JOHN VC

Click on pictures to get the full effect

Day 1 - Today Tony and I are in the southernmost hotel in the world and it has free internet. The city of Ushuaia, looking as if Aspen had moved to the coast of Siberia, was a little fishing and whaling village 50 years ago. Now it’s booming from the tourist trade. The next town is 120 miles away across bog and mountain and no good reason to go there, but yet the 20-block long main street here is jammed with cars. They still haven’t got around to putting up any stop signs, but that’s OK. There are no accidents, because everyone drives terrified. Eleven flights a day come in from Buenos Aires, bringing kayakers and trout fishermen and hikers, plus planeloads of people coming to meet their Antarctic cruise ships. Steak and wine are cheap - $15 for a big porterhouse - but other prices are similar to New York.

We were there because Darrel, who has run (he says, we scoff) 40 tours to Antarctica during his time, heard from his old pal, the owner, that the newly refitted Ocean Nova was going out for a shakedown cruise and asked if he would take a few experimental passengers at half price. We were quite prepared to cook our own flapjacks, but then Quark Expeditions leased the rest of the cabins for a full cruise with a tour staff, cooks and maids and all. Oh well.

Ushuaia is on the north side of the Beagle Channel, named for the ship that on its second cruise took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos and revelation. South across the water, the snowy peaks are in Chile, which owns the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Today us early arrivers - 10 in all - hired a van to take us over to Harberton Ranch, the oldest habitation in Tierra del Fuego. The Argentine government granted this vast tract to a missionary working with the last survivors of the Fueghino Indians — an otherwise hardy lot, described in “The Voyage of the Beagle” with snow melting on their bare skin, but no match for European bugs and guns.

The ranch is still in the family, but Tom Goodall, the present owner, had the good luck to marry Natalie from Ohio when she came down to study Fuegian botany. Natalie, a true scientist, became fascinated with the whale skeletons that abounded on the coast. One day a marine mammal guy from the Smithsonian came by, and nearly dropped dead. The 60 or 70 skulls Natalie had stacked up in the barn included the best specimens ever seen of several very rare species, and one that was completely unknown. Long story short, she switched to marine mammals, started beachcombing in earnest with student helpers, raised money to build a museum for her trophies, and now has a collection of whale, porpoise and dolphin material here at the end of a dirt road 2 hours from Ushuaia that is considered the second most important in the world. If you look at a map you can see how that could be. Tierra del Fuego sticks down into the Circumantarctic Current like a fish-hook, and everything that dies or is sick in the whole Southern Ocean washes up on its eastern shore. Natalie is now stout and white-haired with bad knees, but we got invited to a sit-down dinner and then a three-hour tour, thanks to Darrel’s many visits over the years. Just to give you an idea, Natalie’s museum has complete skulls of five different species of beaked whales, and nobody else anywhere has more than 2 or 3 examples of these strange seldom-seen beasts whose males have tusks like wild boars. It was totally amazing.

Two by Antony

The Goodalls run boats out to their island where magellanian penguins nest in burrows and gentoos cuddle their eggs on piles of pebbles. We followed carefully marked paths so as not to disturb but it was just like the Galapagos - the penguins were merely bored. I about had a heart attack, however, when a huge skua gull leaped into the air and hovered in front of my face with her sharp beak gaping in threat — I had come just a little too close to her egg on the ground.

Day 2 - On board Ocean Nova, and under way around 5 pm, we get dinner and introductions and then a safety lecture, when it’s a little too late to make a leap for the dock. As well as lifeboats and life jackets, we have newly installed self-inflating rubber noogies that unfold “like a bivalve” to a circular raft with a canopy when they are flung overboard into the raging sea. Instead of dangling twixt heaven and earth on a rope ladder while the sinking (or flaming, as you will) ship and the rubber bivalve heave in opposing directions, you simply dive into an elastic tube to be pooped out onto the raft. The tube is made of some constrictive stuff that slowly gulps you down so that you don’t accelerate right through the raft. They also demonstrated a new kind of life-suit - an orange waterproof dry suit with built in flotation that will keep you alive even in the polar seas for 24 hours. We all wanted to sleep in one.

Tony captures the Beagle Channel - click for reality

Beagle Channel is a beautiful water-valley between snowy ridges going on to the horizon. The sun sets behind us as we move smoothly along. The wind dies down, the water is like a millpond. Captain announces that the forecast is excellent - a recent storm has passed and the Drake Passage will be “very calm, no more than 2 meter waves.”

