My second try to Antarctica got me to land. My first try,
back in 2020, was on a big cruise ship that was more of a drive through than
anything else. From there, I’d planned a disembarkation, but it got “weathered”
out. This time, despite the weather, I set foot on the continent. You’re told
to take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints so I don’t have a
rock, but I did leave my voice there.
But the weather … oh my. First of all, I was sick as a dog
the entire first day. “The Drake Shake” – when you go through the Drake Passage
with bad waves – didn’t help, but looking back, a lot of it was just fatigue. Going
out, I changed one flight to cut down my Amman layover from about 15 hours to
about 7, but it was still a 7-hour layover. The next flight was 2.5 hours,
followed by a 4-hour layover. In Istanbul, I got on the long flight, which was
to Buenos Aires, but it first stopped in Sao Paulo for almost 2 hours, and
then, following a brutal 6-hour layover in the Buenos Aires check-in area
(because I was leaving international and going domestic; I couldn’t hang out in
the lounge and had to sit in a chair), I got on my final flight to Ushuaia.
That’s when I realized my flight to Ushuaia wasn’t direct; we had a 1.5-hour
stop in some other city. Seriously, I spent three mornings in airports. I left
Baghdad on Thursday morning and I arrived on … gosh, I don’t even know. I think
it was Saturday around lunch. I checked into the hotel, met my roommate and
tried to sleep but didn’t have much luck.
The weather for the first 5-6 days was awful. Horizontal
rain, snow, sleet, massive (but not rogue) waves. My point-and-shoot as the
photos and the cord I brought on the trip doesn’t work, so I can’t get the
photos uploaded yet, but it was brutal. We had been expecting to do an
excursion out on the Zodiacs on the evening of the third day and that was out
of the question. The next morning, the captain tried in vain to find some reasonably
sheltered place to let us off the boat, but it didn’t work. Same for the next
afternoon, and the following day.
One night, the poor captain had a brutal time trying to find
shelter. The winds were absolutely awful and, TBH, I wondered if there was a chance
we might capsize. The boat, the World Explorer, was fairly new and had safety
features so I really wasn’t worried but I did wonder. My roommate, however,
worried. The morning after what we later learned were Cat 4-level winds rocked
us, I discovered she’d slept right next to her life jacket.
With that, though, the weather kind of broke. We got out the
next morning on super choppy waves. I landed in a less-crowded Zodiac and was
sitting at the front, meaning I got super crushed by waves. The scenery was
fantastic and I was soaked through to my underwear, despite my Minsk “waterproof”
snow pants. Icebergs closer up are even more beautiful than they are from a
distance, like wandering through a floating sculpture gallery. It’s never
boring, but it can be cold and wet.
Seriously, it snowed. That just doesn’t happen. People built a little snowman! It was just strange weather. We had a deck covered in snow – big, fat flakes.
After the first excursion, though, the weather got better. My three layers of pants never got soaked through again, and I met penguins, whales and all kinds of seals. We visited Port Lockroy and, although I didn’t mail any postcards, I did get my passport stamped and bought a magnet. Coincidentally, I have a new tourist passport and the Port Lockroy stamp – which includes a penguin – is the first stamp in the new passport.This was the trip I wanted to Antarctica. Although I was
happy with my previous trip, the whole point had been to set foot on the
continent and see critters up close, and I finally got to do that.
More later. At the moment, I am on my second trip and I am headed to see Iguazu Falls, the largest waterfall in the world.
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