Antarctica

After we boarded, the ship did not leave port. The wind and seas were too severe for the Drake Passage. Based on what we were told at the time, waves on a typical crossing averaged around five meters. Conditions below ten meters might still be considered; once they exceeded ten, departure was essentially out of the question. That was the situation that evening. We had been scheduled to sail immediately, but departure was postponed until the following day.

Passengers were therefore allowed to go back into Ushuaia for the evening, provided they returned before midnight. We stayed aboard. We genuinely had no idea what else there was left for us to do in Ushuaia. Apparently, quite a few people went into town for the bars.

By the next morning, the passage was still closed to us. It was deeply frustrating, but there was nothing to be done. It felt as though our Antarctic journey had lost an entire day before it had even begun—a painful bargain at these prices.

That afternoon, the captain finally announced that we could depart. At five o’clock, accompanied by one long blast of the ship’s horn, we left the harbor and headed toward the Drake Passage.

At seven that evening, I even took a shower. We had not yet fully cleared the channel south of Ushuaia, and the water remained relatively calm. I had no idea how serious matters were about to become. I simply went to bed.

Sometime after midnight, I woke to metallic clanging in the cabin, as though something were rolling back and forth across the floor. It was the metal water bottle we had been issued. Despite sitting on a shelf with a guard rail, it had escaped and was roaming the room. Fortunately, I could reach it from the edge of the bed without standing up. I put it in my bag. Realizing how violently the ship had begun to move, we took our seasickness medicine and went back to sleep.

The following morning, when I tried to get out of bed, everything fell apart. We were told the waves were around six meters that day—roughly average by the standards of the crossing. For us, they were already far too much.

I sat up. I lay back down. I sat up again, then lay down again. After several rounds, the attempt to get up was officially abandoned. The instant I sat upright, I became dizzy. Within seconds, nausea followed. There was nothing to do but lie flat. The seasickness tablets we had brought did nothing. We also applied the motion-sickness patches we had packed. Those did nothing either. We remained profoundly seasick.

We began to wonder whether our medicine was simply too weak. Someone had to volunteer for the doomed expedition to the reception desk on our deck and ask for stronger medication. That someone was me. I walked for a little over ten seconds, stood for five seconds while asking for the medicine, and walked the ten seconds back. The first thing I did upon returning to the cabin was rush to the toilet and vomit. It was the first time I threw up on this journey, but not the last.

I felt slightly better afterward, but I still had to remain horizontal. Getting up meant immediate disaster. We took the medicine supplied by the ship, and it too seemed useless. Our resistance to seasickness was apparently so poor that no remedy could save us. As I experienced it, lying down was almost fine. I could feel the ship moving violently and could readily imagine why I had just been sick, but as long as I stayed flat, the problem remained manageable. The moment I sat up, the feeling returned. I could last perhaps a minute before needing to vomit. Standing reduced that to thirty seconds at most.

So we lay in the cabin, incapable of doing anything. We missed breakfast, and then we missed lunch. A new problem emerged: lying down kept the nausea under control, but now it felt as though our blood sugar was dropping. There was no choice. We had to call for help.

I moved to the chair beside the telephone and called the ship’s doctor. “Can you come to us?” she asked. I told her there was absolutely no possibility of that; she would have to come to us. She said she would be there shortly. I somehow completed the call during the minute I could tolerate sitting, then went back to the bathroom to vomit again.

I returned to bed, and the doctor arrived a few minutes later. After seeing our condition, she said, in effect, that we were beyond ordinary help. The remaining option was to give each of us an injection of seasickness medication that would put us to sleep, allowing us to sleep through the Drake Passage. Many people aboard were ill on this crossing, she added, and the supply was nearly exhausted. We were lucky: at least two injections remained.

We each received one and promptly fell asleep.

When we woke the next day, the ship had largely cleared the Drake Passage and officially entered Antarctic waters. The most obvious difference was that the seas were calmer.

We decided we were functional again and tried getting up. To be fair, “calmer” did not mean calm. The seasickness had eased considerably, but the symptoms had not disappeared.

We went to breakfast. We had gone far too long without food. Since the evening before last, all I had managed was two crackers eaten while lying in bed the previous day—and I had thrown up a fair portion of those. If I did not eat now, starvation felt like the next item on the itinerary.

On the way to the dining room, we discovered ropes everywhere throughout the ship. At first, we did not understand their purpose. Then we reached the restaurant and found it webbed over with ropes, with passengers holding on as they moved around. So that was what they were for. We also noticed hooks beneath the tables and chairs. Ropes had now been attached to them, securing the furniture to the floor. During our first two days of meals aboard, everything had stood loose. The weather had clearly become serious. Even as we ate, the ship continued to roll, and from the kitchen came repeated bursts of crockery colliding. We could only hope nothing had broken.

