I’m back from Antarctica! Lots of adjectives to describe it:
amazing, once-in-a-lifetime, phenomenal, long. Really glad I went and also
really glad it’s behind me now.
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| Ushuaia |
The only way get to Antarctica, short of working at one of
the research facilities there (I applied for a job once) is to cruise, so, even
though I didn’t think I was much of a cruiser, that’s what I did.
And you know what? I am not much of a cruiser. I hated it.
Well, at least the sea days, of which there were a dozen. Normally, I would
guess, there are more port days, but the point was to go to Antarctica, and you
can’t get there easily. It’s three days from Ushuaia, Argentina, which is
basically the bottom of the civilized world.
I loved Ushuaia, and would go back again to spend more time
there. It was incredibly outdoorsy and surprisingly populated. As the guide
explained it, there are lots of factories there and people have come from all over
Argentina to work. There was even a Hard Rock Café!
The cruise people tried. It just wasn’t for me. I like
active vacations, and sitting in a chair reading for 20 hours a day isn’t for
me. I read my share of books – including Gone With the Wind! – but was bored
out of my mind even before we left.
That might not have happened had we left on time, but so be
it. There was an issue with a fuel ship, so we spent the entire first day tied
up to a dock in the little town of San Antonio, Chile. Beyond a little mall I’d
explored the first day, before we were due to leave, I’d explored that mall and
was done with it, so I didn’t bother getting off again. We finally set sail
something like 20 hours late.
It didn’t get much better for me, but at least there was a schedule
and a gym. I was up early every morning and in the gym. The fitness classes
cost extra, so I didn’t do those. Everything costs extra, it seemed, or at
least there was an upsell to everything. A “free facial” class led to pressure
to sign up for $200 treatments and $50 skin care products. Even bingo cost
extra.
Trivia didn’t, though, and that was the other “must do” for
me. At first, I jumped on any team I could find and then eventually settled
with one group that was pretty fun. Despite trivia happening four times a day,
I mostly aimed at the afternoon one. Most of the times, my teams did pretty
well and we won twice. (Yes, a frog uses its eyeballs to push food to its
stomach – no one believed me but it was right.) That was, by far, my favorite
on-board activity.
Spa treatments, which were outrageously priced, were No. 2,
followed by watching reruns of “The Love Boat,” if you can believe that. They
did not have much TV on board but every day they played a “Love Boat” episode
about 4-5 times. When I got sick down the road (a lot of people did), I wound up
watching it 2-3 times a day. They had that, “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Cheers.”
I only say 2-3 episodes of each, but I saw those 2-3 episodes multiple times
daily. There were just huge gaps where there was nothing to do. Not for me.
There were pools, but it was too cold out to sit on the deck
or contemplate getting in the pool. Way down the road, I learned there was a
sauna and started on that, but I’d initially thought they either didn’t have
one or there was an extra charge for it,
because the spa person who’d showed me around made a point to point out the
steamroom, which was $299 for the entire cruise. I wasn’t into that, but the
free sauna – once I knew about it – was great.
Antarctica itself was definitely worth it. Although since I
have a crappy camera, I can’t prove it, but we saw seals, whales and penguins.
Plus oh so many icebergs! And, something I didn’t expect, other ships. Not
many, but over the course of two days in Antarctica, I think we saw three of
them, not counting the one some scientists came on board with to tell us about
their work.
“The Drake” – the Drake Passage, right around from Cape
Horn, is apparently quite a horrid ride most of the time. All the cruise information
I read said it’s 2-3 days of rolling waves and people puking their guts out.
But we got extremely lucky. We had one day early on with rough weather, but not
at The Drake. It was calm and gorgeous. Really, most of the cruising was except
that one day. I noticed a lot of people wearing those seasick patches behind
their ears.
I realize what I did wasn’t a typical cruise, but I’m
certainly in no rush to join another. I do see the draw; it’s just not for me. However,
I enjoyed a lot of the parts, including trivia, the dinner meal and the evening
shows. We had a good table of people (and perhaps the loudest and most jovial)
at dinner and that was great fun. So were the desserts. I got spoiled right off
when they had Key Lime pie, but that never happened again and I kept the
fallback of caramel sundaes, which is not a bad fallback. Every time I opened
that dinner menu, though, I kept hoping for more Key Lime.
