South America Explorations: Week 15 - South Georgia & Antarctica

Sunday, January 19^th, 2014

As week 2 of our 19-day Antarctic voyage commenced, we stopped first this morning on Prion Island. We had actually tried to stop here on our first day in South Georgia, but the waves were too powerful and Austin K and Frank S. Todd decided to move to Plan B that day instead (heck, it might have been Plan N for all we know). But apparently this island is too incredible to miss because it’s home to many nesting wandering albatrosses, which it seems are not so numerous. I’m guessing that it’s probably because they wander. Only a guess.

The South Georgia government only allows 60 tourists to be at this particular location at a time, and they also mandate that everyone stay on the wooden boardwalk that they’ve constructed for us. The boardwalk wasn’t very long, and the fur seals seemed to like walking on them as well. Invariably, there always seemed to be a tourist who wanted more distance between them and a fur seal, so there was lots of time in the boardwalk line devoted to “shooing” off a seal. And there was even more time spent taking pictures of absolutely everything – I know I mentioned this in the last blog, but it seems to me that a significant percentage of people will experience this trip more through their camera lens than through their own eyes, and that’s really sad. I wonder if maybe many people don’t actually inherently know how to enjoy a beautiful scene without having an urge to document it and post it on Facebook… even though these same people will often admit that they themselves won’t look at the photos again.

Fortunately, we only had to be on this boardwalked island for an hour before we took an hour-long Zodiac cruise around the island in search of other wildlife. We ended up seeing a few different birds that we had not seen before as well as a macaroni penguin and a chinstrap penguin. I actually enjoyed the scenery and the humongously long fettucini-like kelp that gently meandered from the rocks with the ebb and flow of the ocean more than any of the wildlife we saw.

In the afternoon, we went out to Right Whale Bay to walk around and see yet even more king penguins, fur seals, and elephant seals. It seems that Left Whale Bay was simply not good enough for us, so I’m glad that Austin K was looking out for our best interests. This bay opened up to a very large flat plain which was completely covered by king penguins, fur seals, and elephant seals. The staff had blazed a trail for us somehow to get through to the plain, but this cleared space was very quickly re-inhabited by the animals. Somehow, it seems they don’t respect the invisible barrier created by the placement of 8 poles in the ground over a length of 500 feet. Didn’t their mamas teach them anything about rules?

So I followed a staff member (Heidi) with a small gaggle of tourists to get up to the plain and get away from the much larger gaggle of Redcoats wandering along the beach snapping bucketloads of pictures to take home and never look at ever again. Up on the plain, it took a little bit to find a good spot to sit and soak, and I just enjoyed a bit in silence while some random penguins and seals came up to check me out. The king penguin chicks are about to be weaned and they are quite massive at the moment. They are working on shedding their baby fur and getting a coat of feathers so that they can finally swim and catch food on their own. But right now, the just look like massive cute balls of brown fluffy stuff.

I watched one of the adorable fur balls follow its mother around crowing non-stop until the mom regurgitated some food for it – this feeding is odd-looking because the mother just opens her mouth and the baby reaches up into the gullet for the partially-digested food transfer. But it looks like the mother is about to snap the baby’s head off.

As I made my way back to the zodiac embarkation spot, there was a big kerfuffle between some birds and a fairly sizable group of Redcoats watching with snapping cameras. There were five or six petrels and scuas trying to get their fair share of a freshly killed penguin adult. Later on the ship, they showed what happened – Mrs. Crox & Sox happened to catch the whole thing on video.

Apparently, a fur seal was having a bad day and started bickering with a king penguin – this minor

bickering is quite common, but apparently this seal had enough and responded by grabbing the penguin by the neck and snapping it with a quick whip of the head. Fur seals don’t generally eat penguins, so the seal dropped the victim and the predatory the birds swooped down to finish the poor fellow off. Undoubtedly, many other Redcoats had the urge to stop the massacre, but we were warned in advance that we would witness nature and were to try and interfere as little as possible. Of course, our mere presence could be called an interference as well, but it’s clear that the organization is trying their best to minimize this as well.

