“Don’t think about the price. Just do it.” — one retiree’s life-changing journey to Antarctica

Postcards Home ….

Each week, Emily Darlow sits down with a member of the Starts at 60 community to hear a travel story worth telling. This week, Roe Kitchin shares her adventure to Antarctica

Antarctica has become one of those rare travel experiences that sits somewhere between fantasy and reality for many Australians. It is the kind of destination people spend years talking about in abstract terms, too far away, too expensive, too cold, too complicated, until suddenly someone they know actually goes.

And increasingly, they are going.

Expedition cruises to Antarctica have surged in popularity over the past decade, with travellers drawn by towering icebergs, whales, penguins and landscapes so enormous they almost feel impossible to properly process in real life. For many, it is less about ticking another destination off a list and more about experiencing somewhere genuinely unlike anywhere else on Earth.

For Kiama retiree Roe Kitchin, the journey south was tied to a milestone birthday.

Travelling with her husband Ken in 2025, the pair booked the trip to celebrate what Roe jokingly describes as “a birthday with a zero on the end”, though she is still refusing to reveal exactly which digit came before it.

Unlike many of the couple’s previous holidays, this trip required very little independent planning. Their Antarctica journey came as part of a fully organised cruise package beginning in Santiago, Chile, before tracing the coastline south through the Chilean fjords, across the Drake Passage and into Antarctica itself.

From there, the itinerary continued through Elephant Island and the Falklands before finishing in Buenos Aires.

Arriving in Santiago, Roe was immediately struck by the contrast between the sprawling city skyline and the dramatic desert mountains rising sharply behind it along the edge of the Andes, something she described as unlike anywhere she had travelled before.

The long days at sea quickly settled into their own comfortable rhythm. Mornings began slowly with coffee and deck walks, while afternoons were spent listening to guest lectures, playing games with friends made onboard and enjoying late afternoon cocktails before dinner and evening shows.

“It was perfect,” Roe said.

But Antarctica itself was something else entirely.

Even now, back home in Kiama, Roe struggles to fully explain the feeling of seeing the continent for the first time. The scale of it, she said, was difficult to comprehend, especially when the ship paused silently in the middle of vast icy bays surrounded by glaciers and floating ice.

“There were moments where the ship would just stop and you were absorbed in the silence and the grandeur,” she said.

From the deck, the couple watched whales surface through the water while penguins darted across floating ice nearby. Unlike expedition style cruises that transport passengers ashore in zodiacs, the Kitchins’ voyage focused on scenic cruising through Antarctica’s waterways, something Roe believes allowed them to slow down and properly absorb the landscape around them.

Elsewhere along the journey, the Chilean fjords became one of the trip’s unexpected highlights.

Before travelling, Roe had heard comparisons suggesting they were less impressive than the fjords of Norway or New Zealand. Instead, she found herself stunned by the scale of the landscape as the ship navigated through impossibly narrow waterways framed by cliffs, glaciers and waterfalls.

“It was just jaw dropping,” she said.

Food and drink also became woven into the memories of the trip.

In Santiago, Roe’s first Pisco Sour, Chile’s famous cocktail made with pisco, lime juice, bitters and egg whites, was enjoyed from a rooftop bar overlooking the city skyline, a moment she still remembers vividly. Further along the journey in Buenos Aires, one of the standout meals came not from a fine dining restaurant, but from a roadside barbecue in the colourful Caminito district.

“The steak was to die for,” Roe laughed, insisting it was far better than an expensive meal they ordered later at a much more highly regarded restaurant.

Like most long holidays, the trip also delivered a few unexpected moments.

During a rugged four wheel drive excursion in the Falklands to visit king penguins, the rough terrain proved too much for the ship captain’s vehicle, which became bogged in the middle of the journey.

“That was funny for us but probably not for him,” Roe said.

Then there were the people they met along the way.

One casual conversation with an Irish couple at a bar onboard eventually turned into nightly games and long conversations, before Roe and her new friend Mags discovered they shared not only the exact same birthday, but the same birth year as well, born only hours apart on opposite sides of the world.

“How amazing is that?” Roe said.

Despite visiting one of the coldest places on Earth, Roe admits they probably overpacked thermals, discovering much of the ship itself stayed surprisingly warm.

If anything, she joked, they needed more lightweight clothes for onboard life than heavy Antarctic layers.

Still, the experience left such an impression that Roe has little hesitation when asked what advice she would give other Starts at 60 readers considering Antarctica.

“Don’t think of the price,” she said.

“Just do it.”

Even after four and a half months of travel last year, the couple are not slowing down anytime soon. A Queensland caravan trip is already planned for later this year, while Spain, Portugal, southern France and Italy are firmly in their sights for next year.

But for now, it is Antarctica that still lingers most vividly in Roe’s mind, the silence, the whales, the penguins and those moments where the ship stood still among towering walls of ice in one of the most remote places on Earth.