Locomotoring

For normies like us, there is no physical training needed to go to the end of the world. An experienced polar adventure company will take you there, care for your safety, keep you warm and well fed. They will help prepare your packing list and compliment it with polar parkas, hiking poles and boots. They will give you mandatory trainings. They will prepare you for the day and give you educational lectures.

What is needed on your part, is a mental readiness. The weather in Antarctica changes from one hour to next and, you are at the weather god’s mercy – cloudy and windy or clear blue skies and a calm ocean. When the wind picks up, it brings with it the coldness of the glaciers. When the rain starts, it turns to hail and stings your skin. When the waves pick up, it is easy to get preoccupied with maintaining foothold.

While Antarctic journey started in Ushuaia, our winter vacation started with a brief stay in Buenos Aires, a city that was enjoying a blast of summer. Buenos Aires is a colorful and invigorating metropolis. It did nothing to prepare us for Antarctica. The city’s brilliant yellows, red, indigo and green only highlighted the lack of colors that we subsequently found in the Antarctic.

A pit stop in Ushuaia did a little more towards preparing us for the coming days. Stepping out of the little airport, we were immediately greeted with icy winds. The snow on the mountains and the grey skies prepared us for a different summertime ahead. As soon as our ship left the calm waters of the Beagle channel, the adventure began with the infamously deep Drake passage, home to some of the most temperamental waves in the world. It is a two day journey to the calmer waters of South Shetland Islands of Antarctic peninsula. During those two days, the waves rose to greet us on the fourth floor deck of our small ship. Our cabin at the front of the ship rode the waves like a galloping horse – what I imagine a galloping horse feels like.

Drake passage presents a deep dialog with oneself. How your own physiology reacts to a galloping horse, is for you to find out. Then there is a matter of how your brain perceives the seemingly unending sky and the sea. In my partner’s case, it was a physiological period of distress, of nausea and vomit, driving every other thought out of his head. He found relief in sleep. In my case, it was a state of mental distress, a deep sense of anxiousness watching the vast ocean. Grey on grey with the foamy white of the endless crashing waves, as far as eyes could see. Sometimes the waves would come within three seconds of each other and sometimes within a dozen. The ships nav told us exactly where we were on the world map, but that didn’t seem to help reduce anxiety. My thoughts repeatedly went back to ancient explorers who didn’t really know if they would sight land and when.

Our first landing was on the afternoon of the 31st, on the Half Moon island of the South Shetland Islands. It was our first experience with a chinstrap penguin rookery, the only rookery where we would see chicks. I spent my entire time on the island, walking a couple of miles and my partner went on a kayak trip before making a brief landing. Here, much of the walking and scrambling was on rocky paths, free of snow. Evenings are a good time to spot whales and orcas feeding. We saw our first whale of the trip that evening.

From here on, as we moved south, the snow and ice would get heavier. We would leave the ship twice a day. Bulk of the time, the ship was moored near Danco coast and Palmer coast of Graham Land. One thing became immediately noticeable, it was the depth the anchor went down to, compared to Alaska inner passage. We landed on small islands that appear as dots on the Antarctic map. On these islands, we would explore the rookeries and stretch our legs. Near midnight, by Ushuaia time, the crew arranged a New Year party on their heated patio deck and supplied us with bubblies. The warm deck felt a little sinful, environmentally speaking.

On Jan 1, the ship entered the Neptune’s bellows, a narrow entrance to a horseshoe shaped flooded caldera, in the Deception Island. My mom subsequently pointed out that it looked like a Bengali sweet. Later that morning, we landed on the Hydruga rocks where my partner and I spent the morning taking some lovely photographs on a leisurely short mile long walk through snow. In the afternoon, we landed on the Portal point, our ship’s and therefore, my first continental landing. At this landing, my partner decided to kayak and I walked about a couple of miles in the snow. He did join me briefly on the land to take some customary photos together holding a continental landing sign!

On Jan 2, we landed very early morning, on the Truant island. I say very early, it was 7:00 am by Ushuaia time. It is hard to get a sense of time when it is daylight all the time and the temperature is measured by the frequently changing wind chill factor. I went walking, my longest walk in the snow, about three miles and my partner went kayaking again. We navigated through the narrow and spectacular Lemaire channel. We had planned to land on the Pleneau island of the Booth island but landed on Port Charcot instead. Yeah, plans change as frequently as the wind does. My partner’s kayaking trip got terminated part way through. I completed a short windy mile long hike. The crew had planned an open deck BBQ and it was not to be.

On Jan 3, my partner and I spent the day together. We first landed on the Almirante Brown, an Argentinian post on Paradise Harbor, and the ship’s second continental landing. Here we enjoyed a short mile of walking. We were informed that the Argentinian scientific crew would arrive a couple days later, allowing us to be the last commercial ship to land before the season began. Later in the day, it was a visit to Danco island, the largest penguin rookery we saw during the entire trip. Walking for a mile or so, we noted six or more large sub-groups scattered on the island. That evening, a family of orcas joined our ship. I think the clever Orcas know that they are the apex predators of the ocean, the way they were playfully scratching their backs on the ship’s hull.

On Jan 4, we went out on a zodiac trip in the morning in Foyn Harbor where we sighted a pair of whales feeding. I had fallen for these gentle creatures during the Alaska cruise and watching them again, I found myself worrying, knowing that the orcas weren’t too far away. Later in the morning, a large number of ship’s passengers, over 60%, chose to undertake a polar plunge. I prefer a steam shower to an icy bath, perhaps my body still remembers its tropical birth. And my partner had flipped his kayak on his second outing, so he already had his share of the polar plunge. In the afternoon, the ship completed the final landing at Palavar point where my partner joined me for a short two mile hike. After that, it was another crossing of the mighty Drake passage, spreading more vomit and anxiety.

It wasn’t truly the end of the world. We didn’t cross the Antarctica Circle (66.6 south latitude). But it felt like the end of the world. No blades of grass, no bushes, no trees to give you a sense of scale. The clouds sit low and for a few seconds give you the glimpse of the tall snow covered mountains they cradle. Every once in a while you see the blue fissures of the glaciers, looking like a partially open eye of a sleeping Sauron. If you looked at the ocean, it was a grey all the way to the horizon. If you looked at the shore, it is snow covered with occasional volcanic rock peaking through when the cloud permits. The limited palette of colors – grey of the ocean, black of the penguin backs, brown of the rocks, white of the snow, occasional blues of sky and glaciers, and hints of red in the algae and penguin poop – makes this part of our planet hard to relate to. Even though I was never alone, the place made me feel lonely. I couldn’t connect to the strange wilderness that surrounded me. It didn’t help that I desperately wanted to hear the natural sounds, the penguins braying, the waves crashing on the rocks, the wind howling through the icebergs, the century old glaciers cracking. But there was no single moment that was free of human chatter. When not telling a story to another human, these humans were busy talking to their recording devices. I might have, for the briefest moment, watching the humans take the polar plunge, wanted the orcas back near the ship again.

The adventure is now over. We are back now, to the familiar California. The mandarins in the garden have turned bright orange on the tree. The punica hedge is full of red berries. The sky, as far as eyes can see, is very blue. I can again connect to the familiar nature that surrounds me, a place where I am often alone, and where I am never lonely.