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Welcome to the World’s Loneliest Tourist Spot

Guide books to Antarctica? The notion that the last wilderness is being colonized by tourists tends to provoke the kind of shock-horror reaction associated with tabloid headlines. Is nothing scared? Apparently not. Thirty two years ago, not a single tourist visited Antarctica. Now, as many as 10,000 tourists visit it each year. What next? Package holidays at the South Pole?

The idea of mass tourism on the ice is shocking, of course, because Antarctica is a powerful symbol of the uncorrupted earth – the planet before we mucked it up. It is a blank in time, the last wilderness and the only geographical symbol of innocence left unless we set up colonies in space.

The dangerous implications of tourism in Antarctica, however, have been exaggerated. 10,000 people aren’t actually all that many on a continent one and a half times the size of Europe. In addition, almost all tourists arrive on cruise ships and spend only a few hours on the continent itself. There is no accommodation available to holidaymakers on the ice, so they are obliged to return to their cruise ships in inflatable dinghies to sleep in heated cabins. Nor are there shops or food or water in Antarctica. Antarctic tourism is now well-policed and all reputable organizations adhere to the environmental regulations of the Antarctic Treaty and the guidelines laid down by IAATO, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Whilst it is essential to maintain strict control over all visitors to the sepulchral wastes, the reality is that the vast majority of the continent has never seen a Nikon and probably never will.

This doesn’t mean that Antarctica has not developed a human culture of its own. No: despite the fact that it has no indigenous population, since the first man stepped onto the continent in about 1821, explorers, scientists, base workers and mountaineers have come to the ice and given it a history. At the beginning they lived only in tents, or in the cramped quarters of their ships, or in prefabricated huts they had brought from home. Now, life in the tiny clusters of human life on the continent is rather more sophisticated. McMurdo, the largest of the three American bases in Antarctica, resembles a small Alaskan mining town. It has roads, three-story buildings, the ill-matched architecture of a utilitarian institution and a summer population of more than a thousand people.

As many as 200 research camps function in Antarctica in the summer, and about thirty remain manned during the winter. They belong to a variety of national programmes, and each country transports its culture to the bottom of the world. I ate Antarctica’s best food at the Italian station, Terra Nova Bay, had sweet, syrupy dumplings with Chinese at Great Wall and drank vodka at the Russian base at Bellinghausen.

But none of these people were tourists, and their overall impact on the continent of Antarctica was minimal. To return to the point I made at the beginning about the alarming rise of Antarctic tourism, people often ask me if I am afraid that some entrepreneurial spirit is going to arrive on the ice to start building huge hotels and shopping malls. The reality is that Antarctica is different from Spain or Greece or Thailand. Even if someone is prepared to contravene the Antarctic Treaty, there are still the almost intractable problems of building and operating a service industry in a place where there is no running water, a place where each barrel of oil has to be transported many hundreds of miles across the worst seas on the planet and which is shrouded in darkness for five months of the year. And despite the complicated politics of the Antarctic treaty, on the continent itself there is no concept of ownership. In the end, neither tourism nor tourist guides can taint the majesty of Antarctica.

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