Antarctica (via Ushuaia)

Antarctica isn't a flight-in destination: no commercial airport serves the Antarctic Peninsula for tourism, so every trip here is a cruise, typically ten to twenty-one days total once the sailing time is included. Ushuaia, the world's southernmost city and reachable by domestic flight from Buenos Aires, is the departure point for nearly every expedition and worth a day or two on its own before boarding.

The Drake Passage crossing takes roughly two days each way and can genuinely be rough water — worth knowing ahead of booking rather than discovering partway across. What's waiting on the other side is real payoff: penguin colonies, towering icebergs, research stations, and small-boat zodiac landings directly onto the continent.

November through March is Antarctic summer and the only window ships operate at all; the rest of the year the region is inaccessible to tourism entirely. This is the highest price point on this entire list by a wide margin, and ship capacity is limited enough that we book these trips six to twelve months ahead.

Most Antarctica expeditions depart from Ushuaia, Argentina — widely marketed as the 'End of the World' city and the southernmost significant town on the planet — for a roughly two-day crossing of the Drake Passage before reaching the Antarctic Peninsula. Trips typically combine Zodiac boat landings among penguin colonies with shipboard lectures from onboard naturalists, and the Antarctic summer (November to March) is the only window ships operate given sea ice conditions the rest of the year.

Ten to fourteen days including the Drake Passage crossing both ways. It suits travelers for whom this is a genuine bucket-list trip rather than a casual addition — the cost, time and physical demands of the crossing are substantial, and travel insurance covering trip interruption is worth prioritizing given how weather-dependent the itinerary is.

Getting there: About 10h nonstop to Buenos Aires, then a domestic flight to Ushuaia, followed by a 2-day cruise crossing the Drake Passage. We check the realistic routing options for a trip like this and help time it around November to March (Antarctic summer — the only season ships operate) rather than leaving it to chance.

Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world and the departure point for the vast majority of Antarctic cruises, sits at the edge of Tierra del Fuego, a region whose name ('Land of Fire') comes from Ferdinand Magellan's 1520 expedition, which spotted fires lit by the Indigenous Yaghan people along the coast — a Yaghan culture that had lived in this extreme sub-Antarctic environment, remarkably, with minimal clothing despite the cold, for thousands of years before European contact devastated the population. The Drake Passage crossing, roughly 48 to 72 hours of open ocean between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula, is genuinely one of the roughest stretches of water on Earth, where the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern Oceans converge with no landmass to break the swell — some ships route via the comparably calmer Beagle Channel from Ushuaia specifically to ease the first and last legs of that crossing. Antarctica itself has no permanent human population and is governed under the Antarctic Treaty System, signed in 1959 and now covering over 50 countries, which bans military activity and mineral extraction and sets it aside specifically for peaceful scientific research — a genuinely unique piece of international law with no equivalent anywhere else on the planet. Most expedition cruises include onboard scientists and naturalists, and the wildlife — penguins, seals, whales — shows the same lack of predator-learned fear seen in the Galápagos, since large land predators have never existed on the continent.