Back on board the ship, I finally settled on a workout routine. The weight system they have is really not user-friendly at all and uses actual plates instead of a much simpler Universal machine type of set up. A weight machine with plates is especially difficult on a ship that rocks back and forth all day and night. The same issue goes for the treadmills and the elliptical machine because the rocking makes you alternately have a decline and then an incline… and decline jogging on a treadmill doesn’t work too great. So I settled on setting the treadmill to a max incline (15 degrees) and just doing a fast-paced walk. All of this, followed by a nice trip to the severely under-utilized sauna onboard. I definitely need some sort of workout to at least attempt to counteract the massive culinary indulgence going on on this ship.

In the evening at the Polar Bear Bar, we were entertained by the Monkey-Eating Eagles, which is a band of cruise ship employees with a guitar, bass, and drummer with a steady stream of different singers. And they are all Filipinos. The reason that was notable is that they ended with “Country Roads”… you might be able to imagine that this was a bit surreal – to be listening to a Filipino band sing about West Virginia off the coast of the South Georgia islands in a ship whilst all of the mostly European passengers are singing along, word for word. I was told later that John Denver was very popular amongst the older generation in Europa and Australia.

Monday, January 20^th, 2014

We had an early rise this morning again – Austin K woke us up at 6:30am for a 7am breakfast and an 8am Zodiac boarding. We were three this morning as my initially single room had temporarily transformed to a triple. Chelsea’s roommate has had a really bad chest cold, prompting us to change her self-titled nickname from “Old Mary” to “Black Lung Mary”. The result of this unfortunate illness has been many restless nights for both of them, so I offered the bunk to Chelsea so she could one good night’s rest in. This morning, she seemed like a very happy camper, despite having to do the walk of shame with all of her bed linens back up to the 3^rd floor. Note: there was no hankying or pankying (that I know of).

Our first stop this morning was Gold Harbour, where we basically were welcomed to a vast beach full of king penguins, fur seals, and elephant seals – much like the past 3 days. Though I might be in the minority on this boat in this opinion, I was kinda getting tired of seeing the same animals over and over so I’m looking forward to getting a move on to our next destination. That’s unbelievably sad, I know. I remember when I was on a safari trip in Tanzania a few years back, my friend Mike and I were both tired of seeing “yet another lion” by Day 3 of the trip. My how we get bored so quickly.

One of the staff members, Doug, led a small group of passengers to a short hike to ridge from where we could get good views of the total colony and surrounding landscape, including a gorgeous glacier falling from a nearby cliffside. Getting there in itself was an adventure since the ground was covered with wildlife. So Doug merely grabbed a pole and trudged straight through, scattering animals everywhere, and we mostly followed the beach line as far as we could go before heading up into the mountain. This breaks a number of the “rules” we were given: don’t come within 15 feet of the animals, tread lightly so that you don’t disturb the animals, and don’t walk along the beach so that the ingress/egress are not blocked. It’s clear that these rules have to be broken though so that we tourists can see anything at all though. There’s just too many animals here.

The views from the ridge were very nice indeed, and we saw the kayakers from our ship enter the bay to get a much closer view of the glacier. This was the first thing that they got to really get a solid view of that we didn’t. Oh yeah… the kayakers – a select group of 20 passengers had paid an additional small fortune to be able to kayak where appropriate during our zodiac landings. By the time I knew about it, the spots had all sold out, but they seemed to be going out almost every day. Drat.

On the way back to the zodiacs from our short hike, I almost got toppled by a particularly strong wave while I was walking too close to the ocean – I was doing this on purpose to wash off some of the penguin poop that we all had to walk through on the hike. And then I saw a half-molten penguin attempt to get in the ocean – a giant petrel noticed it too and knew that this penguin wouldn’t be a good swimmer and so it tried to attack. The two traded jabs at one another for a while until a large wave washed the penguin back to shore. On the beach, a second petrel joined to try and take the penguin down, but he escaped unharmed and back into the flock. I’m still not exactly sure how the penguin had any shot of defending itself to begin with – those petrels are pretty nasty and all the penguin was doing was holding its head high, which seemed more like an invitation than a defense motion to me. Perhaps I should ask the revered Frank S. Todd, penguin expert extraordinaire, why this is so.

After lunch and a rest, we headed out for our afternoon landing at Cooper Bay to see some macaroni penguins. Unfortunately, the locations of elephant seals meant that there was only a small space that would suffice for a landing, so the crew split the landing into a zodiac cruise and time on the beach to see these penguins. Both were short. While on the cruise, we saw very large flocks of penguins swimming towards the island and launching up in a powerful burst to land on the rocks. Every once in a while, a penguin would miscalculate and not quite make it up far enough on the rock and bounce back into the water. Brittany said that while kayaking, she saw a penguin try to hoist up on one of our zodiacs, but it didn’t shoot high enough and just bounced off the side.

