Hurtigruten Expeditions is set to return to Antarctica with the battery-hybrid powered MS Roald Amundsen, departing from Punta Arenas, Chile, on November 25 and MS Fram, setting sail from the same port on December 14. Due to travel restrictions, the third battery-hybrid powered ship, MS Fridtjof Nansen, will alternately offer expedition cruises to the coast of Norway from Hamburg, Germany. It will complement the refurbished battery-hybrid powered MS Otto Sverdrup, which offered the very first year-round expedition cruises from Germany and most of its sailings were sold out for the first quarter of 2022. Affected guests are said to have been contacted with rebooking options.
All guests and crew for all Antarctica expedition cruises will be vaccinated with a vaccine approved by the European Medicines Agency.
MS Roald Amundsen's first departure will be a “Solar Eclipse” sailing to the Scotia Sea near the South Orkney Islands, a group of four islands almost 400 miles northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the best place to experience the eclipse. The region's next solar eclipse phenomenon will not occur for about 400 years.
Hurtigruten Expeditions has been operating expedition cruises out of Chile since the early 2000s. Guests arriving to Santiago de Chile will be flown to Punta Arenas by domestic charter flights. Both on-land and at-sea logistics will follow strict, "still guest-friendly," protocols.
MS Fridtjof Nansen was recently named at latitude 78 degrees North in Longyearbyen. Its godmothers, environmental advocates Hilde Fålun Strøm and Sunniva Sørby, from the Hearts in the Ice project, will be on board one of the new Hamburg expedition cruises to Norway.
For more details, visit hurtigruten.com.
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