped mountains in a minimalist palette of blues and greys".

A new air service can now get you to a "genuine Antarctic base" within 24 hours. From there, travel by sea rather than land is encouraged as it causes less environmental damage, but regular forays ashore are still possible. Penguin colonies are among the main attractions: stepping off your Zodiac inflatable boat into their midst, you'll feel peculiarly "like an alien" observing a human community as it goes about its daily business, "looking after the nippers, bickering with the neighbours and com-muting out to sea to bring home the krill."

At Port Lockroy you can find what must be "the most remote museum in the world", an abandoned scientific base preserved as it was in the 1950s, "complete with long-johns drying over the Aga and cupboards full of Marmite".

And then there's the "extraordinary" Deception Island, "an active volcanic caldera about six miles in diameter, containing one of the world's largest natural harbours". Your boat passes through "a mist-shrouded, dangerous gap in the crater wall" where minke whales play; within, all is "ash and rock, snow and cloud". Vents under the black beaches produce steam that rolls across the sea "like an effect in a horror film"; more spine-tingling still is the experience of swimming here, "in alternate waves of boiling and freezing sea water".

Excedo (0845 246 2666) offers an 11-day Antarctica Fly Cruise from £5,999pp incl. flights. ·