Ready for the adventure of a lifetime? Gape at the icebergs looming over your ship, stand awestruck in the midst of a teeming penguin colony, or glimpse a minke whale surfacing next to your Zodiac – Antarctica will astound and transform you. Written by authors with intimate knowledge of the region, this bestselling guide is your essential companion to The Ice.
Get The Inside Scoop – loads of specialist contributions by experts in Antarctica’s history, ecology and scientific research.
Go Wild – know your albatross from your snow petrel with our comprehensive wildlife section.
Get There – choose the best tour, expedition or flyover with our detailed transportation chapter.
Find Your Way – 52 detailed maps to help you keep your bearings.
Talk The Talk – handy glossary of unique Antarctic slang and terminology.
Amazon.com Review
Just looking at the hauntingly sculpted blues, vast horizon-touching Shelves, and towering behemoths of Antarctica's ice formations makes the traveler know why she wants to go there and why she needs a good guidebook. Lonely Planet has once again done its homework. In addition to a thorough and succinct history section, useful overviews of Antarctic tour companies, information about how to plan your trip, detailed maps, and interesting facts about the places you'll visit, this book includes a 32-page color wildlife guide that introduces you to Chinstrap penguins, elephant seals, and eight types of whales.
LP has sought out the experts on Antarctic issues to write about science, environmental, and exploration issues. Shaded boxes offer in-depth highlights about topics such as traveling by zodiac (the small inflatable boats used by tour companies--ideal for cruising among "bergy bits"), Antarctic fiction, glaciology, and icebergs: "The Antarctic ice sheet is the iceberg 'factory' of the Southern Ocean. The total volume of ice calved from the ice sheet each year is about 2300 cubic km, and it has been estimated that there are about 300,000 icebergs in the Southern Ocean at any one time."
This book offers sage advice and is not afraid of the stark and sometimes dangerous realities of traveling to such a harsh and foreboding land: "If you fall overboard, you will die. Although this may not be true in every single case, it is almost certain, for human survival in the -1.8°C water of the Southern Ocean is calculated in minutes. Since drowning is thought by some to be preferable to freezing to death, one bit of only half-cynical advice for those who fall overboard is to swim as hard as you can for the bottom."
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(16 customer reviews)
78 of 80 people found the following review helpful
The next best thing to being in Antarctica, September 19, 2000
Mark-Lawrence Zammit - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lonely Planet Antarctica (Paperback)
Lonely Planet have been setting the standards for travel guide-books for a number of years now.Jeff Rubin's guide-book to Antarctica is a treasure, first of all because guide-books on Antarctica are still very rare indeed, secondly because it is exhaustively comprehensive in its detail and yet so readable.Antarctica is a unique place. The last true wilderness remaining on earth. A land where diverse and warring nations co-exist together to work, study and explore in peace. A land where Man can watch Mother Nature act alone, undisturbed. The highest, windiest, driest continent and yet the one containing the most water. Jeff Rubin gives profound insights on this last continent, this last true frontier. This book is packed with facts about history, geology as well as environmental issues (by Dr.Maj de Porteer) and antarctic science (by Dr.David Walton).This book also contains a wildlife guide with more than sixty entries packed with pictures and with information...Read more
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
A truly great achievement up to LP standards, and even more, January 11, 2002
Maurizio Giuliano (Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lonely Planet Antarctica (Paperback)
This book from Lonely Planet is, as always, the ultimate choice of guidebook for travelers. It provides excellent and up-to-date information which any type of traveler will find invaluable. Despite the fact that Antarctica is probably the least visited of the many regions of the world covered by LP, the authors have managed to put together an outstanding agglomeration of data and advice, well edited and excellently written. But... furthermore, on top of being an excellent travel book, this LP guide is also (like many other LP guides, but even more outstandingly) a great book about Antarctica's reality: the place itself, the peculiar or unique characters of this wonderful land, etc. Truly wonderful material is provided in this book, ensuring excellent reading for the armchair traveler, or the Antarctica beginner alike. Its many chapters and additional text boxes about a variety of topics, contain and provide extremely rich information on matters from history to politics, from...Read more
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Little guidance for the prospective traveler, September 7, 2010
dickh - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lonely Planet Antarctica (Country Travel Guide) (Paperback)
This book, while relatively well written with a good survey of the exploration history of the continent and much detail on the many parts of Antarctica where virtually no one goes, is almost totally useless as a travel guide.
The single, by far most important decision that a prospective traveler makes is to choose the type of ship and, within the type, which individual ship. According to IAATO there were some 38,000 visitors to Antarctica during the 2009/2010 season. Almost exactly half were passengers on large standard cruise ships that the big operators reposition to the Valparaiso (Chile) to Buenos Aires route during the Northern Hemisphere winter. As a little "bonus extra" these ships skirt Antarctica as they round the Horn and let their passengers view the continent between trips to the groaning buffet tables. Ships of more than 1000 passengers make no landings, while ships with between 400 and 1000 do sometime make a single landing of groups of 100 or less. The same...Read more
(16 customer reviews) 
The next best thing to being in Antarctica, September 19, 2000 
Little guidance for the prospective traveler, September 7, 2010