16.50, 27th february 2009, upper deck of my Antarctic ship, 7 degrees, bit windy, not rolling anymore, finally seeing land after more than 2 days in the Drake Passage, exciting
Strange feeling seeing land again after so much ocean, waves, nothing in the distance. A kind of relief, it’s Cape Horn out there, the scary point for mane sailors over the centuries, but safe land for me. It’s out there, in front of me! We had just had a very deep conversation about global warming, and me questioning myself about those 126 flights I took last year…happy for these 3 months I will only travel by land and sea. And then…we saw land, I just couldn’t resist, took my camera and jumped outdoor. I’m now lying down on one of the benches of the upper deck, listening to Ligabue (Balliamo sul mondo) and writing this mail.
Antarctica…..what’s Antarctica for you all? What’s Antarctica for me? What was before and what is it now? To be honest up to 4 months and 8 days ago Antarctica was just a remote mass of ice at the end of the world, something you can hardly reach, surely not me. A place with no human life, many animals and an amazing number of icebergs, that’s it. Then on that Sunday this world opened to me, meaning my 3 months off travelling in Argentina and Chile, and the immediate subsequent idea to reach this remote land on a cruise ship. I knew nothing about it, and although I kept reading web pages to find the best cruise option for me I did not actually read much about down here, and I boarded the ship completely ignorant on what I would be doing, what I would be seeing. I kind of like to arrive super fresh in a new place, so that I can make my own opinion of place, people, nature, culture. So, nothing new for Antarctica.
Leonie was asking me many questions which I could not answer to. Leonie is the swiss girl I had met in Punta Arenas and who bought a last minute ticket for my same ship. She paid it 2000 dollars less than me, but who cares, I really wanted to do this trip so didn’t want to risk missing the chance if no last minutes available.
16.18, 2nd march 2009, hostel room, trying to warm up after funny but strange hiking, 8 degrees outside, cloudy, tired
Haven’t managed to write any line in the last few days, hectic life as usual ;-)
Antarctica…many of you told this is their dreamland, it is a dream to reach it, it’s such hard work that I really feel privileged having set foot on it, one of those few thousand per year. I’m still freezing if I think of the landings we did, ah ah!
It was about 4pm on Thursday 19th feb when Leonie and myself headed towards the harbor and the Grigoriy Mikheev. The ship looked good, big enough to carry the 48 of us passengers all the way through the scary Drake Passage. A bunch of people was already starting the boarding operation, a smiley guy welcomed us, was Jamie, our guide later on. Next I saw myself setting foot on the ship, with Peter asking to smile for a nice picture, followed by getting into my room, number 305, twin shared facilities. The first surprise…I was going to have the cabin all for myself, we were not fully booked, cool!!! This meant I could be as messy as I wanted, and I didn’t let you down my readers, my cabin by the time to leave the Peninsula on the way back was like ground zero, everything lying around in dispersed order, the proper me!!! Excitement, is what I was feeling. Exploring the ship, going to the deck to see Ushuaia in front of me, the divers boarding with all their big bags, seeing faces, looking for someone young… The ship was ready to go, and we were ready to meet other passengers and got to know the team. First impression: too many English and too old ;-0 Second thought: it’s not so bad, this people look funny! So they were. People kept introducing to me and Leonie, and we kept forgetting names. The team introduced himself and they seemed young and funny. Dinner was served and I had my next surprise: the food was very good!!!Oh dear, I’m gonna put on many kilos during this trip, breakfast, lunch and dinner, I do not do 3 proper meals even when I’m home! And there our adventure started. Most of the people were divers, 25 of them, while we were 14 “special needs people”, or “topside people” or “non divers”, all the names to recognize all those not crazy to dive in the cold waters of Antarctica! Many characters in the group, we all had a great input in making this trip unforgettable. Jamie, the “fantastic” lover of “krill”, with his stripes shirt but above all his colored striped underwear (please check the pictures!!). Lynn, the 62 years old perfect English woman if you see her, but when she starts talking she is so funny in her naïve way, with her comments on people and her suggestions. Ann with similar acute humor as Lynn, nice chat about life and work. Joe the Lebanese/French dental surgery passionate for oceans and diving with his young and very nice Iranian wife. Joe is so full of himself, with what he did, his videos, his pictures, he wasn’t bad but a bit too much for my taste. The Chinese and his lifelong friend Peter, they were sharing the room, and they had a double bed…the Chinese ended up sleeping on the couch…not that good friends to share a bed! The Chinese is a very rich guy, he had a camera worth 8000€, he invited the whole crew for a diving trip to the Maldives all included (?!?!?!?!) and he mentioned to Joe that if Joe organize any nice diving trip to let him know, within 24 hours he can be ready to board a plane to whatever destination in the world…I should have asked him if he had a son ;-) Javier the Spanish weird guy, his English was very very poor, his eyes were always half asleep and he commented on Antarctica: it’s a chicken farm in the ice…argh! (we do a very good imitation of him, keep making us laugh!). Mike the crazy, just like this. Asgeir the Norwegian who got biten by a leopard seal and was always talking with double meaning. The 3 americans who would not smile even if paid and who would dive so covered that they looked like a terrorist commando in Antarctica! Guido the german who has been given a birthday cake 10 days after his actual birthday and who didn’t manage to make a laugh of it, he was almost irritated! Willem, dutch, and Luci, german, who spent a much bigger amount of money to sail to Antarctica but their boat broke down so they ended up in our ship, and who were deeply in love, although they had just met on the broken sailing boat. Gemma the hotel manager, kiwi, red hair, she resulted being pretty funny when I forced her to wear my greenish dress! Jordi, catalan photographer and infinite diver, patient till the bone upon requests for pictures by other guests, he has even managed to teach me something about photography and he made me laugh a lot, which is not bad! Masa…even here at the end of the world Japanese are following me, but he was nice, and unfortunately for him he got stacked in the room with Javier, pobre chico! Leonie and obviously me have been the stars of the trip, but this is a later story! Oh, I cannot forget the young third officer, a Russian guy who bet a bottle of wine with Leonie for sunrise time, she won, but he managed not to give her the bottle. And the captain Andrey, a bit looking like my grandpa, very serious from the outside but he resulted being funny and very nice.
