Adventure > Articles > Eden in Ice

It's like sailing through the middle of the Andes. As if that weren't enough, we're slaloming down a field of ice-floes, dodging bergs as big as apartment blocks.

Welcome to the Lemaire Channel. Welcome to Antarctica. With walls of black basalt and ice rising 300 metres on each side of the narrow channel, this impression - of cruising through a high mountain valley - is not far from the truth. Since the Antarctic Peninsula is the ancient coccyx of the Andes' spine, we are sailing between what were, long ago, Andean peaks.

Our captain is a nuggety, crew-cut Russian named Kalashnikov - not the sort of man you'd jokingly call "AK-47" - who, with a marksman's accuracy, manoeuvres our 117-metre long, ice-strengthened vessel through the bergs. The vessel moves with the ship-shape grace that travel writer Jonathan Raban once aptly described (in reference to another ship) as, "the ponderous delicacy of an elephant sidestepping the tea things in a drawing room."

Some of the bergs are an improbable powder blue; others have downy-white shelves on which languid Weddell seals sun themselves. From their floating sun lounges (yes, this is summer in Antarctica - a balmy zero degrees) the seals consider our passing; a few shuffle and plop into the sea, but most are too lazy to even feign interest.

Such is a day in the Antarctic, with more "once in a lifetime" encounters - with calving glaciers, humpback whales, insouciant seals and teeming penguin rookeries - than I could have thought possible.

I have joined an 11-night cruise aboard a Canadian-chartered, Russian-flagged vessel with the slightly pedantic name of Akademik Sergey Vavilov. Belonging to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, this former "research ship" (for which, read "submarine listening ship") is only ten years old and, being Finnish-built, is equipped with plenty of creature comforts, including en suite bathrooms in each cabin, a sauna, library and (indispensable in the Antarctic) a fleet of inflatable Zodiac boats that will ferry us ashore twice daily.

When market forces caught up with the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many of its big ticket research-cum-defense projects were mothballed. Expensive hardware like the Akademik Vavilov had to earn its keep, and soon this and similar vessels were chartered for Arctic and Antarctic cruises.
With 74 passengers and 50 crew on board, our journey starts from Ushuaia, southern Argentina. South America's last resort (so to speak), Ushuaia is an outpost of rutted roads and nervous wreck pop music, surrounded by the forested peaks of Tierra del Fuego and the vast waters of the Beagle Passage.

A 40-hour crossing of the infamously rough Drake Passage, between South America and Antarctica, lies before us. "'Drake-proof your cabin," advises Brad Rhees, our expedition leader. Although we batten down all bottles and loose items, this time, mercifully, there is only a moderate swell. We arrive at the doorstep of Antarctica, Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands and moor in a massive bay formed by the rim of a volcanic crater. After donning kilos of thermal underwear, Goretex and gumboots, all topped off by mandatory red life-jackets, we pile into the Zodiacs for our first landfall. The cruise crew (mostly North American and British) makes sure no one takes a frigid dunking between the ladder and the boats or between the surf and the shore.

On the pebbly beach we immediately encounter the first of the thousands of penguins we will meet over the next week and a half. The aroma of their rookeries is pervasive, although after a while, "penguano" pong is no worse than the aroma from one's local fishmarket. Gentoo penguins are by far the most prevalent species, followed by the aptly named Chinstraps (who have a small, dark "chinstrap" marking), plus a few Adelie and so-called Macaroni penguins.

The ruins of Deception Island's huge whaling station stand rusting in the polar wind. Abandoned around 1918, this corroding mountain of industrial archaeology, with its vats and tanks and huts, plus the bones of old lighters buried in the volcanic sands, is an eerie, Apocalyptic introduction to the sub-Antarctic.

The Sergey Vavilov's operators, Canadian company Marine Expeditions, have also badged the ship as the plain Marine Discoverer - perhaps for those die-hard capitalists who are still "Red sensitive" or just syllabically challenged. Back on board we passengers get to know each other, as well as our cruise staff and the ship's Russian sailing crew.

The passengers are predominantly well-travelled North Americans and Europeans, plus a few from Hong Kong and Japan. While mostly "over-'40s", these are no blue rinse superannuants who might be content to scan the shoreline penguin parades via their deck-chair binoculars. Every one of our excursions ashore is packed by alarmingly keen people, all bristling with cameras and Antarctic knowledge, hoofing up snow slopes for a better photo angle, glissading down again on their backsides, and generally being up to the hilt in whatever's going.

The most eccentric passengers are a flock of earnest British birdwatchers ("twitchers" according to their own slang) who tick-off on their lists every albatross, giant petrel, tern, skua and blue-eyed shag that moves across land, sea or berg. ("Goodness. I've already spotted three new species of goose," announced one twitcher woman before we were even out of Ushuaia airport.) The men tend to look like the late British actor Denholm Elliott and are often called Nigel, their leading Nigel being distinguished by the Hubble Junior-sized telescope that he hoists before his flock like a bishop's crook.