On the island, almost everyone congregated in a tight pack at the beach, so I ventured up a very muddy trail to get a different view with a few others to observe this other species of penguin. These penguins had a really thick orange-colored unibrow, which is probably why they are called macaroni. They were fairly tightly packed and seemed to get angry any time another penguin walked by them. And then they would often crow together – while the king penguin crowed by trumpeting its head straight up and singing, these penguins extended their flippers to both sides and then raised their heads up for a long drawn out squawk while oscillating their heads a full 235 degrees side-to-side. It was interesting enough that I videoed it.

Back on the ship, we cleaned up and then watched on deck as the captain steered the ship in and out of Drygalski Fjord as far as we could go. Along the way, we started seeing increasing levels of floating ice as we neared the glaciers at the end before turning the ship around to head to sea. That reads painfully bare and uninteresting, but it was spectacular enough that we gave the captain a standing ovation later for even attempting such a feat. Through the trip, he successfully attempted a number of maneuvers that we were told most captains would refuse to do.

]

And on top of this, Josie had a big batch of hot chocolate served to us on the bow, topped off with a shot a Kahlua and some whipped cream. Best of all, it was unlimited. Yes, you read that right – an unlimited mug of Kahlua’ed hot chocolate. Can life get any better? I think not. Hot chocolate is an excellent way to my heart, for all you dear ladies out there who are down with the brown. Adding Kahlua? You may as well have just proposed to me. Josie dear – my answer is YES!

 

After dinner, Jeff played some songs for us after a multi-day hiatus. Many passengers were in the lounge watching the movie The King’s Speech instead. I just don’t see how you could choose to watch a movie widely available everywhere over singing “What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor” and “Piano Man” and “Puff, the Gentoo Penguin” with fifty of your new best friends. That last song, as you might guess, is a Jeff Wiseman original – a hilarious adaptation of “Puff, the Magic Dragon” that we continually pestered Jeff to close with each night.

I’m not one of the night owls on this cruise by any means, so I retired to bed just after midnight. Aron got in at 4am. And Brittany and a few others didn’t go to bed until 6am. Part of me wishes I stayed out, but I think I’m largely glad that I didn’t. I think. Brittany somehow seems to be able to survive each day on 3-4 hours of sleep and still arise perky and enthusiastic. I suspect that she mainlines espresso. Aron usually stays out late as well, but the rest of our little quartet, me and Chelsea, head back generally at midnight or 1am. Sleep is valuable to me, especially if I want to enjoy the excursions the next day which is the primary reason I’m on the ship.

Tuesday, January 21^st, 2014

Today was a full day at sea, which meant that I had a lot of time to catch up on writing this pseudo-diary that I’m back to almost a month behind on. I also started reading another book. Several of us did exactly that, in fact, choosing to skip a viewing of Happy Feet. I actually wanted to see the movie, if only to come up with a set of inane questions to pepper Frank S. Todd with and based on the animated “documentary” that I saw onboard.

By the way, these next few days may not have obvious pictures to go along with them, so I'm going to include random pictures that I like. It's like cinematography for a blog, or something. Because I have no idea what cinematography is. Wait a sec - photographer Paul actually explained cinematography to me on the ship one day, thusly ruining the catch-all movie term I had used for years. Everyone say "Thanks, Paul". 

We did have two very good lectures though. Heidi gave us an introduction to the different types of whales and their biology and migrations and social patterns. And staff member Scott told us the fascinating story of the South Pole race back in the early 1900s between explorers Scott and Amundsen, along with the completely different strategies that the two leaders employed. Amundsen reached the pole first and far more efficiently, whereas Scott and his final crew perished on the return trip.

What was actually most striking to me was how the explorer Scott was perceived back in England. He was lionized by their government and media as being a hero, even though he was far from being a strong leader and was directly responsible for the demise of his men. The British also treated Amundsen in the opposite light, even though he was the much stronger leader of the two. Many of the British passengers confirmed this vocally, that they had only heard about Scott in an extremely positive light, and seemed a bit shell-shocked to learn that this wasn’t the truth. Later, I even heard a few Brits saying that our staff member Scott must have been biased and clearly was twisting the facts. What I saw was a historian who had clearly done his research, tell the story that was most likely by most personal accounts.
 