Day 3 - at sea.
I slept all morning after breakfast, Tony slept all afternoon. It’s the Bonine seasick pills with him. I was just sleepy. People saw 4 kinds of albatross, and one of us saw some penguins jumping the waves. Wonder what they eat out here. At 10 pm or so we crossed the Antarctic Convergence. The Friends of Darrel gathered in the aft lounge for a celebratory snifter of Jack Daniels. Very little wind, gentle rocking of boat, all the fears of violent stormy waves for naught. The good news is that the fine weather will continue. The bad news is that there’s more ice this year than usual (global warming = bigger storms, more snow, less sun) so we will divert to the South Shetlands and probably not even see the mainland peninsula itself. Only icebreakers can go further in.

Day 4 - still at sea. The wind remains calm, the sea glassy smooth with a broad swell though it snowed during the night and low dark clouds hover. Captain says he’s never seen the Drake Passage like this, and seldom in any ocean. We pass through a small pod of fin whales just as breakfast is announced. Things are a little disorganized as all rush out on deck and then rush back in again. Tony winds up at a table where the people discuss what happens to you at the South Pole - water runs straight down the drain without swirling either left or right, and nobody can pull your fingers apart if you are making a power sign (forefinger to thumb). They are, of course, confusing the scientific facts of the Equator with those of the Antipodes but he politely refrains from correcting them.

The first iceberg is spotted far off as we sit down for dinner - Tony’s picture is better than mine. An hour and a half later, as dusk slowly gathers, we slide in under a solid roof of low-hanging snow clouds to Elephant Island, the outermost of the South Shetland archipelago. The tops of rocky islands and cliffs disappear in the cloud layer. Thousands of penguins look like scattered dust on the ice. A white cliff, shining like neon in the gloom, appears next to the vertical black walls of rock, and it takes a minute to understand that we are looking down the throat of a huge glacier. We move slowly past a little gravel beach, a few square feet of black cobbles in a notch below the rocks - Point Wild, where Shackleton’s men waited for rescue under two overturned lifeboats, with rock walls and tarpaulins to keep out the wind, for over four months of subzero darkness and only seal fat and penguins as fuel. Bathing was out of the question - you simply wiped off the grease and soot. We stand at the rail, bundled up and freezing in the late spring weather, and look out on this vast, shadowy hell of barren rock and snow and suddenly realize that what they did was absolutely impossible. The true desolation of Antarctica hits us for the first time.

Day 5 - The ship moves to King George Island overnight to anchor off Penguin Island, a small volcanic cone sticking up through the ice-dotted water. It’s below freezing and a 40-mph wind is tossing the ship about. “This kind of weather turns big strong men into girls,” I complain to Tony. “You have to sit down to pee.” Though the water is choppy, everyone wraps up in their various special Antarctic outfits and the ship’s wondrous felt-lined boots for the zodiac trip to shore. The ground is covered with two feet of new snow, and walking is a lot of struggling and sliding. Nevertheless, most people set out on a half-mile hike to the summit of the cone and a view of eternal cold. My photo of the hikers strung out in a wavering line across the snowfield to the horizon looks like the condemned going to their fate in some icy hell. The Van Couverings decide that we have done enough penance already and retire to the beach, where Tony works his borrowed 3D camera to get me posed with a titanic elephant seal snuggled happily into a snowbank, basking in the springtime breeze.

Back on board, I feel kind of chilled and take a long afternoon nap. The weather has cleared and Tony goes with the crowd to Turret Point for an afternoon of penguins and seals. He finds that if you sit or lie in the snow, the cutie-pie Adelie penguins will get curious and toboggan over on their tummies to investigate. There are giant whale vertebrae sticking out of the snow. After dinner, the late sun lights up the icefields and black rocks in glorious landscapes that are worth serious photography, especially from the comfortable upper deck of the ship, ha ha.

Day 6 - In Admiralty Bay on King George Island, our weather luck holds - brilliant and calm. A score of brave souls strap on skis and head up the slope to do a 14-km cross country along the spine of the island (which is one big smooth ice sheet except for a few scraggy basalt nunataks sticking up like church steeples). The rest are left to visit the Brazilian and Polish research stations. “Antarctic shopping mall,” says Jamie, the saucy bloke who is the tour biologist. (Jamie says we won’t be seeing any big bull elephant seals because they’re all off at South Georgia Island getting laid). Tony and I loaf for the morning, hearing the the Brazilian station is not all that gaudy, but in afternoon we suit up and catch the zodiac for the Polish Arctowski station, where there is said to be some wildlife as well. Turns out mostly ice and whale bones, plus a few penguins and a Weddell seal. There is a cute little Polish-style souvenir shack at the landing beach; where the cute little Polish salesgirl turns out to be an oceanographer on her own time.

