A chilling-but-thrilling journey aboard Ponant’s Le Commandant Charcot

The safety drill on Le Commandant Charcot is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

“If it becomes necessary to abandon ship in the ice,” we’re told, “you will need to get into your survival suit.”

The size of a small rowing boat, this orange jumpsuit look tricky to negotiate. You spread it out on the floor and essentially, clamber in. Then, the briefing continues, you’ll be issued with a survival kit of food, water and sunblock for 24 hours. A small town of tents will be set up on the ice, including a command centre and a hospital.

Ice is what we’re all here for, on a ship built for the most extreme polar cruising.

Le Commandant Charcot is the first of its kind. Its specially reinforced hull designed to bash deep into the pack ice.

Named after the revered 19^th-century French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot, the ship was launched by French-owned Ponant in 2021. It runs on liquefied natural gas and battery power and has already been to the North Pole five times. 

I embark in Longyearbyen, a little mining town huddled on a windswept rocky shore. It’s 1050 kilometres beyond the North Cape of Norway, on the isolated Svalbard archipelago.

An armada of expedition ships bobs in the harbour. With the Russian Arctic now out of the question for cruisers, Svalbard is enjoying a bumper season. 

But all the other ships will be heading around Spitsbergen, the largest island in the archipelago, where the water is largely ice-free.

We’re doing the opposite, setting a course for Nordaustlandet, to the east. Captain Patrick Marchesseau excitedly shows us an ice map. Nordaustlandet is fringed with orange which, he explains, means significant ice cover. To the north, there’s what looks like a wall of red: the pack ice – our destination and the kingdom of the polar bear.

We anchor off Ytre Norskøya, a tiny island that in the 17th century was a Dutch whaling station. Winters here would have been both dark and bitterly cold and many of the whalers died of scurvy. Some of their graves are dotted along the shoreline, marked by planks of bleached wood. 

I jump off the Zodiac into calf-deep water. I stagger up a bank of large pebbles and sink immediately into a bog, which pretty much sets the tone for the difficulty of the hikes on this trip: you do need a degree of fitness to venture ashore.

This trek also involves a scramble up a snowy ridge. At times, I need to use both hands to haul myself up particularly steep bits. 

Guides with guns are stationed all around the landing site, while a Zodiac patrols the shore.

Bears can appear at any minute and, expedition leader Yann Rashid explains, they are both hungry and potentially aggressive in Svalbard.

They haven’t been hunted here since 1973 and as such, have learned that man is a potential meal rather than a threat. 

By the third day, we’re circling Nordaustlandet, a silent world of perpetual whiteness. The peaks of the mountains are smoothed by a vast dome of snow and ice like some enormous meringue.

This is Austfonna, Europe’s third-largest ice cap, meeting the sea in the form of a towering white wall, 180-kilometre long and striated with deep blue. The glacier rumbles as chunks calve off into the black water, creating movement in an otherwise still world.

On the navigation bridge, the expedition crew have their binoculars trained intently on the ice.

A fishy smell leads us to a herd of walrus, slumped in a blubbery pile, chuntering and jabbing at one another with their metre-long tusks. We spot seals hauled out onto the ice, while guillemots fly low over the water in perfect V formations.

We don’t have to wait long for the first bear sighting.

The crew spy a cream-coloured speck on an ice floe. The bear can clearly smell us, sniffing the cold air, but is otherwise unmoved by the sight of a massive ship in the near distance. Everybody rushes on deck, camera shutters clicking madly.

The sightings only get better. Shortly afterwards, we spot a female and two playful cubs, just a couple of hundred metres from the ship. The mother plunges into the water and her babies clamber onto her back, hitching a ride for the short swim between ice floes. Everybody is enchanted. A later bear has its head buried in the carcass of a seal, while yet another is slumped on the ice by a seal’s air hole, waiting patiently for its intended prey to surface.

By the following morning, we’ve left land behind.

A smart blue-and-yellow helicopter emerges from a hangar and flies ahead of us, scouting the ice for bears and possible landing spots.

