Explorer walking past base camp on a snowy landscape
Explorer walking past base camp on a snowy landscape

An explorer sets out on Day 6 of the recent A&K South Pole expedition. Image courtesy of Abercrombie & Kent

At the age of 76, LUX contributor and founder of luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent Geoffrey Kent is still adventuring. Here he recalls one of his most recent and challenging expeditions into the South Pole

For the last three years, I have been occupied with a desire to go on a journey to Antarctica. Like my hero of heroes, Sir Ernest Shackleton, I dreamed of getting to the South Pole. Unlike Shackleton, who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, I wanted to do it in comfort and five-star style.

Adventure is in my genes, and since my parents and I founded A&K in 1962, I’ve packed a lot in. I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, hiked to Tiger’s Nest in Bhutan, and circled the earth along the equator. I’ve journeyed from the source of the Upper Amazon to where it meets the Atlantic Ocean and been to Iraq with some special forces’ guys. I have been to the edge of space in an English Electric Lightning, travelling Mach 2.2 at 21 kilometres up, and hiked to Base Camp Everest. I was officially the last person in the twentieth century to stand on the North Pole.

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My recent expedition to the South Pole is my latest and perhaps most challenging adventure. Like all dedicated travellers, my wanderlust constantly drives me. I’m obsessed with the app Been, which reveals that I have visited 70 per cent of the world’s countries (I travel approximately 270 days each year). In the next few years, I want it to be 100 per cent. The desire to see the whole world is the driving force behind Inspiring Expeditions by Geoffrey Kent.

In December 2018, seven intrepid guests and I spent the latter part of December in the vast wilderness that is Antarctica. Another continent ticked off – a personal dream fulfilled.

Private plane landed on the snow

Day 12: arriving by private jet into Whichaway Camp. Image courtesy of Abercrombie & Kent

When most people speak of having been to Antarctica, they have travelled by cruise ship from Ushuaia to the Antarctic Peninsula, a 1,300-kilometre chain of mountains and volcanoes that juts north towards South America. My expedition was to a dramatically different destination. The Antarctica that I’m talking about can’t be accessed by cruise ship. To get to the South Pole, you need a plane and skis or snowmobiles. Antarctica is vast – mind-bogglingly big. To put it in perspective, from our base inside the Antarctic Circle to get to the South Pole required an eight-hour flight, a re-fuelling stop and the crossing of a time-zone.

Our group – consisting of one couple and their two sons, a father and son, and me – set off from sunny Cape Town in mid-December. We landed on the first of three ice runways (or more aptly iceways) that A&K constructed in Antarctica for this journey and got our first glimpse of the land of snow and ice at a place dramatically named ‘Wolf’s Fang’.

Explorers climbing up an ice wall with picks and helmets

Day 8: ice climbing. Image courtesy of Abercrombie & Kent

There are no wolves for thousands of kilometres, just the occasional snow petrel flying overhead. Antarctica is a high desolate white desert where temperatures in summer rarely get above minus 20 degrees Celsius and the winter average is minus 60. It never rains here and the snow that falls is sparse. With less than 20cm of snowfall a year, Antarctica is technically a desert. It is so dry that with the correct kit on, you feel colder on London’s streets on a particularly grim day.

Read more: Italian brand Damiani’s Kazakh-inspired jewellery collection

It’s the last true wilderness on our planet. The last frontier – the final place on the planet where a traveller can feel genuinely remote and know that your footprints may be the first, that no other human may have walked here before. And if they have… what a club to be part of.

From our basecamp in an oasis – a series of rocky outcrops amongst the ice – over the course of eight days, our group flew to Atka Bay to view the large colony of Emperor penguins. There, we also learned essential winter skills, explored ice caves, visited both Russian and American research stations, summitted (and earned the right to name) a peak in the Drygalski mountain range, and ventured to the Geographic South Pole.

a colony of emperor penguin chicks in the south pole

Day 4: visiting the Emperor penguins. Image courtesy of Abercrombie & Kent

From the top of ‘Mount Inspiring’ – the virgin mountain which our group summited in the company of Marko Prezelj, four-time Piolet d’Or winner – staring over this vast expanse of white in awe of nature at its most elemental, it’s hard to imagine the flux that this continent is undergoing. Sadly, Antarctica has experienced an air temperature increase of three degrees Celsius. This rise in temperature is causing change – perennial snow and ice cover are melting, glaciers are retreating, and some ice shelves have collapsed completely. In the last 60 years, there has been a loss of 25,000 square kilometres of ice shelf. The flora and fauna are facing a threat too. Emperor penguin numbers have declined by up to half in some places and the number of breeding pairs may fall by 80 per cent by 2100.

Read more: The poetic beauty of the Swiss Engadine

One of the greatest, yet least seen, wildlife spectacles on the planet, the colony of 6,000 breeding pairs at Atka Bay is extraordinary. Two and a half hours by airplane away from basecamp, thousands of adolescents were finding their feet and snow bathing to cool off in strong sun, while their parents fished. These animals are under threat from human action from thousands of kilometres away.

