When a young British naturalist, Charles Darwin, boarded a research vessel, the Beagle, in 1831 for a five year around the world voyage, no one could have guessed that his trip would form the basis of a scientific discovery that would fundamentally change the way we understand life on this planet. Now, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, Stanford University is offering adventurous travelers a once-in-a-lifetime recreation of Darwin’s fateful voyage, but with a twist. Instead of hunkering down for weeks in the confines of a ship, travelers on the Stanford Voyage of the Beagle tour will travel south aboard a private jet.

Vacations by private plane are becoming more common as high-end tour providers, like Aberkrombie & Kent, Travcoa and TCS Expeditions launch organized tours that use private jet charters as the prefer mode of transportation to take travelers on around the world voyages or reach remote corners of the globe. The Stanford tour will charter a Boeing 757, configured to hold just 88 passengers. It will depart from San Francisco en route first to the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin’s observations of the variance in Finch populations across the atoll provided him with a profound understanding of the workings of speciation. From there it’s off to the pampas of Uruguay where the badlands preserve a variety mega-fauna fossils, preserved testaments of evolutionary descent. Then the tour hops over to the Falkland Islands, home to a wide variety of wild life including elephant seals and five species of penguin. The next stop is Easter Island, where the huge stone statues serve as a grim reminder of the effects of environmental degradation on civilizations. The tour then works its way through the South Pacific to Rarotonga first, and then on to New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, and Mauritius. The final leg of the voyage will take the travelers to South Africa, Cape Verde, and then finally to Darwin’s mother country, England.

In addition to many of the amenities that travelers will have come to expect on luxury tours like five star hotels, the trip will be accompanied by an expedition chef and physician, and two distinguished Stanford professors as guides. Bill Durham, a professor in Human Biology and Anthropology will provide lectures on the nature and implication of Darwin’s profound discoveries and theory, while David Abernethy, a professor Emeritus of Political Science will lecture on the historical and political context of Darwin’s journey in the age of British imperial dominance. The trip departs January 5 for a 17 day voyage. Prices are $59,950 a person, double occupancy, or $68,950 for a single.