The £15m holiday
Dinner with famous explorers, then a private jet to a frozen isle... and an expedition to leave first footsteps on ‘undiscovered’ territory
FROM trekking the Inca trail in Peru to running the Great Wall of China, adventure holidays are all the rage.
Adrenaline junkies, however, are going to need seriously deep pockets for the latest extreme getaway – it costs £15.3million.
The other catch is there is only one place available, and whoever gets it will need polar survival training to cope with -34C temperatures.
Organisers of the Arctic trip to the northernmost point on Earth insist it will be worth it as the lucky holidaymaker will earn a place in the history books as the first person to set foot on undiscovered land.
He or she could also ‘become a benefactor of humanity’, they say, because of the positive scientific impact the trip will have in understanding climate change, and could even end up the star of a TV documentary as they will be accompanied by a film crew.
In a glossy brochure, Ariodante, an ultra-luxury travel company based in London, have billed it as ‘the adventure of a lifetime’. Whoever books the trip – not expected to take place until 2023 – will be accompanied by a crew of 22 including scientists, a doctor, a chef who used to work at Claridge’s in London, and a film crew to ‘immortalise’ the achievement’.
Day one will see the holidaymaker chauffeur-driven to the Natural History Museum in London for a dinner with ‘famous explorers’. They will then fly by private jet to Svalbard, an archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, and then to Greenland, landing at Station Nord, a military and scientific base.
After a night in a specially built ice hotel, there will be a journey of at least seven days – the goal of which is ‘to discover one or several islands north of Greenland’.
Along the way, the adventurer is promised a front seat view of the Northern Lights, glaciers and wildlife such as polar bears, puffins, walruses and whales.
They will reach Kaffeklubben which, says the brochure, ‘is currently the northernmost point on land on Earth. And then we will reach an undiscovered land’.
The brochure adds: ‘It takes courage (and a form of craziness) to embark on such an extreme but rewarding adventure.’