Sailing Toward NEW HORIZONS

After a once-in-a-lifetime reboot, luxury cruising has returned. VERANDA contributor TRACEY MINKIN explores the rare coin of access luring voyagers back to the deep.

- TRACEY MINKIN

THE POLAR BEAR is outside my window. I'm standing on a ship's stateroom balcony-my balcony. He stands below me on a slab of sea ice so vast it looks like land. He's not close enough to touch, but he's close enough for me to watch his every move with no need for binoculars. He saunters, drops to rub his broad shoulder on the ice, and then splendidly rolls right onto his back, paws up in the air. As my ship slows to stillness here in the middle of the Iceland Sea, somewhere very north of the Arctic Circle and hundreds of miles from land, this vulnerable creature rolls back up on four legs, turns his dark brown eyes and snout toward me, and uses his keenest sense smell to assess. We're close enough, in other words, to suss each other out. He's unconcerned. To prove it he drops down for another casual back roll, lolling like a sultan. Eventually he moves on. So, quietly, does my ship.

I could never have imagined an encounter like this with Ursus maritimus, much less steps from my bed, before making an Arctic voyage aboard Le Commandant Charcot, a revolutionary new ship launched in 2021 by French cruise company Ponant. But I chose this-and two more sea journeys-to peer ahead into cruising's next great chapter after the crushing halt of the COVID-19 pandemic. I sought to explore new places, yes, but more so to explore how we might now see the world by ship differently. To look, as all sailors should, to the horizon.

THE NEW POLAR PLUNGE

Close encounters with wildlife and adventures like kayaking are served alongside Champagne-and a healthy measure of ice-aboard Ponant's Le Commandant Charcot. The ship charts varying routes into the Arctic in the North American summer (including the Northwest Passage and the geographic North Pole) and navigates the frozen realms of Antarctica in the winter. Prices vary by itinerary; us.ponant.com