We endured breakfast and returned alive. Naturally, our first action was to lie down again. Seasickness behaved like a progress bar in a game. Moving around caused the meter to rise; lying down made it fall. If it reached 100 percent, it rapidly emptied itself—in other words, I vomited.

By noon, the seas had eased further, allowing us to stay up longer and roam a little farther. By afternoon, the water was nearly calm, and we had reached Antarctic waters. I had never expected Antarctica itself to be the calmest place in the region.

Only later did we learn that several formidable passengers aboard scarcely suffered from seasickness at all. They had ventured out during the worst conditions the day before, and someone took this photograph in the lounge.

The motion had been strong enough to send the ship’s grand piano flying. One would think a piano aboard a vessel should be secured to the deck. Were they really reenacting The Legend of 1900 and allowing it to wander about at will? Or had it actually been fastened down, only to be thrown loose anyway?

This was our complete itinerary.

To my eyes, many of these places looked remarkably alike, and I had no idea how to distinguish them afterward, so I have combined them here. The “whale-watching points” on the map were not precise locations either. They were areas at sea where whales might appear; an encounter happened whenever it happened.

We lived aboard the ship, but visiting Antarctica required what felt like an amphibious landing. That description is scarcely an exaggeration. These were the landing craft we used: Zodiac inflatable boats.

For a landing, the larger ship stopped offshore and opened its side door. We descended directly into the Zodiacs. There was no pier at the “shore”—if shore was even the right word—only a completely natural coastline. Staff went ahead to install temporary aids, such as plastic steps. The Zodiacs then approached the beach, we stepped from the boat into shallow water onto those steps, and from there walked ashore. It truly felt like a beach-landing operation.

An Antarctic landing is not a matter of sailing until the scenery looks appealing and stepping ashore. Most Antarctic expedition cruise operators belong to IAATO, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, and vessels coordinate landing sites and times in advance to avoid crowding the same place. Generally, only one vessel lands at a given site at a time, and no more than 100 visitors may be ashore. A ship carrying two or three hundred guests therefore has to divide them into groups. A common arrangement is for one group to land while another cruises in Zodiacs, after which they exchange places.

Individual sites also have their own rules. Some accept only one or two ships per day; some limit the duration of visits. Certain areas are closed to protect penguins, seals, or vegetation, while historic sites may restrict how many people can enter at once. Ships carrying more than 500 passengers cannot land passengers and are limited to cruise-only operations.

The shipping company and expedition team handled most of this scheduling and coordination behind the scenes, so ordinary passengers rarely noticed it. Each evening aboard our ship, Michael Jackson told us where we hoped to go the next day. Antarctic weather and sea ice change rapidly, however, so even a reserved landing could be canceled or replaced at short notice. Put simply, Antarctic landings meant scheduled times, one ship at a site, no more than 100 people ashore, and whatever additional rules applied to that particular location.

For each landing, we wore tall waterproof boots, waterproof trousers over our regular clothes, down jackets, and life jackets. We were equipped from head to toe. Environmental controls in Antarctica were strict, with great care taken not to carry organisms or pathogens from one landing site to another, particularly on footwear, clothing, or equipment.

If our boots stepped in anything at one site—most often penguin droppings—they had to be scrubbed clean before we could reboard. Staff helped with the cleaning. Clothing and equipment were also supposed to remain free of soil and biological residue; anything contaminated had to be cleaned upon returning to the ship. The expedition even supplied trekking poles. Because their tips touched the ground, those too had to be scrubbed afterward.

Our expedition team was as professional as advertised and followed the rules rigorously. During the voyage, however, we encountered another vessel landing seemingly at will. Our guide said that our ship had reserved the site and that he had not seen any arrangement for another vessel to be there at the same time, so he believed they were probably violating the landing plan. In the spirit of everyone doing their part for environmental protection, our group reported them.

At our first landing site, I saw large numbers of seals. They behaved rather like a pack of wolves. They would be lying lazily on the ground, perfectly content, until one began calling. Several others would immediately join in, raising their heads and howling toward the sky. We were told they were competing for dominance.

At subsequent landings, penguins began appearing in great numbers.

This was my first portrait taken in Antarctica.

Anyone who has watched a penguin defecate knows that the result is remarkably forceful: a thin white line shoots out behind it, tracing a graceful—if that is really the word—parabola. Now the white lines around the nests make sense.

I also recorded an excellent video of penguins fighting. Video is less convenient to publish here, however. Perhaps next time—which is what one always says.