I found this humorous because in the States, we have a fairly large group of people who have lionized the Constitution and the Founding Fathers as infallible, and don't seem to realize just how bitterly divided the framers were on a tremendous number of concepts, and equally seemingly refusing to recognize that times have and will always change. Any mention of this is met with anti-patriotic claims from this group of course. Many of the rationales for creating rules no longer exist and are no longer relevant as intended by Founding Fathers. Those who do not adapt and change will always ultimately fail – if nothing else, certainly nature has taught us this. And, of course, many of our Congresses have also agreed that the Constitution and Bill of Rights have errors in them, hence the 33 Amendments that have been passed over the years. Given the current political climate, I’m not sure how another Amendment could ever possibly pass.
 

That many of these same individuals hold to a 2000 year old book as infallible does not surprise me in the least (I believe the pope even said this was a bad idea). Similarly, religion also has a long history of creating rules as a means for managing a society that are relevant in one era, and completely irrelevant (and often counter-productive) in another.

After dinner, Jeff took to the stage again for a few hours and then a group of us played a few games of darts before heading off to bed. Fighter pilot Chris had not played darts very much in the past, if at all, but it seems his hand-eye coordination is so incredible that he shot 100 in his first set of throws, two 20s and a triple 20. And all three throws were within an inch of one another. I suppose those are the type of folks we probably want as Air Force pilots.

Wednesday, January 22^nd, 2014

Today is another full day at sea. We’ll be passing by the South Orkney Islands and some others this evening on our way to the South Shetland Islands which we hope to explore tomorrow.

The first talk today was by Alex on the geology of Antarctica, the Falklands, and South Georgia. This was easily the most well-put-together talk I’ve ever seen that explains everything I had ever heard about geology and how the actual data backs up everything from tectonic plate dimensions/locations to the tectonic plate movement/velocity over time to the creation of mountain ranges & oceanic rifts to the seemingly random strings of islands to the shape and orientations of rock formations. My mind was completely blown. Actually, the same went for everyone else in the room too - we, a group of 100+ generally well-educated people were unable to come up with a single question. Fortunately, Alex shared the name of a book that contains most of this information also in a simple language – it’s called New Views on an Old Planet by Tjeerd van Andel.

(Creationists, you might want to skip down a few paragraphs, by the way – and don’t say that I didn’t warn you. You might find my thoughts bordering on offensive.)

I really don’t understand how people can honestly look at this information and continue to say that some supreme being created the earth the way it is, or even say that this is all part of some grand intelligent design plan. Sometimes, it feels to me that this can just be a level of mental laziness for some, driven by the inability to process that level of scientific information. After all, it's far easier to just attribute it all to a higher being than to truly understand all of the evidence.

I think religious authority figures can be guilty of the same, and cannot bring themselves to give any credence to the scientific community. I can imagine it's a scary thing to accept any evidence that flies in the face of what you've been taught and have been teaching to others your entire lives. But I know that there are plenty of brave ones who do exactly that, and have the courage to say "I don't know for sure" when faced with a difficult question about our origins.

But what’s so exciting now vs 100 years ago is that we actually have real data and information available that explains how the earth formed as we know it and provides credible evidence on how we ourselves came to being and we get more and more information every year that explains even more – and these things belong in EVERY single classroom in our nation. These are the things that drive the intellectual curiosity needed to groom our future engineers and scientists. Stories like Noah’s Ark are crazy to take as a fact – the intent of that story and others are only to teach moral lessons (much like Aesop’s Fables). Sure, there will always be more questions, but with time and scientific inquiry, there will also come more answers.

As you can probably tell by now, this stuff makes me quite angry. And while I can absolutely respect that different people have different opinions, the religious right has zero right to put faith-based agenda-driven visions into our schools above widely accepted science that clearly labels concepts as theories and postulates with and without supporting evidence. If you want something different, then I think you should home school your kids instead and not negatively impact others by your religious choices. I'd also feel very sorry for those kids not getting the exposure they need to the sciences. And we wonder why there's such a lack of science/technology graduates from our US-based school systems and those positions/jobs getting filled by immigrants from around the world...