Mr. Drake has been very nice with us, completely flat, 2 perfect days to cross it, full knots, time to look outside to spot animals (whales, seals, penguins, albatrosses, skuas…), to attend lessons about Antarctica, animals, behavior and whatever else, eating, sleeping, chatting, making new friends, and again same. By the evening of the 21st we had seen land again, the South Shetlands, our first landing point. Excitement the next morning, we were landing!!! Wear warm clothes, wellington boots (like for fishing), lots of memory space in your camera and you are ready to land! Hop on the zodiac and a short ride to reach Halfmoon Island shore. Penguins penguins and more penguins, chinstrap and gentoo type. How do you behave when you see hundreds of penguins around you? You get crazy and start shooting pictures!! Or at least this is what I did. I don’t know, probably shot 200 pictures that morning, luckily I have a digital camera! Some more gossips about penguins (not mentioned in previous mails!): they are bloody smelly, they stink!! Or better, to be more precise, they do not stink, it’s their shit which stinks terribly! On the second landing I had to keep my nose closed for half an hour not feeling sick because of the smell. Another curiosity about penguin shit is that it has different color depending what they eat: red if they eat Krill , green if they eat fish, so you can imagine the beach all covered in different colors, and stinky! Next, still on similar subject, it’s how they actually shit. They have a kind of tail which is normally low, but when they need, they lift it very quickly and “pluff” a jet of shit comes out. Very difficult to catch on a picture as very quick the whole act, but your lovely heroine spent hours and hours taking pictures and managed to portrait this special act (basically I got it without noticing!). Check out the pictures! On the beach there were also seals, and the best one I saw was a Weddell Seal, it was so sweet, all on her own, sleeping, waking up, looking around, squeezing the eyes and sleeping again. I took some very nice picture of it! Back to the ship for lunch, we were just waiting for next landing: deception island. To be honest I was a bit disappointed: I wanted to see real Antarctica, I mean ice, glacier and icebergs, but on that first day we just saw land and penguins. Beautiful places, just was expecting something different. Anyway, Deception Island is a volcanic island, last time erupted in the 70ies, destroying the base which was there. Big base I would say, many building left over, also some big oil tanks (Plopsa had a look at them!!). The island has the shape of the mouth of a volcano, and the sand/stone is dark grey, a bit like Santorini but with 35 degrees less. We climber up to a view point, and we saw the most amazingly called birds in the area, well not, there are others which are funny. Anyway, these birds are called “Antarctic shag” (shag = sex). Jamie was telling us that once he was in a group with a perfect English couple, you know the typical lord behauvoir… he was very enthusiastic for birds. When they were reaching the island by zodiac she saw the shags and she said loud “oh love, you can have your antartic shag”…. You can imagine the laughter of the whole zodiac!!! As we are in the subject, the other bird with funny name is the sheatebills, with is pronounced like “shitbills”…well…their job is to eat the stinky shit of the penguins… what a dirty job!!!
Back to Deception island…one of the (many) highlights of the trip…the swim! Yep, because this is a volcanic island, they “sold it” to us that the water was warm, so we could have an Antarctic swim there. Well…it was bloody cold outside, but myself, Leonie, the doctor and 2 guys took off our clothes (we had bikinis of course, men too, ah ah) and run into the water. It was BLOODY cold! I did get in, even with my head, and got out, like the other girls and one guy, instead another one stayed there for ¾ minutes swimming around! Anyway… now I can say I swam in the Arctic region (well, North Cape, back in September 1998) and in the Antarctic region!!!!!!!!!!!! Who else has been that crazy??? Out of the water there was towels waiting for us, and a long way back to the ship on the zodiac: a hot shower was what I was dreaming!
This mail is long enough i'm afraid, so I will stop here, and will not tell you yet of the second part of the trip, the crazy one, the real antarctic one!
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