After the Eiger and the glaciers of Grindelwald – colossal icy tongues that licked the village in the 1860s, but have retreated back into the mountains today – she returned to Interlaken to board the steamer across Lake Brienz to Giessbach Falls.
You'll spend three nights in the historic mining town of McCarthy, surrounded by glaciers and 4,000m peaks, and cruise across Prince William Sound, a stunning glacial landscape that is home to orcas, seals and bald eagles.
Travellers in Patagonia tend to focus on the glaciers and national parks rather than the large-scale sheep farming that bought such wealth to the area.
Book a self-guided trip from mountain hut to mountain hut – across passes, enormous glaciers and lakes.
This was the first in a succession of glaciers; the next, D'Agostini, is named after the Salesian priest who photographed and charted much of this region in the early 20th century, giving it so many Italian names.
The net effect: not only are you worrying about juggling your finances and losing those stubborn extra pounds, but you're also fretting about the economy, people suffering in conflict zones, disappearing glaciers and endangered species.
How else to safely see polar bears in the wild, watch glaciers calve from great frozen walls and icebergs the size of shopping malls float by?
In the horizontal blasts of cutting wind and freezing shards of ice from the nearby glaciers, it was hard enough to stand upright, let alone plant a tree.
One of the study's authors Eric Rignot, of NASA, says that "in a number of places around Antarctica, ice shelves are melting too fast, and a consequence of that is glaciers and the entire continent are changing as well".
The Australis sails from Punta Arenas, a town of many monuments and abundant rain, through channels and straits bordered by mountains that still bear the glaciers that shaped them, sometimes presenting nothing more than vast expanses of grey, bare rock.
Continuing south, you arrive – eventually – in the extraordinarily beautiful Los Glaciares national park, a huge area that protects the southern ice field, dozens of glaciers, virgin forests of lenga, ñire and guindo trees.
