(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to a special bonus episode of "All The Hacks," a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and in my last episode, I was joined by one of the most well-traveled friends I have, Lee Rowan, where we had an amazing conversation all about Italy.

However, just a few weeks before we recorded, Lee happened to have an amazing opportunity to take a trip to Antarctica, which has been on my bucket list for years, and until our conversation, I don't think I'd ever met anyone who'd actually been there. So I couldn't help but ask him to stick around and share why it was one of the most impactful trips he's taken in his entire life, and he's traveled a lot.

We'll talk about the experience, what it's like there, how to get there, and so much more. So without further ado, let's get started right after this. (upbeat music) First off, Lee, thanks for sticking around and talking about Antarctica. - Thank you. I mean, we've gone from the heart of happiness and sunshine and warmth to a very cold place, but it's a very good place, and I'm excited to talk about it and share the fact that out of all the places I've ever been in my entire life, I have never been moved, I have never been blown away and shocked as much as I have by my experience in Antarctica, and I cannot wait to share why.

- So I wanna hear why, but I will just preface this with, I'm fairly certain that anyone listening who's looking for a deal, there is not a cheap way to do Antarctica. Can we just set that as guideposts? 'Cause I don't want people to listen to this, get really excited, and then be like, how do I do this on a budget?

- Well, there's two ways of doing Antarctica, and I'll talk about both really briefly. One is flying into the continent, which is what I did. I got very fortunate to go, and I'll explain more about what that experience is like and how later. The second, of course, is cruising, which is what most of the people who go to visit the seventh continent do, and that requires you to leave from Ushuaia or somewhere in South America, take a two-day crossing across the Drake Passage, which is usually a very harrowing experience for a lot of people, and then spend up to a week or 10 days exploring the Antarctic Peninsula before returning and going back to South America.

So all told, you're on a boat for about 14 days, seven to 10 of which are exploring Antarctica. Now, that general two-week experience or 10 to 14-day experience on a boat can cost anywhere between 10 and $100,000 for most people, and there are ways of actually lowering that cost.

If you're very flexible and you are okay kind of positioning yourself down in South America for a little bit, you can jump on a last-minute boat trip that has a cancellation, and you don't know where you're going or which voyage you're on, but if you're down there, you can get that sometimes for half-off.

So four or five grand for two weeks, still a lot of money, but it's not as bad as it could be if you were paying full retail. Now, most of the people who book these cruises to Antarctica, they do so well in advance, 12 to 18 to sometimes even 24 months out, and so when you look at that booking window, the fact that you might be down in South America and in two days hop on something that wasn't available kind of comes as a shock to some people, but that's the way you can do it on a sort of deal.

Otherwise, expect to plan, budget, save, and then go eventually down the line. - The first option you mentioned that you were fortunate to do, I assume that starts at a higher floor. - A little higher. So there used to be a few operators who would fly into the interior of Antarctica who could take you all the way sometimes to the South Pole.

That number has now been reduced down to zero or one in this case. A company called White Desert out of South Africa. White Desert was founded by a fellow who has done pretty much everything to get to the pole or around Antarctica. So he skied, he packed a sled, he took a kite, next year he's gonna bring a hovercraft.

He's pretty incredible. And so he set up a polar expedition experience on Antarctica that is unlike anything else that's out there, and it does involve flying either an A340, an Airbus jumbo jet, or a G550, a Gulfstream private jet from Cape Town down to Antarctica. And he actually, this is really incredible, he set up one of the only private blue ice runways in the world.

What's a blue ice runway? - I'm just imagining a giant A340 landing on ice. - I was on it, and it's incredible because when you land on that ice runway, which has been groomed for almost a day straight, they take a snowcat and they pull it along at about three miles an hour, and they just build these ruts into the ice on this glacier.

And they smooth this runway perfectly so that a jumbo jet, flying at almost 200 miles an hour when it lands, can land and has the right friction to grab the wheels and slow it down. And so it's a 3,000 meter runway, and so almost 10,000 feet. And when we landed, we only used half of the runway, which is insane.

