Wow, I am starting my first post in fantasy category with Antarctica 🙂 I don’t even know when I started dreaming about this place, but this always brings smile on my face. I never imagined someone going there, unless they are scientists or researchers. Few years back, a friend of mine showed me some photos of his travel enthusiastic friend (pilot) on Facebook and one photo caught my attention  – that was from his Antarctica trip. Looking at that photo, my friend’s immediate comment was “who on earth would want to go this place!”. I replied instantly without even thinking for a moment that it is my dream destination and I would definitely want to go and I am sure he thought I was crazy.

After we moved to Australia, we reached closer to my dream destination geographically and I wished some way of travel from Australia to Antarctica. Unfortunately, the only way of traveling to Antarctica is from Argentina and it is very costly. Though there is a route from Australia, its a rough one and they don’t generally take passengers on that route. Another thing which I always used to wonder about my Antarctica dream trip is if I would be able to tolerate many days of journey on ship without sea sickness. As a trial, we went on a 3 day cruise trip from Sydney and realized that we were fine on the ship and absolutely enjoyed the cruise experience. That gave me confidence that we can pursue our dream sometime in future, whenever it might happen.

Coming to what I am expecting from this trip:

• Crazy landscapes
• Lot of Penguins
• Aurora Australis
• Icebergs and Icebergs
• Seals, Whales, Dolphins(?)

I just remembered another instance of being closer to my Antarctica dream, which is when I realized there are some island half way between Australia and Antarctica, which are called sub antarctic islands and I heard that they also have an amazing and equally good landscapes. The best part of that is those islands are part of Australia and we don’t need any visa and the trip can start from Sydney straight away. This felt like a perfect alternative to Antarctica or a starter before the actual trip. But it is equally costly and my husband just brushed away this idea saying we should only go to Antarctica and not their subsets.. :D.

The closest I got so far on this dream trip was to apply for an Antarctic sabbatical (volunteer) program with Airbnb and my application didn’t go through unfortunately. https://news.airbnb.com/antarctica/

Anyways, better luck next time and hope I get to see this place and wish to move this post from Fantasy to Reality 🙂