Cruise offers arctic allure and midnight sun
If you’ve always wanted to take an exotic luxury cruise to the High Arctic, tour operator Tauck has just released details of its new-for-2019 small ship cruise to the island of Spitsbergen.
The 10-night Arctic Allure: Spitsbergen and the Midnight Sun cruise will traverse the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, located to the northwest of the northernmost coast of Norway.
Along the way, guests have a good chance at seeing polar bears on this adventurous expedition cruise, which far outnumber the island’s human inhabitants. That is in addition to Svalbard reindeer, arctic moose, Arctic fox, whales, dolphins, seals, walruses and more than 30 different species of birds.
Tauck’s Arctic Allure itinerary is offered on just one departure date, June 24, 2019, aboard Ponant’s Le Boreal. With a maximum of just 234 guests, this chic French ship is the perfect base for exploration: comfortable and stylishly inviting, but still active and adventurous enough to offer a true expedition experience, complete with zodiac landings and remote explorations.
But it’s not just wildlife that makes this expedition cruise so fantastic. Also included (weather-dependent, of course) will be visits to abandoned whaling villages and possibly the ghost town of Pyramiden, a long-abandoned Russian coal mining village.
In conjunction with Tauck’s partnership with BBC Earth, filmmaker Peter Basset will also be aboard, lecturing about his career and globe-trotting adventures.
You might know Tauck better from the company’s European river cruises, which are lavish and all-inclusive. But more importantly, Tauck employs some of the best tour guides and leaders I’ve encountered, and the company has brought that attention to detail to its rapidly-expanding roster of expedition-style ocean cruises, in conjunction with French cruise operator Ponant.
The Arctic is an absolutely stunning destination that has to be experienced to be believed. Impossibly remote and barren, it stands as a testament to nature and human endurance. There is beauty in this land — from massive flows of ice to the smallest flowers, living impossibly among an alien landscape of gravel, rocks and sea.
To go to the remote and beautiful Arctic, in comfort and with every detail taken care of by Tauck, is something early explorers and settlers could only have dreamed of.
Just don’t dream too long: with only one departure, this one’s going to disappear fast.