My camera was set wrong, Tony’s wasn’t

We just get back to the ship when the captain comes on the PA - three minke whales are swmming around the ship. The whales plunge and blow, circling away and then back to the anchored ship, apparently fascinated by the sound of its idling engine. We can look down and see them sliding through the gin-clear water. Then four more come from far across the bay, leaving a track of turbulence and foam in the glassy surface that comes straight towards us like an invisible finger drawn across the water. The bunch of them continue to circle around off the port side, swimming right up to the ship and then away, for a good half hour, as we hang over the rail madly clicking. Two zodiacs coming from the beach are diverted over to where the whales are circling, and the curious beasts check them out, rising almost within arms length with a mighty whuff! and and arching over to dive right under the boats - people on the boats are transfixed. Now and again a whale will lunge out of the water on its side, or two will emerge side by side with flippers locked. Jamie the bloke biologist is stunned. “Never in my life have I seen minke whales take any interest in a ship or boat at all.”

Day 7 - Morning stop at Roberts Point on Roberts Island. Tony and I are last to embark and as a result we get a zodiac all to ourselves. Our Yamaha gondolier is Phil, an old salt with a great store of polar sea stories, and who is quite amenable to dicking around. We scoot over to look at a nearby glacier made of mountain-sized fragments sticking up in a white moonscape, and circle around an iceberg before landing amidst chinstrap penguins, which are also very cute. We learn that the heavy late snowfall, which covers everything with deep unmelting powder, will mean few chicks this season - penguins need little piles of rock, which store heat of nesting parent, in which to cradle egg. Pebbles are gold, and the birds are forever stealing them from one another. Every rocky hilltop has its crowd of braying penguins, with toboggan marks down the side where the departing spouse heads for his or her three days on the fishing grounds.

Afternoon on “Aitcho” island, so named for not being named on charts issued by Hydrographic Office (H.O., geddit?), to see gentoo penguins and some spectacuar basalt plugs carved out by the ice. I climb panting over the spine of the island to see these formations, while Tony settles down on the bouldery beach next to a penguin launching pad to get some action shots. It is such a clear day that one can (dimly) see the Antarctic Range on the horizon, 70 miles away. The Bransfield Strait, across which we peer, is the north end of a submerged rift valley the equal of the East African Rift. Therefore, Deception Island, the local Kilimanjaro, whose tip pokes out over to starboard. To see the distant mountains is not a common sight from here, says the Captain. It is decided to make a try for the mainland, despite reports that pack ice bars the path. As soon as everyone is on board the ship ups anchor and sets off southeastward. The crowd gathered in the salon gives a hearty cheer - yes! May we set foot on the Antarctic continent, after all!

Day 8 - We are jolted awake at 2.45 am by a shuddering impact. Followed by others through the dawning hours, at random intervals. We are plainly ramming fairly substantial ice, but we plow ahead. This experience is apparently customary - we have an “ice master” with us, a brawny Russian captain who guides us during such occasions. On the other hand, this was just what Explorer was doing only a week later when things went bad. Cold chills anyone?

When we are called to breakfast the ship is placidly anchored off the mainland coast at Primavera, one of the numerous seldom-occupied stations the Argentines have erected in support of their claim to a vast pie-shaped sector of Antarctica which is also claimed by Britain. After setting foot on the Continent for an hour or so, we enjoy a zodiac tour of the “bergy bits” or small icebergs that make white islands in the bay. Some, made of snow ice thousands of years old, glow with supernatural blue light from every crack, as if lit up from within. One spooky berg made up of frozen broken blocks has an astonishing Jimmy Carter profile. Then, after picking up the skiers from another slitheroo, we move over to Mathewson Cove at the south end of Trinity Island, where there is one of the numerous seldom-occupied Chilean stations erected in support of their claimed sector. Which, as it happens, almost exactly overlaps the Argentinian and British claims. While the Chileans and Argentines are in a race to have the most babies born in Antarctica as proof of tenancy, at least they stick to the main bases and don’t park families in these lonely, but always unlocked, shacks. This one was built on a rocky knoll of the sort favored by the gentoos, and a hundred or so gabbling and braying penguins crowd the yard as if demanding to be let in. I guess they have their own claim to defend as well.

