In awe of Antarctic’s grandeur

“They are places which complement each other, both being beautiful, both being incredibly vulnerable, and both needing caring and help,” Dr Bauer said.

Though he has been officially retired for five years, the tourism expert still travels to Antarctica each year on a cruise ship with a small group of tourists seeking to experience the raw wildness of the great southern continent.

And he loves doing it.

His function is to provide environmental information and help interpret the mysteries surrounding this amazing place, where the most noticeable wildlife is penguins, seals, sea birds and whales, and to give tour members a background into the discovery of the Antarctic and the growth of Antarctic tourism.

“It is one of the last places on Earth where no one lives – there are no humans there, only nature,” he said.

“It is an amazing place to be and in all my 26 visits to the Antarctic continent I have not met one person who has not been delighted and in awe of its grandeur.”

Dr Bauer is eminently qualified to speak about Antarctic tourism, but when he and his wife Lena migrated from his native Bavaria to Australia in 1986 he could never have guessed just how deeply involved he would become in tourism, both in Australia and the Antarctic.

After successfully completing his Business in Tourism Development course, he was told the true opening to a future in the industry was to study for a doctorate. Casting around for a related subject that was still unexplored, he came up with Antarctic tourism, little more than a concept at that time.

“It also had the attraction of being somewhere I knew virtually nothing about,” Dr Bauer said.

He graduated with a PhD in Commercial Tourism in the Antarctic from Melbourne’s Monash University in 1998, and published his thesis as a book, Tourism in the Antarctic, in 2001.

Studying had been an adventure that included haunting remote libraries (no internet then), considerable world travel, and three months as a visiting scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute at England’s Cambridge University. But he had still not set foot on the Antarctic ice.

“My first visit to the Antarctic was in 1994 to film a video, Voyage to the Antarctic, and I was blown away. In all the times I have been there since, I still find it as awesome and as unsurpassed.”

Dr Bauer describes walking where there are no humans other than members of the group, interactions with penguins and seals, watching whales – including on one occasion a vast blue whale – and carefully working his way through tumbling ice flows in a zodiac (inflatable boat) or kayak.

Now a world figure in Antarctic tourism and a member of a number of expert panels, his travel expertise takes him to many destinations.

As we spoke he was packing for a journey to Lucerne in Switzerland, then on to Chile before setting out for Antarctica for the second time this year.

His latest appointment is as Adjunct Professor in Sustainable Tourism at the University of Central Queensland’s School of Business and Law, and at home he is chairman of Mission Beach Business and Tourism.

“There is so much beauty in the world and it is up to us to maintain a balanced view to preserve it,” he said, speaking of one of the lectures he is often called on to give, titled From the ice to the rainforest.

He adds a subtitle – “From words to action”.

“Talk is important, but with any environmental problem, action is more important, whether it is buying country that if destroyed would be irreplaceable, planting trees, or volunteering for environmental restoration – it is doing something practical,” he said. “And the beauty is, it doesn’t matter how old you are to do it.”

Antarctic expeditions – www.oneoceanexpeditions.com