It seemed like a good idea at the time. Other people were doing it and it looked like fun. So why NOT slide down the side of a glacier in Antarctica? It was just the latest in a series of ever-more-exotic travel adventures experienced in the last couple of decades by John and Pit Lucking.

John and Pit Lucking share a laugh with Gianni Vishteh, MD, the trauma neurosurgeon who used screws and rods to fixate and fuse three broken bones in John Lucking’s back. 

Although John Lucking never even had a passport until age 46, in recent years travels have taken him and Pit far beyond the beaten tourist tracks of Europe and Asia.

They’ve been to Tahiti and Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, met primitive tribesmen in New Guinea, been terrified by AK 47-wielding soldiers in Eritrea, enchanted by cheetahs in Namibia and awed by elephants on Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain. They’ve gone white-water rafting on the Zambezi River in Zambia, climbed mountains in Bolivia and experienced an uncounted host of other truly extraordinary locales.

So when the opportunity arose to tour the southernmost portions of Argentina and the South Atlantic, including a stop in Antarctica, they couldn’t resist. This seemed like the most exotic trip of all.

Map of the South Atlantic shows the area John and Pit Lucking were touring on their exotic cruise before John was injured.

It certainly started that way. They took off with about 100 others to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, where they boarded a cruise ship that took them to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the South Orkney Islands and on to the Antarctic peninsula, a strip of land that reaches north and points toward Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America.

“It was great,” Lucking said. “We had all our warm gear on, boots up to our knees, and were hiking up to the top of the glacier ridge.