Please give me a few moments to climb off that massive soapbox… wait for it… and… back down to earth. Thank you. And my apologies if I went too far with that soapbox too. I can't tell you how many times those paragraphs were written and re-written to try and convey my thoughts appropriately.
Note: I've edited these past few paragraphs since initially posting. I realized that I made a tremendous error of mass generalization, while my thoughts were focused on a few specific incidents that make me angry - in particular, a group of state senators in a certain southern state who questioned a group of scientists on evolution in an unbelievably condescending and dismissive manner. It is this group of people that get my blood boiling. There are plenty of others who are extremely well-informed and they see this same information as reinforcing their convictions, and I suppose I can understand why. In any case, I will steadfastly maintain that creationism should not and does not have a place within the school system, and that science already does an excellent job of sharing why we know as fact and what we only have theories on.

During lunch, we had a whale sighting. Again. For some reason, it always seems like we are visited by whales during lunchtime. Don’t they have any courtesy? This day, we were visited by 20-30 long-finned pilot whales – they were swimming right at us and then disappeared beneath the ship’s bow before any of us could grab a camera.

In the afternoon, Paul gave us a quick talk on shooting photographs in snow and Osi talked about the history of women in Antarctica. This last talk was very interesting when you think about it – 30 or 40 years ago, no research station or vessel would allow women to participate. Some countries even had laws in place prohibiting women from participating. Nowadays, women are at all levels of hierarchies in positions related to vessels and research to the continent. I think we often forget just how recent this type of discrimination existed at an institutional and/or governmental level. But I have to admit – I fell asleep quickly during that lecture, not because of the topic, but because the presentation style was not really buttoned up well and wandered and repeated a lot. It probably would have been better for a man to give that particular presentation. (That was a joke, folks.)

Before dinner, Austin K led us through a quiz game to test our knowledge on what we had learned. Our group of young’uns were filling out questionnaire under the team name “The Spiteful Teabaggers”. You know, because if you're going to teabag, you may as well do it out of spite.

One question in, I realized how seriously and competitive the older folks were taking this and knew that we didn’t have a chance in hell to win, so I filled out a second answer sheet under our unofficial group name “Daycare” and answered with nonsensical silly responses. I have some experience doing this years ago my then-local bar in Hoboken during their weekly trivia nights, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I have plenty of practice at being ridiculous. I made the most of this opportunity too and Austin K even called me out for it a few times during the score recap, and finished saying that he would post my answers for everyone else to see. He didn’t.

Instead of enjoying the entertainment from Jeff this evening, a few of my new friends opted to sit in the library and write a faux romance story that they had named “50 Shades of Kelp”. I wasn’t sitting with them at dinner, and though I completely missed the backstory on where this idea originated from, I was game. I’ll spare you the details of the nonsensical story that we contrived by taking turns writing paragraphs on the back of a ship-provided barfbag, but needless to say, there were lots of inside jokes from the previous 10+ days. And the story-writing created a slew of new inside jokes as well. Like “chickpea”. Huh? Exactly.

Thursday, January 23^rd, 2014

We landed on Elephant Island this morning, which is part of the South Shetland Islands, which are below the 60^th parallel making them officially part of Antarctica, meaning that I reached my 7^th continent today. Today should be a national holiday for everyone.

The significance of Elephant Island is that this was the island that Shackleton’s crew navigated to in lifeboats from deep in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica – if you look at a map (overlaid with the direction of the ocean currents), you’ll see just how unlikely this was. And since our trip was called “Spirit of Shackleton”, we needed to try and get there ourselves.

The spot we landed on was called Point Wild, where Shackleton’s crew stayed for 4 months while the James Caird lifeboat went to South Georgia for help. We couldn’t do much here because the beach was virtually non-existent. So we landed one Zodiac at a time for 10 minutes to step foot on this historic location and view a colony of Chinstrap penguins (named so because of a dark black line that looks like a chin strap) along with a monument to Captain Pardo, the Chilean sailor who navigated the ship that eventually rescued Shackleton’s men from this rocky hellhole.

