The accommodation

The Sofitel chain can usually be relied upon for a splendid place to stay, and the Sofitel Buenos Aires was no exception. The staff were friendly and helpful, and spoke excellent English. Unlike in some other hotels, there were enough of them, so if you needed anything, you could always find someone to help.

Our bedroom was very comfortable, and certainly big enough for our needs, but a little smaller than I was expecting considering it was billed as a superior room. Still, it had all the sorts of things you need in a hotel room: minibar, satellite TV, safe, and some nice touches like fresh flowers. Just no trouser press. Is it only British hotels that have trouser presses in the rooms as standard?

It was nice that the hotel had a swimming pool, although even by hotel standards it was very small. It would feel very crowded with more than about 2 or 3 people in it.

The location was pleasantly central, and we were able to do all our sight-seeing in Buenos Aires on foot.

Click here to see the hotel website.

It has to be said that the hotel Cap Polonio was a huge disappointment after the delights of the Sofitel Buenos Aires. The hotel was extremely basic. We wouldn't have chosen to stay there had we been a bit more organised, but by the time we got round to booking our hotel in Ushuaia, all the good ones were fully booked.

Now, to be fair, it wasn't all bad. The staff were friendly and helpful, and the location was great, right in the town centre. But, sadly, that is a pretty comprehensive list of the hotel's good points.

It got off to a bad start when they screwed up our reservation, and gave us a twin room instead of the double room that we'd booked. The rooms were extremely basic. No minibar, cheap toiletries in the bathroom, very little storage space.

One of the least desirable features of the hotel was the mould on the bathroom ceiling. But apart from that, it was clean enough, and at least we didn't have cockroaches or anything like that.

The hotel's catering facilities were as basic as the rooms. Although the hotel had a bar, it never appeared to be open, so getting a coffee or a beer necessarily involved leaving the hotel.

The breakfast was particularly basic, with distressingly artificial-tasting orange juice, and a very poor selection of food (just bread rolls and croissants).

Click here to see the hotel website.

The Grigoriy Mikheev is one of the smaller Antarctic cruise ships, and takes just 46 passengers. There are good points and bad points about being on such a small ship. The biggest drawback is that the ship is less stable in rough seas, and many of the passengers were seasick while we were crossing the open ocean of the Drake Passage, although seasickness really wasn't a problem once we'd reached Antarctica. The other bad point is that the ship might seem a bit basic to those who are used to large luxury cruise ships.

But we wouldn't have traded our cruise on the Grigoriy Mikheev for one on a larger boat for all the tea in China. In our opinion, the good points of being on a small boat outweighed the bad points by many orders of magnitude.

The best part about being on a small ship is that whenever there is an opportunity to go ashore, everyone who wants to can go. The logistics of taking large numbers of people ashore mean that on the larger ships, you may have to take it in turns. Because of its size and its ice-strengthened hull, the Grigoriy Mikheev was able to get into some places that would have been impossible for the larger ships, so we really got to see Antarctica very well.