Cruising Antarctica: The most surreal travel experience on Earth

The afternoon I farewelled Antarctica, I sipped champagne on our French ship's deck in the sunshine, as six humpback whales breached just metres away. It was a moment of such stupid levels of beauty that it has taken me weeks to convince myself it actually happened. Weeks of staring, goggle-eyed, at photos. The spangled water spurting from the whales' spouts. The sun-skimmed water fringed by bright white ice cliffs. The chunky bergs bobbing there like moveable mountains. Enough rehashing and I've managed to convince myself that, yes, Antarctica really happened. No, it wasn't a dream. But it was, unquestionably, as surreal a travel experience as I've ever had.

The detachment from reality began the afternoon our luxurious, 108-cabin APT ship departed from Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, set at the very tip of Argentina. Having thrown back seasickness tablets before leaving dry land, many of my fellow passengers and I were already woozy when we boarded, hours before hitting the perilous Drake Passage in the middle of the night. I awoke that first morning with my head swimming, the convergence of the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern oceans rocking me into a stupor and turning my journey down to the dining room into a sort of drunken cakewalk. At breakfast, the six-metre waves slurping up against the tall glass windows left me feeling like I was peering inside an enormous washing machine.

Everything felt topsy-turvy. And so, despite a program of fascinating lectures by the naturalists on board, I scuttled back to my lavish cocoon of a cabin. I spent most of the next two days in a state of half-conscious abstraction, being rocked in and out of sleep by the waves rolling by my balcony doors and emptying my mind of quotidian concerns as I let the surreal experience take over. At certain points, room service was ordered, the healing power of gourmet burgers discovered. At others, it felt necessary to totter down the hall to the bridge which was, unusually, open to passengers 24 hours a day. There, I watched the whitecaps crash against the bow of the ship and listened to our charismatic captain Etienne Garcia announce zealously over the loudspeaker, "you must deserve your paradise!"

Indeed, like all great things in life, you must move through the pain to get to the gold in Antarctica. Eventually, the heaving and rolling abated and the Antarctic magic began to dribble through. Finn whales breaching by the side of the ship. Penguins shooting in and out of the water as they raced the ship, like oversized slippery bullets. The thrill of preparing for our first landing, gathering in the chic lounge bar wrapped in six layers of thermals, polar fleece, down and wind jackets, before venturing into the icy wilderness on our Zodiacs.

Having always believed myself to be a traveller impassioned by culture, I'd wondered whether this place of nothingness – this great white desert with no language, currency or permanent human population – would move me. But after taking my first crunchy steps on the continent at a place called Neko Harbour, I found my eyes unexpectedly welling up as I tiptoed through a "penguin creche". The dozens of fuzzy bodies waddling all around, the frosted whip of the wind against my face, the growl of the ice chunks as they slid past the shore. Even the smell of the penguin guano (poo, to you and me), a head-swimmingly rich scent reminiscent of rotten seafood and wet cigarettes, developed a certain romance. One of the naturalists told us the penguin chicks were being prepared to enter the ocean for the first time, where they'd spend the winter feeding. She pointed out how the mothers feed their infants a little before running away so the babies chase them, thus teaching them how to move less clumsily and fend for themselves. I spent the majority of those first 90 minutes on land rooted to one spot, entranced by this game of penguin catch.

Over dinner that evening, after our second outing to a British historic base called Port Lockroy where we had the bizarre experience of buying souvenirs from four women who were calling the port home for the Antarctic summer, my dining companions and I decided that the continent's abundance of nothing is, actually, quite something.

It's this nothingness, in fact, that a traveller can come to appreciate most on an Antarctic journey. It seems to create a mental spaciousness and freedom that's very difficult to find in other parts of the world, one that puts you right at the centre of things. During a morning Zodiac ride through an "iceberg garden", as our expedition leader called it, I fancied I could almost hear the wild, ancient conversation going on between the water, the wind and the ice. The ice that had once been water and would be water again; the wind that had shaped the ice into these gigantic abstract sculptures. There were icebergs that looked like waves, like combs, like nuclear mushroom clouds. There was a white iceberg with swirls of blue twisting through it, like a massive bubblegum paddle pop. One indigo beauty was the ruffled underside of a can-can skirt; others were draped with chubby white crabeater​ seals, stretching and waving from their frosty perches. "I'm not religious by any means, but this does make you feel closer to God," a fellow traveller whispered to me that morning.