We also went out in Zodiacs to observe whales at close range. Encounters depended entirely on luck. Whether we found any whales at all was uncertain. The larger ship adjusted its course according to where whales had been seen and moved toward areas they frequented, which became the customary whale-watching zones. Even there, luck determined how close an animal might come.

Our luck was exceptional. As our boat moved slowly along the whales’ direction of travel, one swam beside a Zodiac ahead of us and began circling it.

We were still remarking on the extraordinary luck of the other boat when the whale came directly toward ours. It surfaced beside us, less than two meters from the edge of the boat. Its fin rose above the water so close that it seemed almost within reach.

I recorded a video filled with the exclamations of everyone aboard. The final image above is a frame from that footage, hence its lower clarity.

In retrospect, watching a whale from such close range may have been rather dangerous. This was “only” a humpback, yet it measured more than twelve meters. Our Zodiac could not have been more than six meters long. One careless flick of that tail looked as though it could have sent us flying. Presumably—perhaps—there had not been such an incident before.

We also saw orcas from the larger ship, many times.

During one landing, we climbed a mountain. The ascent felt exhausting, only for us to learn afterward that the summit stood just over 200 meters high. When I told friends about it, their immediate response was that 200 meters hardly qualified as a mountain. Was that not simply an oversized mound of earth?

Under normal circumstances, they would have had a point. Antarctica was not a normal circumstance.

First, this was the panorama from the summit.

I took the obligatory summit photographs.

And this was the route up.

As the photographs show, there was no trail in the conventional sense, only a route through the snow. Climbing here required full cold-weather clothing: down jacket, thermal leggings, insulated trousers, everything. Without them, one would freeze. All that equipment multiplied the effort compared with hiking in shorts and a T-shirt. Even setting that aside, the snow track was difficult. For long stretches, the snow reached around thirty centimeters deep. Each step sank in, and simply pulling a foot free required effort. Nor could we tell what lay beneath. A step might land on ice hidden under the snow and send us sliding. Throughout the climb, we had to remain alert, brace our cores, and make sure each footfall held.

By the time I reached the summit, I was exhausted. About fifty people had set off behind Michael Jackson at the start. Only four remained with him when we reached the top. After we took photographs and began descending, many others gradually arrived. Early in the climb, the guide’s advice had been, “You are nearly there—keep going.” Farther back, it had changed to, “You should turn around. You may not make it back in time.”

We also visited several historic remains in Antarctica. Our guide offered an amusingly simplified description: anything left before 1958 counted as a historic artifact, while anything left afterward counted as rubbish. His explanation was that Antarctic activity changed dramatically around the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58. Huts, equipment, and objects from the early era of exploration might possess historic value. Waste left after the later expansion of scientific stations, however, did not automatically become heritage merely because someone had abandoned it in Antarctica; in principle, it should be removed under environmental rules.

In Antarctica, then, when one abandons rubbish matters enormously. Leave it early enough, and yesterday’s waste may become today’s treasure.

Penguins had already occupied some of the remains.

Other buildings had not yet fallen to the penguin advance.

By any reasonable standard, this building looked structurally suspect. The guide said we were welcome to go inside and look around, but if it collapsed, that was our problem—a warning delivered more as dark humor than legal language. I went in. Fortunately, I supposed Antarctica had no termites and relatively few earthquakes; otherwise, the place might have fallen long ago.

The ship also organized polar activities, including kayaking and a polar plunge.

The kayaking sounded particularly appealing: a two-person boat among fragments of ice in Antarctic waters. It was difficult not to be excited.

The activity depended heavily on weather, largely because Antarctica left little margin for error. Our guide said we could go to the proposed area and proceed if conditions allowed; otherwise, we would have to abandon the plan. We arrived to find excellent weather. The answer was obvious: launch the kayaks.

Calling it an activity site was generous. It was simply a stretch of water beside the Antarctic continent. The location was probably chosen because its geography made calm conditions more likely. That day was clear and windless, ideal for kayaking. Staff went out first, marked a broad area with buoys, and told us not to paddle beyond the boundary. Then we could leave the ship.

This was our kayak.

And this was what it felt like to paddle into the broken ice ourselves.

Naturally, we took photographs.

Then came the polar plunge. A temporary jumping point was assembled near the kayaking area. In practice, two Zodiacs were positioned beside the open door of the larger ship, with a plastic platform of less than ten square meters suspended roughly one meter underwater between them. Participants stood on the bow of a Zodiac, jumped into the sea, swam to the platform, stood up, climbed back into the Zodiac, and returned to the ship.

That was the procedure for people who could swim. Those who could not were allowed to launch themselves directly onto the plastic platform. As long as the entire body went into the water, the attempt counted.