We reached the Pole two days and one hundred and seven years after Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer who won the race to the South Pole, just ahead of Scott. Standing at the designated marker at the lowest point on earth, you are able to walk around the world in a few steps. Surrounding the marker are flags from the twelve signatories of the Antarctic Treaty that sets aside the continent as a scientific preserve. It was a good place to reflect on the adventure of getting here and wondering about what’s going to become of this white desert… and what we all can do about it.

Discover Abercombie & Kent’s portfolio of luxury travel tours: abercrombiekent.co.uk

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Explorers climb through an ice cave in the South Pole
An image of a candlelight ceremony at Petra, Jordan

Petra, Jordan. Instagram: @abercrombiekent

Increasingly businesses and professionals are using Instagram as a way of promoting their brand, but the app can also function as a modern-day diary. LUX contributor and Abercrombie & Kent Founder Geoffrey Kent explains why he’s a social media convert

Oscar Wilde wrote: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” Not many people have led as sensational a life as that of the Irish playwright, but keeping a diary or journal isn’t just for the outrageous, or the pursuit of Adrian Mole-esque teenagers.

A growing body of research suggests that recording your experiences is a good practice, not only for posterity, but also as a good mental-health practice. Other benefits include aiding memory. Oscar Wilde also wrote that “memory is the diary we all carry about with us” – but memory is a funny thing. Impressions can last for years but the minutiae can become lost quite quickly if not written down.

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I discovered this for myself in 1958, as a teenager. When I was 16, I rode a motorbike from Nairobi to Cape Town on a 3,000-mile journey of self-discovery along some of Africa’s most dangerous roads. In my saddlebags, along with my Shell Oil road map, a poncho, tarpaulin sheet and elephant hair bracelets, were a pencil and journal. Every day, I made notes: the route I took, how many elephant hair bracelets I had managed to trade at market, leopard tracks on my tails, that the giraffes that I saw had smaller and smaller spots, that my next challenge would be climbing Kilimanjaro. I also posed more existential questions, such as: who is Geoffrey Kent? What do I think is worthwhile? I usually wrote at midday whilst catching shade from the broiling heat, resting at the base of baobab trees.

Businessman and traveller Geoffrey Kent poses in front of tent in the South Pole

Geoffrey Kent at the Abercrombie & Kent camp in the South Pole. Instagram: @geoffrey_kent

Upon arriving in Cape Town, I felt a profound sense of achievement, duly recorded in my journal‚ and then my thoughts turned immediately to my next challenge – how to get home. I didn’t fancy another 3,000-mile bike ride back to Nairobi. I needed to earn some money so I could go back by boat or train – anything but by two wheels. A friend in Cape Town suggested I write a story about my journey and try to sell it. Thank goodness for my journal and all the notes I had taken along my route. I managed to pull together a good piece, full of accurate, evocative details, and the Cape Argus newspaper agreed to publish the article along with photos of me on my bike.

Due to my scribblings in my journal I was able to get home in style – in first class, aboard the Africa, the best ship in the Lloyd Triestino line, from Cape Town to Mombasa. From that day to this, I have always kept a diary. My diaries were invaluable in researching and writing my memoir Safari: A Memoir of a Worldwide Travel Pioneer. In the pages of Smythson notebooks unseen for years (sometimes decades), I uncovered details that had been lost to time – that I had been granted the first license to take travellers into the Ngorongoro Crater; how dinner with David Niven led me to own my first boat on the Nile; how I got into China before any other travel executive travelling as an Ethiopian citizen (thanks to my sister’s birth in Addis Ababa) in a tour group organised by an Ethiopian pro-Communist group that I had read about in the East African Standard.

Read more: Get to know these 4 new Instagram aesthetes

Over the years however, an evolution has occurred in step with technology and my method of memory-keeping has changed. I now keep a visual diary. Upon opening my Instagram account (@geoffrey_kent), I fell in love with the platform and now use it to – yes, promote my businesses and brands – but also as a photographic journal. It’s my new diary. Social media is the easy, accessible way to record your life and experiences in a public forum (shared with the wide world or just a private, select few – your choice). I post religiously – even from the South Pole.

Explorers climb through an ice cave in the South Pole

An Abercrombie & Kent expedition to the South Pole (Day 5). Image courtesy of A&K

Antarctica is never one to be underestimated, but it is amazing too. I will long remember seeing the Emperor penguins, exploring the ice tunnels, climbing and naming a mountain in the Drygalski mountain range, and making it to the South Pole. Despite what can kindly be called patchy internet access, I posted daily to my grid and look forward to scrolling through my feed in years to come to bring to mind this sensational trip with some new close friends.

7 steps to Instagram success

1. Start by thinking about what it is you like about your favourite account.

2. Try the Preview app – it’s a cool tool for testing out your posts before you commit an image to your feed.

3. Quality rather than quantity – only feature amazing images which are in line with your chosen aesthetic.

4. Be sure to edit – Android and iPhone have excellent built-in photo editing tools for cropping and levelling, but there are lots of apps that can help make your photos picture perfect.

5. Be smart about hashtags – you can add up to thirty hashtags in one post, but you shouldn’t.

6. Include the geotag to boost your post’s visibility.

7. When and how much you post matters – those in the know suggest posting at similar times every day, when your followers are active.

Discover Abercombie & Kent’s portfolio of luxury travel tours: abercrombiekent.co.uk

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