Cruising the Great White Antarctic Silence
Expedition leader Brad Rhees’s advice for the two-day crossing of the notoriously rough Drake Passage was blunt: “Don’t put on your desk what you don’t want on the floor.”
But although the crossing from Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula was rocky, it was more lullaby than lurch, allowing full attendance at a series of lectures teaching us Antarctic rules of behaviour. By the time we reached our first landing site, we knew everything necessary to keep our impact to a minimum. We knew how to board the Zodiac inflatables that would take us to shore; we knew our penguins; and we even knew how to tell a phocid, or true seal, from an otariid, or “eared” seal (such as a fur seal or sea lion).
We also knew our schedule for the next few days, and learned about the explorers who had preceded us. But “a schedule in Antarctica is just something to deviate from,” Rhees warned, and no day came without changes. At a time when the words adventure and exploration are commonplace in brochure copywriting, and unlikely companions for the word cruise, G Adventures’ M/S Explorer turned out to offer the real thing.
The first landing, on an island in the Aitcho archipelago, began with wrapping up to a degree that would have made Neil Armstrong feel underdressed, then descending a steep, narrow, wobbling gangway and carefully timing the step into a bobbing inflatable with the assistance of two strong crewmen.
Sitting only inches above waters cold enough to kill the unprotected within minutes, we weaved between icebergs and grounded on a rocky beach, gingerly lowering insulated boots into the dregs of the tide and stepping ashore into a David Attenborough wildlife documentary, with added smells.
Gentoo penguins in their thousands thronged the slopes, and the skyline bristled with their silhouettes. Many of the chicks were already quite large, some moulting toward a sleeker adult form. Their mothers tried to tempt them seawards by providing small snacks of regurgitated krill, then retreating into the water, where others could be seen porpoising purposefully, more fish than bird, in neat arcs through water littered with a dandruff of berg fragments.
We had been told to keep at least five metres away, but someone had forgotten to tell the penguins. Curious, fluffy chicks came to pull at the clothing and hair of those who lay down to take photos at penguin eye level.
But the beach was also a battlefield. Sharp-billed skuas strutted among the penguin families. Pecked at when they got too close, they languidly lifted off to hover expertly just out of reach yet close enough to disrupt the disgorging of krill from adult to chick, with the hope of mopping up the spill later.
Smaller chicks were also on the menu, and those unwisely losing track of their parents were quickly surrounded, to be pecked at until they weakened, perhaps only a metre from another mother penguin indifferent to the fate of all but her own.
Nor were the hazards all on land. As we left, a curious leopard seal, sleek and powerful, swam alongside the Zodiac—lifting up a head with doleful don’t-club-me eyes belying razor-sharp teeth quite capable of puncturing the boat—before returning to patrol the shoreline for a penguin snack.
The first human to set foot in the Antarctic did so only in 1821, and no more than about 300,000 have done so since. But annual tourism has tripled in recent years and is expected to reach as many as 25,000 annually. Global warming or not, the Antarctic is suddenly “cool”. There’s talk of congestion down the west side of the peninsula, where the calmer waters between the continental landmass and numerous offshore islands offer some protection from consistently temperamental weather. But cruise-ship captains keep in touch by radio so as to avoid each other and preserve the sense of remoteness.
Recently acquired and refitted by Canadian-owned G Adventures, the historic M/S Explorer, known as the “little red ship”, became in 1970 the first purpose-built passenger vessel to visit the continent, and in 1971 it was the first of its kind to cross the Antarctic Circle. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of Russian icebreakers were converted for tourism but rarely venture close to shore. Larger conventional cruise ships have also been daring enough to travel south but make only limited landings or none at all. The 108-passenger Explorer looks like a lifeboat parked next to these giants, but it has built up a prodigious private library of navigational material for landings no other ship makes. Just 25 Antarctic locations receive 95 percent of the tourists, but the Explorer has visited more than 250, getting close inshore and keeping Zodiac transit times down.
