Checking the White Continent off the list
IWAS was born with acute wanderlust, which, by my early 40s, had propelled me to Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America, often for months on end. Yet seeing the seventh and storied White Continent never crossed my mind until a chance meeting with a globe-trotting pal.
“I’m looking for someone to join me in Antarctica. The ship leaves from the tip of Argentina in six weeks, and it’s half price. Wanna come?”
You bet. Here was a chance to hit my final continent and its jaw-dropping environs.
On the evening of December 7, two weeks before the summer solstice below the equator, Vivienne Lassman, an independent art curator, and I joined 91 passengers from around the world aboard the Sea Adventurer, a 1976 Yugoslav-built vessel – with an ice-strengthened hull – run by Seattle-based Quark Expeditions.
By midnight, we had left behind the port of Ushuaia and the Beagle Channel to enter the notorious Drake Passage. There, in what is called the Southern Ocean, the currents of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans often slam together to create an Antarctic “convergence” below Cape Horn. Waves can easily top 9 metres and turn the hardiest sailors into seasick wretches.
We, however, lucked out. Our 965-kilometre Drake crossing was blessedly calm, and the wildlife impressive: humpback and fin whales, orcas, divebombing petrels and skuas, and one glorious albatross, miraculously engineered to glide hundreds of kilometres without flapping wings that span 2.4 metres to 3.3 metres. Some fly for months without landing.
Our first iceberg appeared on our second Drake day as we headed toward the Antarctic Peninsula. For me, Vivienne and nearly 20 other shipmates this frozen landmass that is larger than both Australia and Europe would be our seventh continent.
The two-day crossing became a floating classroom featuring pictures and lectures from expedition staffers, a multinational group of outdoorsy, mostly young nomadic scientist-adventurers. Knowledgeably and enthusiastically, they spoke about whales, seals and birds.
The ship was hardly posh. No “dressing for dinner”, no wrangling seats at the captain’s table. (He was in the wheelhouse keeping us from ramming an iceberg or getting frozen in place.) Neither artisanal nor precious, the food was international and plentiful, the purchased wine just fine. The outdoor pig roast dinner (suggested attire: parka and long johns) complete with hot, mulled Malbec and dancing, was pretty hilarious. And more than half my shipmates took a daytime “polar plunge” wearing, yes, bathing suits, into frigid waters while secured to a harness, for what I considered dubious bragging rights.
The trip was billed as 10 days and nine nights, but total time spent exploring mountainous islands, beautiful waterways and the continent’s northwest peninsula was not quite five days. The rest got eaten up in Ushuaia, on the Drake and by our hasty exit from King George Island to Punta Arenas, Chile, so the plane wouldn’t be grounded by fog.
But what we saw during at least 20 hours of light each day at and below the Antarctic Circle was spectacular.
Morning, afternoon and one evening, we galumphed off the mother ship into kayaks or 10-person motorised Zodiac rafts to savour sights that included crab-eater, Weddell and leopard seals lolling on icebergs and slipping underwater to frolic and feed. We learned to identify whales by their spume, backs and flukes (tails), and witnessed a single, breathtaking avalanche – all snow but no deadly ice boulders – in the Lemaire Channel, nicknamed Kodak Alley for its magnificent scenery. The ship only got halfway down before ice blocked further progress.
We endured the heartbreak of the wild when a skua drove its beak into a gentoo egg left momentarily unguarded by its parents at Port Lockroy’s breeding colony. The port also boasts Antarctica’s only museum and boutique and post office in a repurposed British spy station. At Whaler’s Bay on the circular Deception Island – actually a volcanic crater – we stood silently before twocentury-old graves, dwarfed on that black ash beach by rusted-out whale processing equipment and tumbledown buildings.
On Enterprise Island in Wilhelmina Bay – along whose sheltered coast countless vessels had dropped anchor in the early 1900s – we circled a ship that never left. The ghostly Gouvernoren, a onetime floating whale-processing factory, burned and half sank in 1915.
Whether at 4am or 9pm, there was always something to ogle. Gargantuan icebergs and smaller growlers in the distance, or a swirling, watery stew of frozen chunks called bergy bits and brash ice floating past the ship. On deck and in Zodiacs, we saw ice that was blindingly white, dirty-looking tan and rust from embedded flora, fauna and minerals, and a startling Windex blue, indicating ice crystals that expanded over time and compressed all the air bubbles. We even saw an occasional chunk of clear ice, which our guides fished out of the water, passed around for close inspection and later brought back to chill the vodka at the ship’s bar.
Sometimes I’d ascend to the bridge to silently watch the crew study charts and computers, and sweep the horizon with binoculars for open water amid treacherous ice.
But I was thrilled we were flying out rather than recrossing the capricious Drake, and at about 3,040 metres, Vivienne asked where I was headed next.
“I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon. Wanna come?”