We're landing on an A340 with four engines, fully loaded, and the thing landed like smooth, as if you were landing at SFO. It was incredible. And then, of course, you step out and you're like, "Whoa, I'm on Mars, this is not Earth. "This is something totally different." Because the advantage of flying into the interior is that, number one, fewer than 300 people a year do it.

Unless you're a scientist stationed at a base somewhere, you don't have a chance, as a tourist, to really go into the interior of Antarctica. The boats only reach the coast, and they only go a couple hundred feet inland at most. This, you're 150 kilometers from the shelf, from the sea, when you land on the A340 on the ice.

And then you fly around from there in other aircraft. They use a converted DC-3 Basler, it's called. These Canadian guys fly it all the way from Canada, where it's stationed in the Northern Hemisphere, summer. They bring it all the way down to the Antarctic in the fall, switches to spring when it gets down to South America, and then come early November, it's on the ice.

And they fly it all around the Antarctic continent. You can go to the South Pole. I unfortunately did not get a chance to do that on my trip. It's a seven hour journey, one way, in the plane. And you actually stop along the way, because you have to pick up more fuel.

This is the crazy part about Antarctica, that it just boggles my mind. How do you get fuel? - Yeah, I was just thinking, there's not a gas station. - Right, right. So what they do is, once a year, they bring a ship from Cape Town, down to the Antarctic shelf.

And it unloads with this giant crane, containers of fuel, and a hovercraft, and food, and whatever else they need to bring. They leave it on the ice, and then they begin, basically, a convoy, to bring that fuel, and that stuff, down to where it needs to go. So it goes from the continent's shelf, all the way down to 83 degrees South, which is like a 45 day, one way journey.

Can you imagine? Imagine these guys were like, driving a snowcat, it's fully sunny all day, and they're just driving it south for 45 days, just to drop fuel, so that you can fly to the South Pole for an hour. It's mind boggling, right? The whole thing is incredible. So, anyway, we didn't get to do that.

We did get to fly those Baslers to the coast, to see penguins. And when I say penguins, I mean, I saw emperor penguins, freshly hatched, little chicks, who obviously had never seen humans before, because we were some of the first in the season to visit their colony. In the entire year, they maybe will get 150 visitors, ever.

I mean, it's insane, right? So you literally feel like you're on a different planet. You're not seeing humans for a week at a time. You're doing your own thing. You're in your own space. And you feel like, wow, I've left Earth. And yet you come back at night into these luxury digs, where you're sleeping in an explorer tent with fine linen, and there's like sparkling water.

And if you want wine, there's wine. And there's this creature comforts to take care of you. But the actual logistics of the experience are just mind blowing. - Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be. I get it. Life comes at you fast. But trust me, your friends are probably desperate for a good hang.

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You said it's down to zero, one. Is this an expedition that people can go on? - Absolutely. So there's one provider, White Desert, who does this on a yearly basis. They have three camps that they operate in Antarctica, in the interior. And you sign up through either your travel advisor or directly with them on their website to sign up for which experience and expedition camp you wanna stay at.

One is a space-agey kind of camp. One is located on an oasis. An oasis in the Antarctic term means a rock outcropping, not ice. So that's kind of weird because we think of an oasis as a place that would have water in a desert, vice versa. The desert in Antarctica is all the ice all around you.

They only get a few centimeters of snow per year on this glacial cap. But the rock facing is only about 2% of Antarctica, and those are called oases. And that's where they actually built one of their camps. You can spend time there, or you can spend time at their sort of runway base.

But yeah, you basically, you save up your money. Their trip started around $50,000 US per person, double occupancy. So that's per person in a two-person room. I heard stories when we were down there of people who had saved up for three or four years. This was their vacation fund.

They put away year over year over year, and this was their incredible trip they took. Some people have crowdsourced or crowdfunded a trip to go down there. - Some people have started luxury travel companies. - And got very lucky and knew the right person at the right time. They have an incredible product that is definitely worth those dollars and worth that experience.

