To seek out new worlds…. exploration cruising, the new frontier of travel

I have recently been on a ship visit on Silversea Silver Explorer in Portsmouth and it gave me the chance to ponder some new things, as well as some things I already knew or had an inkling about.

Firstly exploration, I’ve done a bit of weird and wacky travel in my time but can I hand on heart say I have been to the most remote places in the world. Maybe not.

The Russian far east area has a huge population of brown bears.

A friend of mine booked his flights to go to Kamchatka a couple of years ago, he booked just the flights through me at that time as he was dealing with an extremely unique/small New Zealand company that specialists in cruises to Antarctica and also to the Russian Far East, namely Kamchatka. At first I could not pronounce Yuzhno Sakhalinsk and Petropavlovsk but now I know their airport codes and all! (PKC and UUS). I mainly knew the area because it was the furthest easterly point in the board game “Risk”.

It is also on the pacific ring of fire so lots of volcanoes like this one.

As a biologist he booked the trip to get out into the islands of Russia, for the wildlife and massive bio diversity in the area, which is basically Russia’s mirror to Alaska but I suspect much more untouched. The photos he brought back and showed me of this area were staggering. Things like him kayaking next to killer whales and huge otherworldly volcanic

islands, in fact the sort of thing you might expect in the more explored Galapagos islands.

The usual reason for people travelling to this area is to get to the Trans Siberian express from Vladivostok which I have also booked for someone else before (and alas not done) in my time. Only 7000 people currently travel to the Russian Far east every year, no doubt not helped much by having to obtain a Russian visa which I think is a big shame. Nonetheless this area is incredibly remote, with Korean air being one of the few international carriers to go here, unless of course you want to fly the Russian national airline Aeroflot….

Anyway I went to go and see the Silversea Silver Explorer at Portsmouth last week and was told that the Explorer will be doing this area next year and it inspired me.

Me on Silver Explorer at Portsmouth, with a lot of ID tags….

It just goes to show that there is so much of this earth of ours left to explore and that the travel industry in my lifetime probably still wont have explored it all.

In fact adventure and exploration travel is something I am quite passionate about and it is even better if you can do it in luxury like on the Silver Explorer. It was interesting being on-board as I suspect some of the agents we were with thought the ship could have been a bit more luxurious. As my first experience of an luxury expedition ship I was very impressed by the attention to detail onboard. There were display cases from the Royal Geographic society with antiques like Shackletons hat from one of his expeditions amongst other things. I also loved the public areas, one of which had two Jacuzzi’s overlooking the aft of the ship and the presentation room which ha a massive big screen and minimalist tables for keeping your drink on (for me probably a liability as I would almost certainly at some point spill my drink).

It would be very easy to get caught up comparing the Silver Explorer to regular ships or other 6 star ships. The point that is easy to miss about the ship is that it is designed to go where others cant and this is therefore given priority in the design rather than big swimming pools and so on. Swimming pools are arguably not much use if you are in Antarctica anyway, which is another of the Silver Explorer’s destinations.

The ship was fantastic and I loved the small intimate feel of it and you just got the impression from the staff that once on-board, the service and attention to detail would be very personal and of extremely high quality.

Travel is ever expanding and ever changing, that’s probably why I like working in the industry so much. I think there are worse ways to spend hard earned money than to follow in the footsteps of Shackleton and explore places that very few people have been before like Kamchatka.

See the below guide to Ultra luxury cruising for more info on Silversea.

The Definitive Guide to Ultra Luxury Cruising