Consider this your necessary daily dose of adorableness.

Voyagers with Lindblad Expeditions, onboard the ship National Geographic Explorer, were just chilling on Aitcho Island in Antarctica when they spotted a rare white penguin a few days ago. The cutie pie is a Leucistic chinstrap penguin (okay, so he's not totally albino), as the video explains, and he's just going about his penguin-y business.

Now is the middle of the prime summer season in Antarctica, when the cruise ships and expedition tours make landfall on the southernmost continent. Hopefully we can expect more sightings of similarly cute wild fauna before the season ends in a couple months.]]> JetSetCD 2012-01-12T12:50:05-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/1/7/94059/88595

It's the video gone viral yesterday—the Japanese whaling vessel purposefully turning to hit the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's Batman-looking boat, the Ady Gil, in the seas off Antarctica. Check out the collision above if you haven't seen it already; it's a pretty great video for such a terrible event.

Luckily, no crew on board the Ady Gil were killed and only one suffered cracked ribs, but the collision did sheer 10 feet off the bow of the high-speed stealth boat, which was sitting dead in the water when the Shonan Maru altered course to aim directly for it. The incident occurred in the most frigid of waters, in Antarctica's Commonwealth Bay, which is part of Australia's Antarctica territory. Luckily for the Ady Gil, the crew of the Sea Shepherd's newest ship—the Bob Barker— was only a little ways away and was able to rescue the crew and salvage the boat.

See exactly where it all went down, after the jump]]> JetSetCD 2010-01-07T09:55:58-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/9/11/61145/3583

Want to be the first to see the sunrise on New Year's Day 2010? Then get yourself booked onto a flight on the Qantas A380, which will spend New Year's Eve 2009 flying over Antarctica.

A gang called Antarctic Sightseeing Flights are running the trip, which starts in Sydney and will pick up more passengers in Melbourne before heading down in the direction of the South Pole. You'll spend almost 12 hours on board but it's no ordinary flight—they'll have a jazz band playing, a bit of a party atmosphere, and a strict seat rotation policy so that everybody gets their share of the best views.]]> amandak 2009-09-11T08:58:52-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/8/28/144013/899

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"?]]> Omri 2009-08-28T16:04:42-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/7/7/133318/7076

Potential alternative titles: "Become Antarctica's Ben Southall," "A colder chance to be Ben Southall," or - more simply - "We hate Ben Southall." Southall, you'll recall, was the winner of Tourism Queensland's Best Job In The World Contest. Contestants had to submit videos explaining why they should be allowed to house-sit the Great Barrier Reef and blog about it for six months. People voted on their favorite applications, the tourism board chose one, and that was that.

Having won, Southall has recently taken to posting pictures of himself cavorting with dolphins and hanging out in his luxury villa. See? Hate.

In addition to unending enmity, the competition also generated about $200 million in global publicity value for Tourism Queensland. So naturally similar promotions are springing up. The most recent is Quark Expeditions' Blog Your Way To Antarctica contest.]]> Omri 2009-07-07T17:07:07-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/1/29/171255/288 Matt Chesterton has returned to Jaunted with tales of his latest trip cruising around Antarctica. Every day this week, he'll be enlightening us on this luxury ice capades adventure. Enjoy.

"My God, this is an awful place!"

That was Robert Falcon Scott's final verdict on Antarctica, as recorded in his diary. You can hardly blame Scott for allowing his quintessentially stiff Edwardian upper lip to quiver for a moment. He was about to freeze to death, a state of affairs which in his view -- to paraphrase another of his journal entries -- threatened to put a bummer on the entire trip.

We on the Antarctic Dream had fewer complaints. At no point did we have to choose between starving to death or spit-roasting one of our huskies. We ate well, drank well and could watch up to four movies a day. True, we ran out of beer. That shook us. But only the Germans considered it a fate worse than death by hypothermia.

Nothing awful, then. But one place we visited was eerie, if not downright sinister -- such stuff, to adapt Shakespeare, as nightmares are made on. This was Deception Island in the South Shetlands. ]]> MattyC 2009-01-30T11:55:57-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/1/28/145232/365 Matt Chesterton has returned to Jaunted with tales of his latest trip cruising around Antarctica. Every day this week, he'll be enlightening us on this luxury ice capades adventure. Enjoy.

It was the biggest piece of ice I'd ever seen in my life. A monstrous, sparkling slab of frozen bling. And to think I could only see one fifth of it! It filled me with awe -- and I'm not easily filled with anything.

I wanted to reach out and touch it. But of course I couldn’t. The bar was too wide, and Hugo the barman was keeping an eagle eye on his prize.

That's right: It was half-price whisky night on the Antarctic Dream. And each large--and I mean large, Hugo had the kind of quivery right hand you really appreciate in a barman--Scotch would be poured over a carved chunk of glacial ice, recently hauled aboard by several burly crew members.

Bacchanalian? Hardly. Poor old Bacchus never got out of the Med as far as we know. He had to settle for warm liquor. ]]> MattyC 2009-01-29T13:55:57-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/