What's really incredible that I thought about the Antarctic Peninsula versus the Antarctic interior is that there's a sort of a circuit you can do on the Antarctic Peninsula where you're gonna see the same colonies, the same islands, the same glaciers, as every other boat that comes through that area.

Whereas in the interior, you'd wake up in the morning and then you'd be like, "Well, what do you wanna do today?" I'm like, "What do you mean?" And you had a list of options of, oh, you could abseil down a mountain, or you could climb a mountain that maybe only a hundred people ever have climbed.

Or you could take a flight seeing trip where you go out in the Basler and you go flight see out to different parts of the Antarctic interior. And you could land places where you were the only human and you were confident in seeing this that has ever landed there and climbed that rock or that Nunatuk or that mountain.

It was insane to think that's something that was just accessible to you that you could do. So I think that the scale, you are infinitesimally small, you are insignificant and nothing amongst this ice and amongst this, wow, it was just so mind boggling for me and so beautiful and so humbling.

- Do you think if you'd done the cruise, you would have had a similar experience? I feel like at this point, you're like, interior was such a more magical experience, but I imagine very few people are gonna have the two-person $100,000 budget, myself included, to do that, is doing a cruise and cutting that cost significantly still gonna be as magical?

- So I personally am not cruised, but I know a lot of my clients who have, and I know a lot of my fellow travel industry folks who have talked about the same life-changing experience. That they go down to the ice, they're surrounded by these colonies of penguins, and even if there are other boats and there's other people around, it's just this overwhelming sense of, God, I'm so small.

And I'm just seeing this field of view in front of me that is so massive, and yet I am a little person. So I definitely think there's that overview effect element that people get when they go to Antarctica. It's exotic, it's crazy, it's uninhabited, it's so otherworldly in so many ways.

And it's always a place that people come back from and say, I'm so grateful that I had a chance to do this, I'm so glad I did this. No one ever says, well, that was a long boat ride for nothing, it's always very, very positive about the experience. And really, look, no matter which way you choose to do it, whether you go on a research ship or a super high-end yacht or boat, or you go fly in to the interior, no matter what, your experience will be incredible because you've never done this before.

This is something absolutely out of the ordinary. And I asked Patrick, the fellow who set up White Desert, who's the explorer, who's gone to all the poles, and he's gone everywhere. And I said, what is it that keeps you coming back to Antarctica? And he couldn't put his finger on just one particular thing.

It's just this grandness and this opportunity to explore and see an experience that is just so overwhelming. There's just so much down there. And it's the majesty and the space, it's just really quite incredible. - Wow, probably not a good one for the young kids, but-- - Kids eight and older.

- Eight and older, so I've got seven years to save up for a trip to Antarctica. - Or just leaving home. - Yeah, find childcare, we can sneak away, and find time for a two-week boat adventure, which means they're probably gonna need to be a little bit older. - Exactly.

- I think it's hard to find any family member that wants to watch your children for two weeks while you go on a nice cruise. - Well, the nice part is you could leave them back in Cape Town, and you could fly with White Desert, and you're only on the ice for four, five, six nights.

And we'll need the seven years to save for it anyways. - That's right. - Yeah, not gonna crowdfund that, although maybe I can at least call it a business expense. - You never know. - So. - Talk to your tax advisor. We've had a few on the show. I will say one last thing, which is that there's a slight chance that the White Desert folks are gonna be putting together a very cool, round-the-world, all-seven-continents-in-one-month private jet expedition.

And it wouldn't be marginally much more expensive than one of their traditional trips to the ice, but it would touch all seven continents in the span of about 21, 24 days. So keep an eye out on that. That may be coming sometime next year. - Any other parting Antarctica advice?

- One of the things that I felt so grateful for coming back from the ice was that the things we take for granted, having an Amazon delivery, right, or having trash just taken out, are truly things of a cooperative society and of innovative companies that make our lives so easy.

