Penguins or polar bears? First choice is yours

During a recent vacation, I met a traveller from Italy who told me he desperately wanted to visit the Arctic… to see penguins. Without at all sounding patronising, as a frequent traveller to the polar regions, I nodded and suggested he’d have better opportunities to see them in Antarctica but not to expect any polar bears down there.  

It would be easy to oversimplify the polar regions as simply ice-bound, remote, and frigidly cold, with little difference between the two. After all, even the names of the two polar regions bear semblance. The word ‘Arctic’ derives from the Greek, Arktos, meaning bear, so named because of the prominent stellar constellations in the northern hemisphere - Usra major and Ursa minor. Antarctica, meanwhile, rather unimaginatively translates as ‘opposite to the Arctic’.

Yet the differences between both regions are myriad and each offers completely different experiences and reasons to travel. The first question any traveller needs to ask before choosing between the two is what do you want from your voyage? Is it solely to see wildlife, or to be dazzled by extreme landscapes, or to dig deeper into the exploits of derring-do explorers? With ice-readied small expedition cruise ships offering ever more adventurous and varied itineraries to both, your starting choice is whether to head north or south.