Antarctica Trip Part One: Shipwrecks, Icebergs And Ego-Free Perfection

After a number of very busy days of preparation in Buenos Aires, on the evening of the 10th of January we shoved off from the dock and began to sail south towards a major goal of mine for many years now. I am not going to spend much time on this point, because it is personal, and because it is not something that I feel needs much discussion in a blog. Throughout my twenties and throughout my travels, my goal was to get to know this great big world of ours in the best manner that I could. Mostly, that meant not just buying a round-the-world ticket and getting it all over with in one go. Starting with France and Spain in Europe in 2000, I decided that the only way to get any real sense of a place was to be there for a while. I decided to try to apply that idea to all the continents and since that time, to one degree or another, I have. Antarctica is sort of an exception to this idea because even while it is possible to stay there for some three or six months at a time, I don't feel particularly driven to do this, mostly 'cause I am not a fan of winter. That said, I have always been intrigued by the Arctic and Antarctic and it is certainly a place that I couldn't leave out in my more or less Quixotic 'quest' to get to know the 'Wet Planet'. The point of this is that my goal had been to visit and spend time on all the seven continents by the time I was thirty. In my psuedo-idealistic 'dream' (man I hate the cultural connotations of that word...) I would spend my 30th birthday sailing around in Antarctica. Well, due to the fact that Antarctica is still more or less closed for business in the first half of november, and due to the way things go, I am two months late, but here nevertheless!!! So that is it, the completion of a major life goal. (I drank a bottle of Chateauneuf Du Pape in Antarctica to celebrate!!!) Of this I am proud, but more I am just in awe of the things I have seen in these different regions, the people I have met, the kindness and brutality I have witnessed, the food, the music, the manifestations of life...well, for more slop like this you can read the 30th birthday entry on this blog page...I won't subject anyone to it again here and now...and with that noted, we sailed southwards towards our first stop, the Falkland Islands.

You don't call the Falkland Islands the Falkland Islands in Argentina. There you call them Las Islas Malvinas, or just Las Malvinas. This is as a result of a war that occured between the Argentinians and the British over a seemingly random few peices of land off the coast of southern Argentina in 1982. Seeing as I was travelling with my Argentinian friend Manuela, we were calling these islands Las Malvinas.

After a couple of days at sea we arrived for a day in the Falklands/Malvinas. This day also marked the first day of our incredible weather luck for the trip. Leaving the mothership that morning the sky was a perfect shade of blue and the breeze blew just enough to keep the sun from feeling hot. As the day went on, small white-cotton clouds cropped up and travelled in small herds across the sky. Considering how far south this place is, it was indeed lucky, for about three quarters of the year they have fog and/or rain. We explored the island on foot and saw a bunch of interesting things. A couple shipwrecks that are still sitting there in the bays, a museum and monument dealing with the history and conflict over an island full of sheep, an anti-whaling display made out of whalebones in a guys front yard, a lot of nice british buildings, a horse that made strangely disconcerting but still funny faces at us, and a lot of flower displays. The place smelled terrific, with floral aromas riding every other breeze and the sea air cruising in between. It was bright and colorful and every one of the people I met there was quite friendly. (There are less than 3,000 human inhabitants and hundreds of thousands of sheep. Enter joke here...) We had a nice coffee and took in the vistas. When we saw the first shipwreck I got inspired and whipped out my iPod to play Manuela Gordon Lightfoot's 'Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald' and was shocked, awed and very disappointed with myself to discover that I don't have that song on there!!! What the deuce is wrong with me? Travelling the seas without Gordon's seafaring (Great Lake faring) classic. What a tard I can be!! So I played 'Carefree Highway' instead which is no substitution but it was kinda how I was feeling and it had to do. She had never heard of Gordon anyway so I guess any introduction is a good introduction.

Back on the boat we set our sails/motors for the South Shetland Islands, which are way the hell down there. When I first saw them I thought we were in Antarctica already and I was as happy as a little kid on Christmas morning. The 'Antarctica Expert' who travelled with us quickly set us all straight on where we were. He said that if we thought that the Shetlands were cool, wait 'til we saw Antarctica. That guy was really funny. Bernard. He is this old British guy who sounds, when he speaks, as though he is about to die. A punto de morir. He sorta grinds his throat and coughs a lot. When he was addressing us over the mic it was often tough for the non english speakers to figure out what the hell the guy was gurgling about. I did a lot of translating...to english speakers as well. That said about him, the guy was a stud. He spent many years of his life travelling around the Arctic and Antarctic on dogsleds and boats, and that is badass. Talking with him in person, you knew you were talking with a brave man. A man who had done many great things and regretted little. He was weathered from sun and cold, but he still held the exuberance of a man who was very interested in life and all it's follies. (Maybe a way of growing old gracefully?) Anyhow, despite the fact that we were yet to reach our real destination, we were all thrilled with the sight of the Shetlands. That day was a bit overcast at first, but even still, the moment you see an ocean full of perfectly square icebergs shifting stoically for the first time, you are a happy homeboy or girl. We sailed by slowly with the rails of the deck crowded with people looking out. (Suzanne noted from some of the photos on my myspace page that the boat looked really nice, and that is true. It was a really nice boat and we were, indeed, not roughing it for comfort. Indoors at least...) It had grown very cold and the wind was whipping at our faces. I turn rosy cheeked at almost anything. When I get hot, cold, drunk, embarrassed, exhilerated, etc., so you can imagine what I was looking like in the Antarctic winds that were to follow. That coupled with the fact that it was colder than I thought it would be, and I was sort of prepared, but not really. Thank god I had a sunday morning paper route for many years back in Montana when I was a kid. Good conditioning for Antarctica.

