PERFECT SPOT TO CHILL OUT
One of our last frontiers, Antarctica is now bustling with tourists, with 52 vessels already offering trips to the icy wonderland – but it’s still totally worth exploring the “Antarctic Riviera” and admiring the wildlife
At a time when economies thrive on arms industries and hopeless wars wage over resources, it’s refreshing to be in a place that belongs to no one. The world’s seventh continent, a frozen desert loaded with hostile superlatives, has no army, no government and no land up for plunder.
Holding our planet in the palm of its icy hand, Antarctica influences climate and weather patterns worldwide. Clearly, there’s no question who is boss. But attempts are under way to tame the wild beast – or at least make it more accessible.
My journey to the fabled land that’s claimed the lives of so many brave explorers, takes just two hours – a fraction of the time it took Scott or Amundsen.
One Ocean Expeditions are one of a handful of operators offering tourists the option to fly into King George Island, a research base 120km off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, thus avoiding a two-day voyage across the tempestuous Drake Passage.
Weather permitting, it’s a breeze – although that doesn’t mean our 11night voyage will be a leisurely, diluted affair.
Getting off the beaten track sounds like a tautology in a place as remote as Antarctica, but the truth is – wilderness is getting busier. IAATO, the body monitoring tourism in Antarctica, estimates 43,885 tourists for the 2016-17 season, a 12 per cent rise on last year. Currently, 52 vessels operate, although that number too is set to increase.
Our aim is to explore the western side of the Peninsula, tackling the unpredictable Weddell Sea, where fewer vessels go. To ease ourselves into the adventure, we first skirt the eastern edge of the continent, following a classic route.
“Would you like to go to paradise?” asks our expedition leader, Aaron, rhetorically, as we enter the appropriately named bay.
Beneath a beaming sun, snowcoated sculptures melt like candle wax until gossamer smooth, and glistening slopes framing the inlet are a swirl of kaleidoscopic refractions.
For the past few weeks, this “Antarctic Riviera” has been drenched in sunshine; a pattern consistent with the last decade, according to one naturalist on board. Perhaps it’s too crude a deduction to interpret it as climate change, but there are signs to suggest disturbed equilibrium. Long chains of salps (pea-shaped organisms encased in a gelatinous body) ribbon below the surface; their presence indicates a rise in water temperature and dictates a crash in the population of krill – the bedrock of all marine life.
All, it would seem, is not well in paradise.
For now, though, there’s still a sufficient supply of the 5cm semitransparent crustaceans to feed creatures 320 times their size.
Weaving between our zodiacs and trails of brash ice in the inky black waters of Orne Harbour, humpbacks lunge feed at such proximity, I gulp and gag at blasts of their fishy, putrid breath.
Arching above us on the Antarctic continent proper is a colony of rockscrambling chinstrap penguins.
Reaching them requires a steep, sweaty climb through thick snow. Metres away, my calf-high companions make it look effortlessly easy as they waddle purposefully along hewed out “penguin highways”, returning from a fishing trip, to feed their newborn chicks.
Yet, eking out an existence in this mercurial environment is thwarted with rigours.
Nowhere is this desolation more felt than at Deception Island, the caldera of an active volcano in the South Shetland Island archipelago, at the tip of the Peninsula. The last eruption occurred in 1970, at Telefon Bay, where a steep-sided valley rips through the colour-drained basalt landscape, stained white with zebra stripes of ice.
A listless crabeater seal languishes at the bottom, the only sign of any recent life. Some distance from the water, his unfortunate presence leaves us baffled, and as rage-swollen black clouds belligerently hurl spears of hail in our direction, we retreat to