The second landing in the afternoon was at Cape Valentine on Elephant Island - this is the location that Shackleton's crew first arrived at from the frozen Weddell Sea after they had not seen land for a year. No tourist ship ever really attempts to land here, so no charts even exist around this part of the island to know the depths of the ocean. We were told later that the captain decided to use sonar, which apparently is not typical and many captains would never even attempt this. The ocean was still rather choppy – the ship was rocking back and forth and loading & unloading the zodiacs was extremely difficult, but we were glad to be there. We saw a few dozen fur seals with pups, 2 Weddell seals, 1 elephant seal, and chinstrap penguins & two chicks. According to Frank S. Todd, there’s no recent history of fur seals breeding here so this was new knowledge for him. Fur seals used to be plentiful down here until the sealing industry (that’s the folks who kill seals, not the ones who figure out how to close things) completely wiped them out in Antarctica. So this was a very encouraging sign that the fur seals are starting to repopulate the area. Frank S. Todd was happy.

Friday, January 24^th, 2014

Our first stop this morning was to a spot called Turret Point on King George Island, not to be confused with Tourette’s Point, which is located F*CK YOU!

Here, we got to observe a couple of small groups of Adelie penguins – many of the nesting grounds of these penguins are in protected areas on the islands or continent, so we were fortunate again to have good weather and calm seas to be able to land here and observe them. Basically, they make nests of stones and spend time stealing each other’s stones when the other isn’t looking. And they look like a child painted their eyeballs on the sides of their faces. And they collectively squawk off any scuas trying to steal a young chick for their dinner. And the last piece of baby fur that comes off of a chick seems to be the Mohawk stripe atop the head.

After sitting and observing with 100 of my favorite Redcoat friends for a half hour, I walked around a bit and saw a large group of nesting giant petrels and realized that maybe we weren’t supposed to walk up here. There was another spot on the island where there were lots of elephant seals lying side-by-side. I realized that I haven’t talked much about the elephant seals in depth, only that we’ve been seeing them everywhere for the past week.

As you can guess from the name, they are very large, but they are very different from fur seals. Fur seals are part of the eared seal family and can hop around a bit upright. Elephant seals are affectionately called “blubber slugs” because they can’t do much on land other than occupy space and molt, the latter of which is why they are on land to begin with. They move in a very similar manner to “the worm” dance move from way back when – except that they’ll only do that for about 15 feet at a time before needing to stop and rest. They have massive expressive eyes and just seem to be smiling and content, often wallowing in large groups together, side-by-side, or stretched out atop one another. And they are a farty, belchy, sneezy mess to boot. Kind of like a group of teenage boys. They make me smile.

In the afternoon, we went to Arctowski, which is the Polish research base. We all got our passports stamped here, though this is an unofficial stamp because Antarctica isn’t exactly a government with a customs & immigration process of any sort. I’ve largely avoided putting any sort of non-official stampage in my pristine travel document, but Antarctica will be the lone exception this passport around.

The area was not really all that special. We went into the research station briefly – I was hoping that there would be people there that we could learn about the research they were doing, but instead all we got to see was their dining room. It was kinda drab. Austin K told us that he likes going to the Polish station because they are friendly and happy to have us, whereas the American station Palmer borders on being outwardly rude so he generally avoids them as much as possible. By the way, Austin K in a US native and lives in San Francisco, so it’s not as though he is purposefully trying to avoid our station in the least. Somehow, Brittany charmed the gift shop attendants enough to get a free T-shirt, which she proudly wore numerous times throughout the remainder of the trip.

Saturday, January 25^th, 2014

Our first stop this morning was to Cuverville Island which has a large population of Gentoo penguins. I must admit, when I first heard the staff members saying “Gentoo”, I thought they were saying “Gen2” and I wasn’t really sure what they were referring to. It took a day or so before I realized they were talking about a species of penguin. Most of you reading this likely had no idea that “Gentoo” was a type of penguin either, but on this boat, I had people laughing with (at) me.

On Cuverville Island, I noticed that the majority of people were headed to the right after deboarding the zodiacs, so I naturally went left instead. And I’m so very glad I did that. There were only a handful of people who went that way because there was snow on the ground and it was difficult to walk – my feet sank into the snow every third or fourth step, so many of the older folks found it too difficult. After fighting for about 15 minutes, I got to a few decent sized colonies of Gentoos and there were only 5-6 people around. Each Gentoo had a nest of small stones built and most had 1-2 young chicks that they were raising. It was the first time we had seen chicks this young and there were some moms still with eggs.