"That's it - the big seven!" announces a woman from New York on the morning that we step for the first time onto the Antarctic Peninsula proper, at Paradise Bay. Antarctica is the seventh continent and for many of these travellers, setting foot here completes their global "score".

Along the indented shores of the Antarctic Peninsula we venture out twice daily in our Zodiacs to blitz the penguin rookeries and fur seal colonies with camera action, or just contemplation. Or to meander in the boats through stupendous fields of "bergy bits" — white galleries of Dali-esque ice sculpted by the sun to surreal extremes. Gothic bergs that bristle like a Chartres Cathedral in ice. Translucent arks, scrimshaw swans and ivory aircraft carriers. One pioneer explorer described his vision in ice floes as, "A gondola steered by a giraffe ran afoul of us, which much amused a duck sitting on a crocodile's head."

On these excursions, humpback whales sometimes surface near our Zodiacs. Around the bays, the continent's ancient ice-cap creeps inexorably down to the sea in shelves that crack and avalanche with the sound of howitzer blasts. Here the extraordinary is recurrent.

We've been well instructed to remain at least five metres
clear of the penguins (and much farther from the cantankerous fur seals); however, the penguins haven't been similarly educated, and soon they are zig-zagging around us, indeed almost between our legs. This is late summer, penguin fledgling season, when the mothers are trying to teach their goofy, fluff-ball offspring a little common sense. Such as: "No, I won't feed you fish (via beak-to-beak regurgitation) every time you wail; no, don't follow me everywhere; and yes, there's the sea - now go and learn to swim and fish for yourself."

At such times a penguin rookery resembles a pratfall training camp for a Three Stooges movie. As a mother gentoo penguin flees downhill from her frantically pestering offspring (plus another hanger-on or two), the whole train trips over itself, squawking and skidding uncontrollably - like David Attenborough gone slapstick.

Antarctica is like God's hand let loose, an Eden in ice. On the shores of aptly-named Paradise Bay sits little Almirante Brown base, one of several research stations - British, Polish and Argentinian - that we visit. It's not much more than an outpost of tin and wind: two orange huts and an Argentine flag shredding itself in the gale. Such "scientific bases" are maintained by a number of South American nations in order to literally "wave the flag" in hope of reinforcing their claim to some slice of rock and ice. In Paradise Bay's case, Argentina claims it, along with both Chile and the UK.

Almirante Brown base used to be much larger than its current pair of curiously singed-looking huts. The Antarctic urban legend goes that in the mid-1980's the base doctor, perhaps stuck down here too long, became unhinged. When he heard that a ship was coming to relieve him of his duties - and possibly in a straight-jacket - he took the line of, "If I'm going, so is everyone else ...", and he torched the base. Personally, I suspect that his fellow workers passed the hat around and encouraged him with several thousand pesos (and a box of matches) to hasten their repatriation en masse back to Argentina.

Life on board our ship seems much about digestion - of scenery, Antarctic information, and of course, meals. On most days we enjoy specialist lectures in Antarctic ecology, the complex local birdlife, whales and of course the heroic/tragic history of polar exploration. The meals, too, are excellent, and on several afternoons we enjoy that polar improbability, a barbecue on the Vavilov's sunny aft deck.

But it is from the close quarters of the Zodiac, or in delicately creeping through a rookery, that our greatest impressions come. A school of crabeater seals surfs the turquoise surge around the base of a grounded iceberg. Elephant seals snooze side-by-side on the beach like obese, comatose cigars, or waddle into the water to swim like rocks. Giant whale vertebrae lie beached and bleached on the shore like prehistoric, bone propellers. And summer's growling avalanches of blue ice - the gods of "The Freezer" (as Attenborough called this place) at their annual defrosting.

"So much ice for gin and tonics!" I overhear one tippler sighing at the sight of fields of pure ice. It's easy to forget that Antarctica is in fact a desert, one of the world's driest places; a desert covered with an ice sheet over 2100 metres thick that contains 70 percent of our planet's fresh water.
The world's lowest temperature, -88.3°C, was recorded in Antarctica, although summer along the Peninsula - the area most commonly visited by cruise ships - can be as warm as 15°C. This is mid-February and it's zero degrees Celsius on deck; even so, the couple opposite me at breakfast is celebrating: "This is our summer vacation. It was minus 21 Fahrenheit when we left Chicago."

Some fifteen ships - departing from Ushuaia, Christchurch and Hobart - now bring around 10,000 visitors to the Antarctic waters, from South Georgia Island to the Ross Sea, during the November-March cruising season. It's a figure that many fear may be already nearing the impact limit. The frequently voiced opinion of, "Don't open the door any wider," after one's own visit is, paradoxically, both selfish and protectionist.

I climb a steep snow ridge above a beautiful inlet named Neko Harbour and look down into its glacier-framed bay where, amid a litter of ivory bergs, the Akademik Vavilov rides on a mirror sea. This could be a J.M.W. Turner image, painted not in fire but ice. As they say, the last virgin continent. May it stay that way. No more travel writers, at least, should be allowed.

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