The activity sounded appropriately dramatic. Predictably, I had to sign two additional waivers—documents that felt very much like contracts surrendering one’s life. The plunge was clearly unwise for anyone with conditions such as high blood pressure or heart disease, yet roughly seventy of the ship’s more than 140 passengers participated. As far as I could tell, people around my age were exceptionally rare aboard, perhaps fewer than ten. Nearly everyone was at least ten years older than I was, many more than twenty years older, and gray hair was common. These explorers in their fifties and sixties were genuinely formidable.

The seawater was about 2°C. I had assumed the jump itself would be the worst moment, but it was not. Entering the water happened in an instant, and the entire interval before reaching safety lasted no more than twenty seconds. One simply endured it. Waiting in line was far worse. We stood in the Antarctic wind wearing only swim trunks. Even that was tolerable for a few minutes. At the beginning of the queue, we could wear sandals, but beside the Zodiacs we had to leave them aboard while several people still stood ahead of us. Towels covered the ground there, but they were saturated with icy water. I stood on them barefoot for two minutes and nearly lost all feeling in my feet.

In the end, I completed the plunge. Unfortunately, there is no photograph to prove it.

Back aboard, the doctor stood nearby and handed each participant a special warming coffee. I did not catch a cold, and everything remained normal.

The landscapes seen from the ship were as remarkable as those at the landing sites. An old line of verse came to mind: with the clouds dispersed, moon, sky, and sea needed no further ornament. The clarity of the blue water and open sky was difficult to rival.

Beyond the scenery, life aboard was impressive in its own right. The ship was remarkably luxurious. The lounge bar opened every afternoon and stayed open indefinitely into the evening—as long as someone remained, it remained open—with all drinks included. My only disappointment was that one nonalcoholic drink I had selected remained out of stock until I disembarked. It had looked delicious, which apparently meant everyone else had reached the same conclusion first. The ship also had a sauna, a spa, and a glass-walled panoramic gym. The range of facilities was extraordinary.

Eventually, our journey approached its end. The ship returned to King George Island, where an airport would provide our flight to Chile.

Naturally, something went wrong again.

The airport was rudimentary and bore little resemblance to an ordinary civilian terminal. The runway did not look like a conventional paved surface; from what I could see, it was made entirely of gravel. Taking off and landing there appeared difficult. With minimal facilities and rapidly changing Antarctic weather, flights depended heavily on visibility and conditions. The sky had to be clear, or visibility had to exceed some required distance, before an aircraft could operate.

Our guide said that, in their experience, the usable flight window on a given day might last only a few hours. We therefore spent our final day aboard waiting. Once a window was confirmed, we would take Zodiacs to the island and proceed to the aircraft.

On our scheduled departure day, no window opened at all. Observations at the time also suggested that flying might remain impossible the following day. We should ordinarily have continued waiting, but because operations were definitively impossible for the moment, the captain arranged one more landing. We gained an unexpected additional excursion.

And saw still more penguins.

Attentive readers may notice that these photographs differ substantially from all the earlier ones. Every previous image was taken in fine weather. For several days in Antarctica, both at sea and ashore, we had enjoyed clear skies and excellent conditions. Whether that was fortunate or unfortunate depended on one’s perspective. It made every activity much easier, but it did not feel remotely Antarctic.

This day was different: a full blizzard. The air was cold, the apparent temperature far lower than before, and the wind cut through us. For the first time, Antarctica felt genuinely severe.

Many people aboard expressed the same thought: this was Antarctica. The previous days of sunshine had encouraged the unrealistic impression that the continent was tranquil.

Once back aboard, everyone seemed even more satisfied. We had now experienced an Antarctic blizzard as well. The journey felt complete.

That evening, the guide told us that flight operations would probably be possible the next morning. We should sleep, he said; if a window opened, they would wake us.

At four the next morning, we were dragged from bed. Breakfast followed at speed, then a Zodiac ride to King George Island, another beach landing, and a journey to the airport to await the plane.

As noted earlier, calling the place an airport required some generosity. Around its perimeter stood a few structures that could be described as buildings, and we waited inside until the aircraft was nearly ready to land. We were told that cleaning the facilities was extremely difficult. To protect the environment, we should avoid using the toilet unless absolutely necessary. Whatever we had, we were asked to carry it onward to Chile.

A bus then took us closer to the boarding area, where we continued waiting in what passed for a departure lounge: two plastic tent-like shelters. The wind roared outside, and its howling remained plainly audible through the plastic. At this point, toilets ceased to exist altogether.

The aircraft did finally arrive. One was painted black and white, prompting the guide to call it the penguin plane. When it took off, people nearby became wonderfully excited and shouted, “The penguin is flying!” The old human tradition of inventing one’s own entertainment remained alive and well.

We boarded the second aircraft and flew to Chile.

With that, our Antarctic journey officially came to an end.