After a bit, Chelsea (who apparently had the exact same excursion plan) and I headed over to the other side of the beach to gawk and stare at a few more small colonies. By that point, many of the Redcoats had departed already, so the plan worked to a T.

While waiting for the zodiacs, a few of us sat on large stones on the beach and watched the Gentoos swim around. There was a small piece of ice that the Gentoos apparently were stricken with – they kept shooting out of the water to try and land atop it – some would make it and others wouldn’t. I shot a quick video of it and happened to get a number of mishaps… hopefully this video posting works...

 

On the way back to the boat, the Zodiac took us on a short 15 minute cruise around the icebergs that dotted the bay in all different shapes and sizes and hues of blue. This zodiac cruise could have gone on for 3 hours and it still would have been too short. I think I might even like the icebergs more than the penguins. Anyway, the iceberg gawking continued after we got back on the ship and will probably continue until we head back up towards Argentina. Today was really the first day that felt like we were very far south because of the snow and ice that’s everywhere here.

The afternoon stop was to Neko Harbour, which is a few hours away on the mainland proper. There was no harbour there, which I think we kind of expected. It was located deep in a bay, and there was a ton of floating ice. Getting the kayaks out and the zodiacs running was a bit of a challenge as some significant ice floes came at us just after dropping anchor. As we got ashore, we quickly understood why – near the landing spot on the beach was a very large glacier which was calving quite frequently (apparently, this term refers to the action of a piece of glacier falling off into the water and NOT to the act of childbirth by cows), depositing chunks of ice into the bay. And there were lots of other glaciers in the area doing the exact same thing too.

There were a few small colonies of Gentoo penguins near the beach, but four of us (Aron, Celine, Chelsea, and I) headed straight up to the top of the mountain, through some pretty thick snow. Only a dozen or so other passengers made it up there as well, so we were treated to a spectacular view of the bay from a high vantage point. When we got up there, the sun also came out and we were burning up – several of us had to go down to our base layers only for almost an hour up there and a few folks got back on the ship with pretty red faces and necks. But the view was positively spectacular up there and we got some great pictures. I also saw a fairly large chunk of ice fall off the glacier and plunge into the water below, which caused some pretty large waves to wash up on shore, surprising a few of the Redcoats down on the beach.

The way down was the most fun – Celine and I took the opportunity to slide down much of the mountain on our bellies despite the warnings from Alex that we would get soaking wet (we did not). And the snow was such that we took an opportunity from time to time to hurl a snowball or two at one another.

About 30 of us went camping on the ice this evening as well. Initially, we were supposed to camp at Neko, but owing to the ice conditions, the captain didn’t feel warm and fuzzy with anchoring in this bay overnight. I don’t think any of us were surprised one bit. Besides, there didn’t seem to be all that much snow on flat land that was available for us to camp on in Neko anyway. So the captain and crew steered the boat to a nearby area called Leith Cove in Paradise Bay.

The camping spot was a pretty small island with no wildlife, which I was mostly thankful for since that meant no poop everywhere and no stench of poop everywhere. But we didn’t really have access to the mainland to go on a hike in the snow or anything else of that nature. We were, however, treated to some spectacular views with mirror reflections of the mountains and glaciers in the water. Most of us sat or stood outside for 2-3 hours doing exactly this. Before I knew it, it was nearing midnight. In this part of the world at this time of year, the sun is up most of the day and since it was overcast, the clouds kept the sky lit up more or less all night. It’s easy to lose track of time. Most everyone was in bed by midnight because the winds started picking up out of nowhere. Me too – I was freezing.

But yeah, today was probably the best day we’ve had on this trip.  

Tidbits

1.       Brand names are funny. The name on the sugar packets is “Dona Sangre” which loosely translates to “Madame Blood”. And the name on one of my wine bottles read “Toro Viejo”, which means “Old Bull” – no wonder that particular bottle of wine was kinda crappy.

2.       In one of Paul’s initial lectures on photography to us, he shared that he hoped we each would leave the trip with at least one shot that was worthy of being blown-up and framed. From then on, any time one of us took a funny picture, we’d loudly proclaim “That’s a framer!”

3.       Context-free quote of the week: “vegetarian tentacle porn”. I can’t even remember the context anymore. I just remember busting a nut when that phrase was uttered during lunch one day and the tables next to us wondering what happened that made us laugh so much.