It started with a screensaver on a colleague’s computer.
I was working in Antarctica at the time, already deep into what most people would consider an extraordinary career. Expedition travel, remote destinations, guests who had seen everything. I thought I had a sense of the map.
Then I saw his screen. A photo of the Arctic ice, white and vast and impossibly still. And planted right in the middle of it: a large red sign, standing alone on the frozen surface. It read: 90°N / North Pole.
I didn’t even know it existed as a travel destination. The Geographic North Pole… reachable by ship. By a very specific kind of ship. From that moment, I was obsessed.
1. How a Photo Changed Everything
That was 2012. I was working as Shop Manager for Quark Expeditions, and the position aboard the North Pole vessel was already taken — by someone far more senior than me, and rightfully so. There was no path there. Not yet.
So I waited. I took a sabbatical year in 2014. And when Poseidon Expeditions offered me a contract in 2015, buried inside that offer was the thing I had been waiting three years for: a season aboard the 50 Years of Victory. A nuclear-powered icebreaker. Russian. The most powerful vessel of its kind in the world.
2. The journey begins before you even board
The journey begins before you even board. Murmansk, in northwestern Russia, is not a city that eases you in gently. It is a port city built for industry, for cold, for purpose. When you arrive at the ROSATOM nuclear facilities — the company that operates Russia’s fleet of atomic icebreakers — you understand immediately that this is not a regular embarkation.
There are protocols. Clearances. Steps that exist for reasons you don’t fully understand but respect completely. Every layer of the process reminds you: this is not a cruise ship. This is something else entirely. And then you walk up the gangway, and you see the scale of it.
3. Franz Josef Land, and guests who expect every detail to be right
We sailed via Franz Josef Land — a Russian Arctic archipelago so remote that most people have never heard of it, myself included… obviously — let alone seen it. Glaciers calving into the sea. Walrus colonies on ice floes. Polar bears (how I became obsessed from an early childhood is another story) moving across landscapes that look borrowed from another planet.
A voyage to the Geographic North Pole is not something many people ever do. The trips are few, the places are limited, the cost is significant, and demand consistently outpaces availability. The people who make it aboard are not casual travellers. They are seasoned explorers, deeply knowledgeable about the world, who know exactly what they are paying for and expect every detail to be right. There is no room for improvisation.
The catering was overseen by an Austrian executive chef. The culinary team was Austrian and German. Precise. Excellent. Unyielding in their standards even at 80 degrees North. The expedition staff was something I had never experienced before: a team from Canada, Russia, China, Germany, Australia, Scotland, Japan, New Zealand, France — and one Argentinian. Me. Fifteen languages of expertise, one shared mission: to fulfill the dream of 114 guests who were experiencing the ultimate trip.
4. That comes next
I didn’t know, as we sailed North through the Arctic Ocean, that I would make this journey fourteen more times. I didn’t know what the Pole would feel like when we finally reached it… that particular silence, that particular light, the strange and vertiginous feeling of standing at the one place on Earth where every direction is South.
That comes next.