Arriving in Antartica

I’m looking out my cabin window at a mountain range of crystalline white, flanked by a rippling grey-blue sea dotted with islands of ice. The iceberg we’re currently cruising past looks like a giant scoop of snowy vanilla gelato, its edges sharp and crisp against a cornflower sky.

good morning

We arrived in Antarctica proper at 8.30 this morning, travelling through a veil of fog, the captain steering carefully through an ocean of floating ice. We inched closer to our destination, the Fish Islands, through chunks of ice in all shapes and sizes: honeycomb, a shark fin, feathered sheets, bird beaks … like cloud watching, as many variations as your imagination can conjure. 

And then there’s the sound, the crackle and pop, like a bowl of frozen rice bubbles, as the ship ploughs through fields of ice,and later, the rip and crash as part of an iceberg falls into the sea. Other than that it’s blissfully quiet, a calm that later becomes reverential as we gather on the deck to watch a pod of whales just metres from the ship.

heading out on the Zodiac

There’s an electric excitement in the air as we make our way to the lower deck to take a closer look at the islands on a Zodiac cruise. Zodiacs are flat bottomed inflatables, perfectly designed to navigate the ice floes and get in close for a birds-eye view of the wildlife. We’re lucky to be on the first boat along with a United Nations gang of German, American, Venezuelan and Russian fellow passengers.

Our guide, Todd (from the UK) steers us straight to a group of Adelie penguins, biding their time as they finish moulting and prepare to dive back into the water where they’ll spend the next six months swimming and feasting, and hopefully avoiding tiger seals who also want to fatten up. The penguins still here have already survived the seals and the skuas—gull-like birds almost as big as an adult penguin who ravage their nests and feed on the babies, and sometimes the adults. Fingers crossed luck will hold out for these guys who, if they manage to keep avoiding predators, can live for up to fifteen years.

Next stop is a chunk of ice housing a lolling Weddel Seal who is polite enough to raise his (her?) head as we ooh and ahh and click like crazy, giving in to the urge to capture as much as possible on camera. Then there’s a Crabeater Seal who apparently does not eat crabs but lives on smaller varieties of crustaceans, so close enough I guess! And to complete the trifecta we spot a couple of Fur Seals biding their time on a cliff where they camouflage beautifully with the mottled brown rocks.

a crabeater seal snoozin’

As we cruise the fog clears and the sun shines, coating the icebergs in a glossy sheen, illuminating the water and turning the bases and crevasses a translucent shade of blue. Todd manouevres the Zodiac through an ever-thickening field of ice as we make our way back to the ship. Everyone’s smiling as they head to lunch on a communal Antarctic high. But the show isn’t over yet. For dessert there’s a trio of humpback whales bubbling and circling as they stir up a banquet of krill, blowing sprays of water into the air. Seeing these giants of the water up close and personal in their natural environment is a true privilege and has capped off the day perfectly.

humpbacks are star attractions in the Antarctic

The afternoon is all about information sessions, and celebrating crossing the Antarctic Circle, an imaginary line that defines the point at which the sun doesn’t set during the summer solstice and doesn’t rise on the winter solstice. Tomorrow, weather allowing, we’ll set foot on the Antarctic Peninsula before making our way north again to make further stops in the coming weeks.

cheers to crossing the Antarctic Circle

It’s hard to sum up my feelings on being in one of the world’s true wilderness areas. I can’t help but reflect on the fact that our presence is possibly contributing to its demise but I also know that having experienced it I’ll be even more determined to add my voice to the worldwide chorus demanding we do whatever we can to slow the impact of climate change.

I’ll go to bed tonight with visions of waddling penguins, yawning seals and arcing whales filling my head and aqua-lit dreams of what tomorrow has in store …