From the Shetlands on, we were pretty much constantly in awe of one thing or another. Everywhere you turned there were icebergs passing here and there and lots of penguins darting in and out of the water. We arrived at the Antarctic Peninsula and stopped at a number of research stations. Argentina, Uruguay, the old British site, Chile and Poland. The Polish site was the most interesting because we got to talk to a number of the scientists that were studying there. They study all sorts of things like animals, plankton, water, ice, weather and geology. It is a fascinating place and one of the guys gave this impassioned speech about how living on this base through the winter makes you realize that man is so small in the grip of mother earth's hand. It was my first real sense of how deadly the Antarctic is. Staring off into the black water later that night it really sunk in that if I fell off this boat, I would die in a matter of short minutes. Not enough time to get a life bouy to me, let alone a life boat. Even if they did get to me I would be in shock and most certainly die. One's body would freeze up so fast that they would have no chance to even tread water. I am telling you, IT IS SO INHUMANELY COLD there. It is no joke. They weren't joking around when they made Antarctica. As we continued to tour the islands and islas I wore four short sleeve shirts, two long sleeve shirts, a thin sweater, a thick sweater and my windbreaker. I wore two hats doubled over each other, and two pairs of gloves doubled. A scarf for my neck and one around my mouth, which ended up smelling funny. (Ha ha.) The point here, is that it is so freaking cold!! And it is summer time right now!! I could write a way-too-long blog about all the animals that survive here and how they do it, but that we can either talk about later or you can look up on your own. To put it simply, it is incredible that anything lives there at all. It also explains why no humans do. There are no resorts here. No towns, no tourism centers, no indiginous populations. No eskimos, no nobody. Most of the early explorers here died. Many whalers braved these waters and many of them, too, died. Only a handful of scientists and military people brave the winters down here, they say that there have been less than 300,000 people who have ever even visited the crazy, cold place.

One of the things that makes it difficult to stay on through the winter is that the light goes away. It is almost continually dark for months at a time and the seas freeze solid not allowing passage of any sort for boats. We experienced the opposite situation with days almost completely full of light. For a number of consecutive days there were midnight sunsets. We would stand, bundled and shivering against the wind, watching some of the most incredible displays of light that I have ever seen. The air is perfectly clear there, and the water takes on the emotions of the light. Icebergs would bob by in the twilight and mountain ranges would stand cristaline in the distance. It never completely got dark either. If the sun was completely down by midnight-thirty, it would be rising just after four, just a few hours later. It was quite something.

I could rattle on forever about all the details, so I will cut to the chase here. My favorite day was the day that we crossed the 65th parallel south and sailed through the Neumaier Channel. It was another perfectly clear day, with the sun making the water shine a blue I have never even imagined. The mountains are black and brown stone, but you don't see so much of that because of the glacial coverage. Basically this is a world of blue and white, and the air has a quality that seems to glaze everything in a dreamy sort of atmosphere. I hope it doesn't sound trivial to say that it looked like a fantasy world. Some sort of made up place, some chilly fairy-world or something from a Lord Of The Rings Movie. If that makes it sound silly in any way, then forget I said it...really what it was was a manifestation of perfection. The irony being that it was so perfect that it would not support human life, the very presence of which would taint it's perfection. It makes you wonder what other beautiful parts of the earth were like before humans where there to subjugate and 'improve' them. Antarctica on a sunny day will make your mind slow down. It stunned me. I didn't want to speak with anyone. I couldn't really speak anyway. I would just stare at the water and ice mountains and feel the burn of the cold and sun on my face. It was like everything you could ever hope for in inspiration while at the same time knowing that you could never take that inspiration and do it justice with your own creation. It would make you want to cry and at the same time you would have to laugh because you could never explain it. You could never transfer that vista into words or images or sounds, you knew that it would forever remain static there at the end of the world, and that it was so much better for it. It was a humbling thing. I remember thinking that all of our lives were at the mercy of a floating structure of metal and wood and that this perfection, although still alive in my memory, would be left behind when we again sailed north. I took over 400 photos down there and they are all terrific, but they are also only mere threads that I pulled from something so much bigger and greater...threads to take with me, still laughing with the feeling that they would speak so little of the whole.

So you see that I could just keep yammering in this direction. I sum the Antarctica part up by saying that it far exceeded my expectations, whatever those may have been, and that it was truly incredible. I am sure that I will speak in person with most of you about this later and maybe by then I will have thought of a better way to communicate my recuerdas of this place, but I am not gonna hold my breath.

After a number of days there, we turned ourselves around and headed towards Cape Horn and the southern tip of South America. Tierra Del Fuego and southern Patagonia. Towards the rough waters that swirled with maritime history and captain's lore. As we made this journey northwards I spent many hours, bundled in my department-store-load of shirts and hats, at the back of the boat looking out through the halflight across the churning sea. Spanish speakers use the word, impresionante, which pretty much means impressive. But I like it better because impressive seems to me to carry a sense of ego, and impresionante seems to be more of a reaction to something amazing, that doesn't have an ego per se. I would choose to use the spanish word in this case because Antarctica has no ego, and it would never need one, because it is more beautiful that almost anything else in the world.