The ice, extending in every direction, is up to a metre thick, in the shape of circles welded together. Watching the blocks shatter as we slice through the whiteness and listening to the constant booming echoes as steel meets ice is mesmerising; I’m astonished at how long I can spend, just looking at ice.

We cross the line of 81 degrees latitude. “We could be further north than anybody else in the world right now,” Yann tells us. 

It’s a curious contrast to the uncompromisingly hostile world outside.

We live in an elegant cocoon of soothing shades that reflect the colours of nature, from stone to sea blue, with textures of slate and pale wood, and flickering vapour “fires” in the light-filled lounges.

Luckily, the cabins have blackout blinds – essential this far north, when the sun just circles overhead, never setting and playing havoc with our sense of day and night.

There’s a spa with an indoor pool and on deck, the Blue Lagoon, named after Iceland’s famous thermal bathing area. Half is warm, the other half freezing. Other neat touches include a glowing firepit on deck, and benches warmed by excess heat from the ship’s engines.

The attention to detail is impressive. Hot chocolate with boozy shots and fresh ginger tea await when we return from hikes. At lunchtimes, lobsters sizzle on the barbecue by the pool. One evening, caviar and blinis are served in the lounge. The gentle hiss of bottles of Veuve Clicquot being opened accompanies cocktail tunes in the early evenings. 

This being a French ship, with about 70 per cent of passengers on my expedition French-speaking, food is of prime importance.

While celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse oversees the menus on all Ponant’s ships, Nuna is his first signature restaurant at sea. The food here is undeniably classy; garlicky organic snails, duck confit, filet mignon and classic French onion soup all feature. 

Some nights, I head for the buffet in the Sila restaurant on Deck 9, where I can take up a seat by the floor-to-ceiling windows and just gaze out at the endless ice.

There’s always fresh sushi on offer here, as well as a superb salad bar, a choice of hot dishes and an exceptional array of cheeses, all sourced from Brittany-based fromagier Jean-Yves Bordier. 

While most people turn up for dinner in jeans on dress-down nights, two gala evenings during my eight nights on board are surprisingly formal.

Some passengers even sport tuxedos and spangly dresses. A posh frock in the high Arctic seems absurd to me but, luckily, heels and something floaty is sufficient.

Sequins aside, this is a serious expedition.

Every day, there are lectures, hikes, kayak trips and forays through the ice in the ship’s Zodiacs. I never tire of the view; I find the landscapes, and the stories of the explorers who tried to discover them, absolutely mesmerising.

My favourite member of the expedition team is Marilia Olio, who works for the Happywhale citizen-science tracking app.

We’re bobbing off a glacier face, with nothing but ice on the horizon, when Marilia unpacks her hydrophone and drops it into the water.

To my astonishment, beyond the thrum of what’s clearly the Zodiac’s engine, we can detect the haunting echo of a high-pitched song; a blue whale, which could be anywhere within 10 kilometres.

Next, an unearthly, trilling whistle blasts out; the underwater vocalisation of a bearded seal.

I think all of us would have stayed for days in the ice. But after 15 thrilling sightings of polar bears, it’s time to head south, many of us commenting how bereft we feel as the jagged black outline of Spitsbergen reappears on the horizon.

Being able to travel somewhere so extreme, where only a few have ventured, has been a life-changing experience.

Ponant’s Longyearbyen expeditions, including those to the North Pole, include a charter flight from and to Paris. Fly to the French capital with Emirates via Dubai (one stop) or with Singapore Airlines via Singapore (also one stop). The next Nordaustlandet expedition departs from Reykjavik and returns to Paris. Fly to Singapore with Qantas, followed by Finnair to Helsinki and then Reykjavik.

An 18-night expedition from Reykjavik to Longyearbyen, via east Greenland and Nordaustlandet, departing on 22 June 2023 costs from $39,470, all-inclusive, with a one-way flight to Paris at the end.

You’ll be given a luxurious but bulky expedition jacket to keep, so leave room in your luggage and travel in something light. Mud boots are provided and you must wear them to go ashore. A couple of evenings per expedition are quite dressy; some passengers even wear black tie, although the dress code simply states “evening attire”.