10/02/2018
Today we are back in the ‘normal’ world, I typed this while down there
Antarctica..... I doubt I will ever be able to truly describe it. I can see why people go there and keep going back and back! The guides were genuinely excited to see it, our cruise was the first after winter and it changes so it’s new every summer, bays changed, glaciers have moved and changed shapes, animals have moved, it’s an adventure every time.
Our plans changed as we went as we were running from a massive storm, even ‘avoiding’ it resulted in 6m waves and 10 on the Beaufort scale (it only goes to 12)... as our expedition leader said, you need to work for Antarctica - it was 8m seas and 50 knots on the return!
I don’t know what I expected I just knew I wanted to go but it surpassed anything I had imagined... every day I said ... that is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen .... to find the next day .....THAT is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!!
I have 1184 photos but they won’t capture it, I could and may (did) buy the DVD of the professional photos taken on this cruise but they won’t capture it.... I sat on a windy, beyond windy beach in the Falkland Islands and watched the waves break and the penguins wander up and down, having to cover my face with my gloves in the strongest gusts as I was being sand blasted and I felt....peace... David said I looked like a small child and that’s what I felt. The wonder children have and that we lose as we ‘grow up’... our first day on the actual Antarctica peninsula I plopped down in the snow at the top of hill.... and watched and felt....penguins, a glacier carving, the sound, the wave... and it made me cry... sounds silly doesn’t it? Actually it was tears because it was just too much, beauty, serenity, nature, us jaded humans don’t handle an overload of that easily...
It is stark, unforgiving and brutal and you could be forgiven for thinking, ice and snow... really how can that be beautiful or varied, like I said I won’t ever be able to describe it.... but apart from the beauty I think it’s the fact that it’s the only place I have been where we humans haven’t fu**ed it up, or modified it to suit. It is a constant battle to keep it that way so fingers crossed the 38 countries involved in the treaty stop the few who are trying to mine, fish, whale the area. There are remnants of the evil history down here of whaling etc but they are past and the natural state has reverted, yesterday we were surrounded on our ship by 100+ whales, 3(maybe 4) different types and walking on shore penguins wander around in front and beside you without a care in the world because they haven’t learnt to be frightened of us!! I can not tell you how exciting and moving that is... they do look at you, hmmm you are a weird looking penguin and not sure I like the red jacket but I have somewhere to be so off I go... that’s why I try to sit and just absorb it...
We even have to take care to step over their little penguin highways coz they all follow a track they make so their little legs can get through the snow... and everyone does!!! Absolutely step over it, take care, give way to the penguin, don’t get too close to the seal.. polite humans... who knew?? I think it’s part of the magic...
If I was younger and had found this years ago I could imagine studying relevant subjects and being involved down here, it is the only place that I have found that is magical, one person described it as spiritual; I think both are words that try to describe the feeling it inspires but both are inadequate...
