Swan Hellenic’s Scandi Cruise with a Sci Fi Twist

We all know how we don’t want to spend our holidays.

Booking a one-way submersible trip for £250,000 to visit a Titanic graveyard would be bottom of my bucket list.

Bungee jumping.

Chasing tornados.

Pot holing.

No thanks.

But searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence in the company of scientists while enjoying the luxury of cruise life, now that really floats my boat. It’s an extreme adventure without bonkers risks.

My first ever cruise ages ago set sail from Tilbury to Madeira in a bleak mid-winter.  After what seemed like an age of stormy buffeting and yawing the first island I espied from my porthole was not the destination island but the Isle of Wight.  But even a seven-month pregnancy bump and a Force Eight didn’t stop me playing table tennis against the Captain – destined to command the Royal Yacht Britannia.

That was decades ago and a totally different experience to my latest visit to the spanking new SH Vega, which this summer completed her inaugural voyage around the UK and Ireland.

She is one of a trio of Swan Hellenic’s state-of-the-art expedition ships,  Finnish built, Scandi furnished and achingly tasteful with muted colours and clean lines.  Not a swirly, garish carpet in sight. (I’d always suspected that pattern was to disguise the aftermath of seasickness). This elegant ship is fitted with serious stabilisers.

We weren’t exactly whistled aboard as we made our way up the gangplank at Portsmouth for a whistle-stop recce.  But we were greeted at every turn by a one-to-one army _ or should that be Navy? _ of 150 staff from captain to cleaners, chefs to spa masseurs, and waiters bearing bubbly and canapés.  Better than a welcome whistle any day.

Our buffet lunch, barbecue fish and gooey desserts augurs well for travellers on this ice-class ship making waves with her sisters on expedition cruises from the Arctic to Antarctic, Brazil to Papua New Guinea, Norway to New Zealand, Madagascar to the Mediterranean.

There’s a different gourmet chef aboard each cruise, with cooking shows and gastronomic visits ashore.

Cruise class with added intelligence

But the selling point for me is Swan Hellenic’s link up with the SETI Institute, a space and Earth science research organisation supporting NASA.  SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

Passengers will join a quest to find other forms of life within and beyond our solar system, taking researchers to the planet’s most remote and inhospitable regions, including Antarctica.

Only last June NASA announced it was commissioning a study into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), the rebranded UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). America’s Department of Defense also investigated reports so now seeking Life Beyond Ours is not a taboo subject among top brass and respected scientists.

Swan Hellenic is fully on board this open-minded zeitgeist by signing up guests with expertise in astronomy, astrophysics, astrobiology and planetary science to give adventure travellers an extra dimension to their cruise.

My choice would be to join SH Vega’s Voyage to the Northwest Passage next month (September) to catch astronomer Dr Seth Shostak’s lecture on Looking for Aliens.

SH Vega even boasts a Citizen Science Room.  On many cruises guests can contribute valuable information obtained during their expeditions and on board, reporting cloud data to NASA, recording whale sightings,  and monitoring phytoplankton and Antarctic seabird numbers.

The whole ethos of these cruises is adventure, expeditions, exploration.  No disco glitter balls or bingo on these trips to the world’s most extreme regions.

 SH Vega, just a year after leaving her Helsinki boat builders, is ‘built like a rhinoceros,’ Captain Lyubomir Garciyanov from Bulgaria, assures me. ‘That makes it good for ice-breaking.’

Not that you’ll encounter any rhinos at either Pole.

You can tailor your voyages to fit your budget – around £3,000 for an Arctic cruise and £6,000 for the Antarctic –  your interests and calendar.   Choices range from eight day explorations to an epic 21-night semi-circumnavigation voyage. On this adventure SH Vega will visit Gough Island – seabird capital of the South Atlantic – and Tristan de Cunha on her way to Cape Town, South Africa. This voyage will be followed by cultural expedition cruises up the West Coast of Africa and on to Lisbon, Portugal, before coasting the Atlantic seaboard to Honfleur, France.

Celtic discovery voyages of Cornwall, Ireland, Wales and Scotland will take SH Vega  to Iceland, Norway and the Arctic for her summer season. Finally, in September, she’ll cross from Greenland to Halifax, Canada and southward to spend October and November deep in the Caribbean and Brazil through to the end of November 2024.

• For more information about Swan Hellenic, please visit www.swanhellenic.com