The cruise life really did crack me up because of Baghdad. Upon
getting Baghdad as an assignment, people said it was like a cruise ship that never
docks. Now, after actually going on a cruise ship that rarely docked (for ports
in 15 days), I really get the comparison.
There is food everywhere, right along with signs to wash
your hands, and there is a full schedule of stuff to do. Both have captive audiences,
but is way more diverse in many ways. Beyond more people from different places,
they also have more fitness classes in Baghdad. I guess if I had a job (or
anything else) I could have done for 8-9 hours a day I wouldn’t have been so
bored but man I sure was.
The shows were pretty good, though. I did the 9:30 p.m. one
every night since our dinner was 7:30 p.m. There was a juggler, a magic guy, a
couple of ship-produced shows, plus some outside entertainers. My two favorites
were Ric Steele, a country music writer/singer, and Carlos Somebody, who had an
amazing voice and huge range. He opened his second show with “Unchained Medley”
in Spanish and closed it with an Italian
opera, and this was a guy who’d done “Billie Jean” in his first show.
During that performance, his microphone cut out a couple of
times. We could tell it was while some announcement was going on, but Carlos
continued with the song, thanking the captain at the end of the song for “being
part of the entertainment.” At that moment, his mic cut out again and the
captain came on, saying something about it being contained or something like
that.
Turned out, one of the engines had caught fire, and they
came over with an announcement that the crew needed to reports to their drill
stations. With that, the seven-piece band got up and walked off the stage –
they had to report.
Fortunately, nothing bad happened with the fire. It would
have been the absolute worst timing, because we were just headed out of
Antarctica – 800 miles from the nearest outpost, which would have taken two
days to get to.
That next port was Stanley, in the Falkland Islands. Sadly,
four cruisers were in a car accident on their way to see penguins and they
weren’t able to get back on the boat and had to stay in the hospital there.
Also there, one of the crew members had to get off the boat and have surgery,
which we later found out had happened in Santiago. I’ve no idea what the
hospital facilities are like in the Falkland Islands, but I can’t imagine being
that poor crew member, who had to have some emergency surgery (our guess:
appendix) and wound up having to fly from Stanley to Santiago. But the report
back was that he or she was doing good.
I didn’t do a tour in Stanley and just wandered around a
bit. In Montevideo, I did a regular city tour and enjoyed that, and once in
Buenos Aires – cruise end – I went to a ranch one day and did a city tour the
next. I’d also arrived early and spent three days in Valparaiso, Chile.
It was a long vacation – initially intended to be taken from
Baghdad, not Minsk – and I had been planning it for a long time. Now it’s over
and I really don’t know what’s next, although for now, long-haul flights are
off the table. I had two full travel days on the way there and one the way
back, and I was under the weather for both segments.
I’m really glad to be home, even though I can’t wrap my
brain around the fact I have to go to work tomorrow. I’m sick, let-lagged and
exhausted and planned on taking it easy today. I took melatonin last night and
didn’t wake up until about 11 a.m., at which point I tossed clothes into the
washer. When I made it as far as the kitchen, though, everything went South:
the sink was filled with dirty water, the counter was covered in it and dirt,
and there was standing water in my utensil drawers and on the floor, including water
that had soaked one of my Turkish rugs.
It wasn’t the washer; apparently it was someone else’s
dishwasher hitting a clog and backing up into my kitchen. Not fun, but I called
the person to help and the right people came over so I think it’s fixed now. I
just had to wash every utensil I own and sop up the floor. I used the giant
bucket to bail out the sink (which was still filling up with water) and it took
six trips with the bucket to the toilet to get it under control. When the guy
texted me to back if thee kitchen was flooded, I wasn’t even sure how to answer
because it had been flooded but by that time I’d cleaned 80 percent of it up.
Not how I hoped to be spending my last day before going back
to work, but it’s a good reminder to not count on making definite plans. I didn’t
have anything I really needed to do today, but bailing out a sink with a cup, a
saucepan and a bucket certainly wasn’t in my realm of possibilities of how to
spend a Sunday.
