Antarctica

It’s just after ten in the evening, and Alice and I are watching the sun set over the outskirts of Torres del Paine from our living room in Puerto Natales. We had an “emergency” disembarkation of our ship two nights ago because of an incoming storm, and landed here around three the next morning. So, we found ourselves with an extra day of Internet and no plans, the perfect chance to catch up on all of our errands before heading into the national park tomorrow.

I don’t remember why, but our trip to Antarctica was the first leg of the sabbatical that we booked. We didn’t have any particular attraction or expectation for the continent, but I suppose it seemed like the kind of place one goes when they have a mission to travel and as much time as they need. And so one night last March, we somehow just decided that we were going to show up at the southernmost end of the world on December 27 and take a ship to Antarctica. We ended up with our favorite day of the sabbatical so far, some of the most breathtaking scenery we’ve ever seen, and new friends from all over the world.

March 26, 2024

Taken at home right after booking our Antarctica trip, and right before I set this blog up in an effort to keep the excitement going that night.

Like the spines of a land iguana

Ushuaia, or el fin del mundo, is the southernmost city in the world. In a smoky izakaya in Japan, a friend of ours told us that the magic of traveling with someone was developing a shared language with them. It really is pretty magical to be able to say, “remember in Patagonia, near Ushuaia, those mountains that looked like the spines of the land iguanas in the Galapagos?” to Alice and know she knows what I mean.

For scale

Even by the time we flew back to South America, I don’t think I fully understood the scale of the landscapes in front of us. On our first Zodiac cruise, I asked our guide what sorts of wildlife would be leaving marks in the otherwise pristine snowdrift above the ice cliffs. She seemed a bit confused and said that she didn’t see any traces of animal activity. It was only after another boat drove into view that I realized what I thought looked like the trails of a dog playing in the snow were hundred-foot wide crevasses and towering seracs.

Penguin highway

I once read an Onion article titled “Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game of ‘Big City’”. Pretending to be a residents of a big city is also what penguins seem to do all day. They, about as tall as my knee, would waddle up and down their penguin highways, flippers held out behind them as if they’re about to angrily walk up to a counter and demand to see the manager. Sometimes they would wipe out, get back up, and look around as if they were checking if anyone saw them. I was pretty judicious throughout the trip about what videos I kept on my iPhone—realistically, I was never going to rewatch a grainy video of some maybe-whales-or-maybe-waves in the distance—but I have no regrets at all about hanging onto all eight minutes of my penguin footage.

Adventures I

Lindblad was insistent on branding our cruise as an “expedition,” evoking images of Shackleton and Amundsen, and not a “vacation,” but our voyage pretty squarely sat in the latter category. Even still, there were moments during our landings when the landscapes were so vast and deep, our fellow travelers so small and far away, that I couldn’t help but to feel a little bit like we were having a proper adventure.

Adventures II

Back home and throughout most of our sabbatical, our plan to take nine months off has tended to register as fairly unusual. But on the ship, our travels seemed a bit more quotidian. There were plenty of doctors and lawyers taking a much-needed year-end vacation, but there was also the couple who had thousands of skydives between them, the Bavarian who was rescued by a Russian icebreaker after drifting for four months in polar ice towards the North Pole, our friend who had to rip his stuck-on Lesotho visa out of his passport on his way to Indonesia. Finding these people reminded us of how big the world is and how full life can be.

How I'm looking at it

We were passengers of the National Geographic Explorer, on a National Geographic-Lindblad voyage, but the entire weight of the NatGeo brand was carried by Phil, the expedition photographer who was the lone person who was actually affiliated with the Society. I spent a couple of landings following Phil around and watching how he was “looking at things”. I was reminded of how for any art (trading included!), the only way to learn isn’t talking to a master of the craft or reading their book; it’s watching them at work.

Iceberg shadows

In grade school I remember learning that blue isn’t often found in nature. Since then, it’s been easy to see that in fact, blue is there, in peacocks, berries, hydrangeas. But the electric blue that we found in the shadow of icebergs seemed bizzarely out of place, a hue that seemed as unnatural under the gray Antarctica sky as the bright orange of the parkas we wore outside each day.

Fournier Bay

On our favorite morning of the trip, we kayaked through polar ice as humpback whales swam around and underneath us. There must have been a dozen of them, feeding on the krill underneath the icebergs dotting the bay. On the water, you hear a whale before you see it. A sound at once resembling a shriek and a growl seems to come from every direction just before it appears, and if the whale feels some whimsy, its fluke will breach the water as it finishes feeding and disappears back into the deep ocean.

Refreshing

After kayaking with the whales, we jumped into the just-colder-than-freezing saltwater of the bay (Lindblad took this picture for us, but I have a nice close-up from the GoPro I’m holding too). The initial plunge was, as our Galapagos guide Billy might say, refreshing. But Alice got out first, and even just being in the water for a few extra seconds left me understanding for the first time what a gnawing cold feels like. Later that afternoon, we watched a pod of orcas swim aside our ship, capping off the most memorable day of our sabbatical yet.