Mathewson Cove is said to be where the first woman (a whaling captain’s wife) reached Antarctica. Just a few miles down the coast is the spot where in 1821 the first of either gender to set foot on the continent was a crewman from a sealing ship who jumped out to hold the boat steady for Captain Davis of Nantucket. They were in search of more seals after the first rush exterminated the population on the South Shetlands less than three years after their discovery. We learn that the beginning of the industrial revolution was lubricated by whale and seal oil, with liquid petroleum and natural gas still 20 years away. The craggy wall of mountains along the spine of the peninsula now looms across the bay in stark black and white, instead of being the horizon of dirty orange teeth against a dark smoky sky that we saw in our binoculars. Is the polar atmosphere tinged with pollution, or is this just the way distant mountains look down here?

Day 9 - The narrow entrance to the lagoon that occupies the center of the Deception Island caldera is a canyon termed “Neptune’s Bellows” because of the way it funnels the wind. It is fairly dramatic, but the 12-mide wide interior is just a circle of snow-clad slopes in which volcanic structure is hard to see. (Usually the snow will have melted by now, says Darrel.) We pause at the abandoned whaling station just inside the entrance, with its giant rusty whale oil tanks and old Norwegian barracks. There are no animals or birds about, so Tony goes to investigate the picturesque potential of empty buildings in the snow while I take another morning off. Wish I’d gone, his pictures are wonderful. There have been several major eruptions from vents inside the caldera during the past 50 years, causing anxious evacuations of Chileans and Argentines from their breeding grounds on the island, but the famous “hot gravel” beach where you can scoop out a hole and strip down to pose in a hydrothermal bath tub is not open for business today.

At Half Moon Island, our last stop on the expedition, a solitary macaroni penguin is discovered amidst a crowd of chinstraps, looking with its hunched posture and gaudy dreadlocks like a desperado among respectable neighbors. There are basalt pillars surrounded by penguins for dramatic effect, and rocks in the sea with great bonbons of snow on top. Some of the more adventurous passengers find a pretty good body-boggan hill down which to slide on their waterproof backs. But then the ship lets out a long toooot - “come back now!”: Thick clouds are racing in and the wind has begun to really blow, and we must hurry back on board to prepare for our crossing the Drake Channel under more normal Antarctic conditions. We are told to stow our cameras inside our waterproof parkas for the ride back to the ship. “Does this mean we will be rocking tonight?” asks one passenger of Phil the Sailor Man. “More like hopping,” he says with a jolly grin. After dinner we pop Bonine tablets to stave off seasick, and they really do the job - as soon as we emerge from between the islands the ship starts plunging and thrashing about like a fun house ride on steroids, but we sleep like logs. It calms down considerable by breakfast time but alas, Bonine has a 24-hour effect, and every time we come back to the cabin it is only to flop and snore once more.

Day 10 - Just motoring along. The dreaded Drake Passage has gone all wussy again, and not much to do but rearrange photos in the computer and touch up the journal. Jamie’s lecture on whales and seals is full of tidbits, such as a whale can take a full breath in 0.3 seconds (and those are big lungs!) - takes a human 2 seconds - and that elephant seals can dive to 2,000 feet in pursuit of squid. My favorite factoid is that right whales win on testicles, in that.a well-hung male is lugging around some 2,000 pounds of pelotes. This is because the lady right whale wants it all during her brief annual fling, and wrings out a dozen or so maddened males in a few red hot hours. Under such depraved circumstances, the only hope that a guy whale has to pass on his heritage is to basically flush out the competition. Must be some spasm.

Day 11 - Contuined placidity, on our final 100 miles to the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia. Albatrosses are back with us, causing much less stir than when spotted on the way out. A fin whale off to port? Yawn. Lectures on the Antarctic Compact, and on future trips with Quark? Scuse me, I need to pack. It’s been a fabulous voyage, and already we’re planning our post-trip get together at Lake Sagamore under strict rules, i.e. no more than 30 photos each, and it will be forbidden to repeat Laurie the tour leader’s “humorous sayings” that blasted out of the speakers each morning at reveille. A few hours for one last wander through the souvenir shops to draw a final line at the end of the Antarctic experience, and home we go.
“Some day, son, this will all be yours.”