There’s been much debate about the impact of tourism on the pristine habitat and its occupants. The popular penguin is a “marquee animal” for environmentalism, as one lecturer put it, although its numbers are not in the least endangered and, if anything, tourism has helped not hindered them. Scientific studies show that regularly visited colonies have fared better than others, perhaps because the visitors scare away the skuas. There’s certainly a symbiosis between the Explorer and the scientists: cabin-fevered Chileans from one station came aboard for a shower; Ukrainians from another plundered the larder to get fresh supplies for borscht. We rescued an American penguin observer just before he was iced in for the season. It was tourists who first protested at the pollution caused by the bases; the Antarctic Treaty now requires that everything shipped in be shipped out again.
The fear after the first landing is that each experience will be much the same, and there are typically two a day. But there was always something new.
At Cuverville Island, we trekked over a headland to watch elephant seals wallowing aromatically in their own filth. At Neko Harbour on the mainland, we struggled uphill through thick snow parallel to trenches called penguin highways with rush-hour quantities of the creatures skating and sliding down to the water. Great glaciers lay at steep angles, their tops crossed with fissures, like slices tumbling out of a newly opened loaf, but in decade-long slow motion. The compressed ice appeared to glow from inside with cobalt-blue light.
Below, the beach was fringed with the ice boulders known as bergy bits, and the ship seemed tiny, anchored between grounded icebergs. We slid back down at incredible velocity to a seaside audience of surprised fur seals who hissed a warning to keep the 15- metre distance we’d been instructed. Otariids have muscular fore flippers, and their speed over land is faster than that of the average human, especially one who has overindulged in the ship’s lunch buffet. We took the hint.
The staff of the former British base where the ozone hole was discovered — sold to the Ukrainians in 1996 for £1 ($2.08) — were eager to welcome visitors to what is now called Academician Vernadsky. Its spartan conditions were rendered instantly homey by the smell of freshly baked bread. A brief tour of the laboratories and living quarters ended at the bar, a startling replica of an English country pub, right down to the dart board. But we drank vodka, not warm beer, and afterward we learned it was homemade from sugar.
“Will we go blind?”
“No!” came the shocked reply. “We are scientists!”
The schedule called for a crossing of the polar circle, but the winds were marshalling the pack ice against us, and the ship had to scrape its way through slabs of royal icing, dusted with sugar, lying on a sea of meringue. The seemingly solid surface flexed with a queasy plasticity, giving watchers the feeling of a hangover without the pleasure of the alcohol to precede it. But the ship’s bow smashed into it, sending it fragmented and spinning in endless variations with the same mesmerizing attraction as a lava lamp.
“The other ships can follow the trail of red paint,” someone said.
G Adventures’ Canadian owner, Bruce Poon Tip, on-board inspecting his huge investment, tried to cheer himself up. “The captain told me steel is cheaper than carpet,” he said mournfully.
Late into the night, passengers braved the sleet to stand at the bow as three spotlights picked out larger bergs for fleeting stardom. But by the morning the ice was too dense for there to be anywhere to push it, and it was closing up behind us. Just short of target, we carved a semicircle and returned north, having gone farther south than any non-icebreaker that season.
Our return to Ushuaia was the roughest passage of the season so far. Even the cheerful Philippine maids, usually seen in the cabin three or four times a day, disappeared.
On arrival from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, tiny Ushuaia had seemed like a backwater. But after the unpopulated silences of Antarctica, it fizzed and buzzed, and we shied from the roar of individual cars and winced at the music blaring from the cafés, willing to brave the Drake again for a little peace.
ACCESS: From Vancouver, the most convenient and direct route is with American Airlines via Dallas–Fort Worth to Buenos Aires. See www.aa.com/ or call 1-800-433-7300.
Cruises with the M/S Explorer start from Ushuaia, and G Adventures can arrange flights from Buenos Aires, which are usually included in longer trips involving time in the Argentinian capital. The Antarctic cruise season runs from November to March, and options range from 10 days to 29 days, sometimes involving the Ross Sea on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, or including South Georgia and the Falkland Islands.
See www.gadventures.com/ for full details, or call G Adventures’s recently opened office in Yaletown at 1130 Mainland Street: 604-694 6669.