If you're not quite ready for your summer vacation to end and you've got $60,000 burning a hole in your pocket, the professional travel planners at ekoVenture are ready to take you on a two-month adventure across Antarctica. The trip has a difficulty level of "strenuous" and the comfort level is rated as "bare bones," or, in other words: awesome.
If that last part doesn't give you an adequate sense of what you're in for, the trip overview begins with the following: "this unique expedition has the goal of arriving to the south pole unsupported, which means without any help or food caches from its beginning to its completion." On one hand, arriving at the south pole sounds mind-blowingly incredible. On the other hand, aren't "food caches" traditionally helpful things? Why would anyone want to give up on something with a name like "food caches"?
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The trip lasts 60 days and involves the full array of adventure travel: skiing, hiking, mountaineering, and camping. You start at Patriot Hills on the 80 South parallel and travel 600 miles to the south pole. All supplies are carried on sledges and skis and, we imagine, your back. Or, per the website blurb, it's "a clean, self-sufficient trip... in the purest style of Polar Exploration."
EkoVenture's Green Travel principles probably prohibit you from running into the middle of a penguin colony and hugging Emperor Penguins. Even so, this is the kind of trip people save up their whole lives to get to do just once. And it's totally worth it.
[Photo: Felipe Menegaz / Wiki Commons]
Related Stories:
· ekoVenture [Official Site]
· Summer Vacations With An Edge [Jaunted]
· Antarctica Travel [Jaunted]
