Take the kids on an extraordinary adventure to the Galapagos, Antarctica or Papua New Guinea

Instead of watching the Animal Planet, Discovery or National Geographic channels on television, consider taking your family on an exotic cruise where real-life families can experience their own travel vignettes to re-play the rest of their lives.

At first, family cruises and exotic cruises may not seem like the same animal, but if your kids love mammals (and birds and reptiles), and they want to text about adventures their friends have never done—give them, and yourself, a gift, by cruising comfortably to the unknown in a relatively known way.

You can unpack everybody once for multiple adventures with other helpful adults preparing the meals, making the beds, taking the family photos, telling your kids to stay on the trails, making sure you don’t get lost, and helping you all have unforgettable, bonding times.

Some large cruise ships are floating entertainment parks with fun climbing walls and water slides, but if you are looking for hands-on authentic experiences off the ship, there are smaller cruise ships that can take you to remote wildlife habitats and tribal villages.

“The Bottom of the World” for Top Times: Antarctic Cruise
Everyone in the family can have “happy feet” when you explore a penguin colony of thousands of black-and-white waddlers. Your eyes can be happy too as you spot albatross overhead, and whales, dolphins, leopard seals and crab-eater seals amidst the whites and blues of icebergs. Antarctica has never been inhabited by people, but Norways’ Hurtigruten cruises make the remote “White Continent” a comfortable place for people to have wildlife times.

On the line’s first cruise to Antarctica this year, a 13-year-old passenger from New Jersey was telling a new friend onboard, “Well, every kid likes penguins, but it’s much better to see the real thing than stuffed animals.”

For John Finch, a teacher from Maryland, the cruise proved a great way to spend quality time exploring the southern end of the world with his college-age daughters during their winter breaks before one headed off to MIT in Massachusetts and the other to the University of Southern California (USC).

November to March is prime time to visit Antarctica and experience penguin nest building, chick hatching and “ecstasy” mating calls, as well as long daylight periods and warmer weather. It’s summer at the “bottom of the world” while it’s winter in the northern hemisphere,.

The Hurtigruten line has been navigating glaciers and icebergs since the 19th century along the fiords of Norway under the Northern Lights and above the Arctic Circle. Now it also has the stellar MS Fram (Norwegian for “forward”), which takes up to 400 passengers from South America hundreds of miles into the exploration outposts of Antarctica.

Weather permitting, two shore expeditions per day provide memorable photo opportunities. Families who send a postcard from the southern-most post office in the world are also able to write about cruising inside a volcanic caldera, seeing tabular icebergs bigger than city blocks, yards of tempting international buffet food, intriguing lectures about maverick explorers and unique animal behavior, Orca whales spouting at sunset outside the ship’s sauna window, visiting the international research station that first identified the hole in the ozone or laughing at two penguins sliding down a sloped iceberg.

Your family can leave their various sized footprints of happy feet in the snow and take happy stories home.

Go-Go Galapagos
Go ahead, laugh together! There really are blue-footed booby birds. And giant tortoises with heads bigger than a human’s. And iguanas three feet long that will hold staring contests with you. Go ahead and say “Wow!” You might see a baby seal that was just born, its long eyelashes still wet. Or you might watch a young pelican try to swallow a fish that is way too big for it.

Ecoventura’s “expedition yachts” offer great year-round, award-winning green cruises for Galapagos family travel. With only 20 passengers per cruise, you could invite the extended family or friends and have the entire boat to yourselves. The roughly 2-to-1 passenger-to-crew ratio means you can have individual help getting in and out of the wetsuits that will keep you warm while you snorkel with colorful fish, swimming iguanas, playful sea lions and, if you are lucky, the Galapagos’ penguins.

If you don’t want to dunk in, you can kayak over clear waters, or sit on the beach and let other animals check on you. When you get back onboard the ship, there are snacks and drinks waiting—alcoholic and nonalcoholic.

Shore trips to two different islands a day of this dramatic archipelago also provide memorable hikes, from easy to challenging. With the groups divided between two naturalists, you can have time to stop and watch wildlife fight and flirt, and wait for photographic gold. Beaches range from postcard-white sands, to volcanic tide pools and dramatic rocky contours.

Since whaling and seal hunting stopped a century ago, the animals don’t think of humans as predators and are not frightened of two-legged creatures without wings. The islands are environmentally protected: you need to keep your distance from the mammals, birds and reptiles, and you need stay on the trails—unless, of course, the trails are blocked by wildlife, which is fairly frequent.

For kids and parents, the Galapagos provide Darwinian evidence that those who can change, survive—not a bad life lesson for times when resiliency is needed. The naturalist guides can show you how the finch birds on various islands adapted differently to diverse ecosystems—their beaks ranging from short to long and curvy to straight, depending on the functional needs. With conservation in mind, the president of the family-run Ecoventura, Santiago Dunn, aims to have the Galapagos and the guests benefit from the unforgettable cruises.

Play in Papua New Guinea
Splash! A young boy jumped from a tall tree into the river, then another boy and another boy. They had spotted the MV Sepik Spirit, a yacht-houseboat operated by Trans Niugini Tours that takes visitors through the jungles of Papua New Guinea from tribal village to village along the shores of the Sepik and Karawari rivers.

As soon as the visiting powerboat was spotted, boys and girls also started paddling narrow dugout canoes from shore to the wider part of the river ahead. The kids hoped the large boat would play with them—and it did. It speeded up and did 360-degree turns to create fantastic wakes for the kids to bob up and down and up and over laughing and waving at the passengers.

The Sepik Spirit is beautifully decorated with striking local art and icons and is well staffed by people from different villages. It offers hot showers, hot food, comfortable accommodations and electrical outlets, but once on shore it may feel like time travel to the kids. There are no televisions or computers. Many of the women go topless, and little boys run naked in the tropical heat. Head-hunting still existed a couple generations ago. Running water is usually the river.

Papua New Guinea offers some of the more remote and diverse cultures of the world, with rich traditions and more than 600 languages still spoken. Your kids can see children who paint their faces as part of a traditional ceremony, not just for play; who have birds perched on their shoulders; who make taro to eat and swing machetes to clear paths.

Passengers can climb ladders into “spirit houses” where locals dress up in bones, shells, feathers and body paint to perform demonstration dances and display museum-like carvings they’ve made of masks, drums and shields. An accompanying guide translates when English isn’t spoken, so go ahead and ask about the initiation ceremonies some teenagers go through, and discuss the prices of handmade art to take home.

“It’s a truly amazing experience,” says Lynn O’Rourke Hayes, a mom adventurer and editor of FamilyTravel.com. Recalling her time in 2010 on the river cruise, she highly recommends Papua New Guinea for family travel: “Any parent who has the opportunity to share this adventure with their children is offering a gift that may not exist much longer. For today, the people, especially the children, seem untouched by the vices of the outside world. It is a beautiful thing to see and share as a family.”

If You Go

Hurtigruten- Antarctica
www.hurtigruten.us

Ecoventura- Galapagos
www.ecoventura.com

Trans Niugini Tours- Papua New Guinea
www.pngtours.com

Lisa TE Sonne, an award-winning writer, photographer, filmmaker, television and record producer, has traveled all seven continents and many of the world's seas. Her book Everything 101 will be in Barnes & Noble stores in summer 2011 and available as an e-book. She co-founded www.GivingCertificates.org and created www.WorldTouristBureau.com.