And when you're forced to create that all on your own in a unique environment like Antarctica, where their trash is taken out once a year, and so literally the very minimal trash I created into Antarctica is gonna stay there until next December, and then it'll get taken to Cape Town.

Just that logistical idea alone blows my mind. We live in a space and in a place and in an age where we're like, these things are just like second nature and we just think, oh yeah, we can recycle something or throw something away or get something delivered tomorrow. And that's an incredible luxury.

I had to go a very far distance and spend a lot of money and blah, blah, blah to realize how luxurious I have it at home. - Wow. I do have two questions that are probably pretty normal. How cold and how bright? - So bright. Oh my God, so bright.

So the disorienting thing for me was that obviously we're underneath the Antarctic Circle, 24 hours of daylight. The sun does move. It doesn't just stay right overhead like it does at the South Pole. It moves around in sort of like a oval shape. The vistas are so wide that it doesn't go down below any of the mountains 'cause in most places you're 30 to 50 miles away from mountains that look like you could reach out and touch them, but they're super far away.

So the brightness is real, obviously from the sun, but also from sun glare off of the snow. So you have to wear specialized glasses that really wrap around any open area, including your nose, where sun could get in because otherwise it zaps your eyes. So even like the moments of like, I'd like briefly take off my glasses, I'd be like, whoa, like put them back on 'cause it's intense.

Sunscreen as well, put sunscreen everywhere 'cause you will burn any single spot that is exposed. Cold is an interesting thing. Cold is relative to how much wind there is. Standing on ice, obviously you're at about zero Celsius or a little below. When the wind blows, you're at very cold very fast.

And they have these things called katabatic winds, which is basically when the wind picks up in what would be the afternoon. There is time by the way, but there's no time zone. It's very strange. But anyway, in the afternoons, the winds would pick up, they'd come from the South.

So blowing from the South North, from the South Pole up towards where we were, it could get pretty windy pretty fast. If so, you get these little shards of ice and snow that whip off of the glacier and they feel like exploiting treatments. They're strong, but with a good wind jacket on and like a face buffer, you're fine.

So we were out skiing and up sailing and having fun in strong winds. Wind chill wise, it could go down to negative 10, negative 15 Celsius like that. I never felt cold. There were days where I felt hot, where we'd be hiking up and down a glacier or a hill and I'd like take off layers 'cause it's toasty.

- But because you were working. - 'Cause we were working out, we were well-dressed. You definitely take care of yourself in the surroundings. There was one night where I walked from my pod where I slept to like the communal pod where everyone was like having dinner and hanging out and I wore sandals as a joke and my toes got a little cold.

- And you said time zone, like is there a time zone in Antarctica or how does that work? - There is, so each scientific base that's down there chooses their own time based on where their sort of home country is. So we were closest to an Indian base and they chose GMT.

They chose London time. We were on London time as well, but we were technically like one time zone over and South Africa was one time zone further from us. There's a Russian base down there that chooses Russian time even though they're on the other side of the world from Russia.

There's obviously a lot of US bases and they choose New Zealand or US time. So it just depends on where you're sort of aligned. - But you could conceivably get in one of these planes, fly from one place to the other in the middle of the day, but when you get there, everyone's sleeping.

- Totally, and that's the disorienting part is that like you wake up at two in the morning to have a glass of water and like it is bright out. And I'm not saying bright, I mean like sun is overhead. - Wow, thanks for doing a little bonus here. - Thank you.

- On a place that most people don't get to go. - Yeah, I hope more people will get to go. It is truly magical and fascinating and well worth your investment. Save your time, save your money and go. - All right, thanks for being here. - Thank you. - I hope you like this little bonus episode on Antarctica.

I have mixed feelings because now I really wanna go, but wow, is it really expensive. So no idea how I'm gonna make that happen, but it still remains on my bucket list, so we'll see what happens. See you next week. (upbeat music) (whooshing)