On The Road – arrieve – Antarctica Part 1

This is the landing area at Neko Harbor, taken from the ship. One of the zodiacs is heading back to the beach, and if you zoom in, you can see the line of red jackets heading up the mountain to a viewing spot.

The Antarctic tourist regulations allow a maximum of 100 people ashore at one time; since there were 200 passengers on the ship, we were divided into six groups for zodiac boarding, and three groups at a time would be on shore. After an hour or ninety minutes, the first three groups would return to the ship and the other three groups would go ashore. (Which groups went first rotated every day.)

Since my group was going ashore later, I got to watch the first group from the ship.

I did not climb up that mountain by the way–much too steep and slippery. It would have taken all of the limited time on shore just to get my ass safely up to the top lookout and back down again, and I preferred staying closer to the beach where I could enjoy the glacier views and watch the penguins.

A glacier backdrop for a colony of gentoo penguins.

An ice cave in the glacier.

The first time I went to Antarctica, I shared pictures with my co-workers when I came back. My new manager, who was kind of an idiot, expressed her disappointment in the penguins because they were so “dirty.” It is true that real-life penguins are often kind of grubby, covered in mud and poop and other substances you would probably prefer not to have identified. You know, what with them being wild animals and all.

So I’m sharing this very uncharacteristic penguin picture from Neko Harbor because the penguin is so clean it would probably pass even that manager’s unrealistic standards. Well, except for the feet.

The regulations also require keeping a distance of at least 5 meters from any wildlife, but that rule is a lot harder to follow. You might be waiting patiently for a couple of penguins to cross the path ahead of you, and not realize that there’s another one coming up behind you.

Penguin Courtship in Action.

The gentoo on the left had offered the one on the right a pebble. This is like a diamond ring in Penguinland, and all of us watching (from the mandated distance, of course) were crushed on his behalf when the pebble was refused. She does look sorry to have to disappoint him.

The rejected suitor dropped the pebble and waddled away, and as soon as he was gone, she dug around in the snow and retrieved it. Hey, you don’t want to let a perfectly good pebble go to waste!

I took this picture with my phone and the lack of fine detail makes it look like a painting.

I did have an SLR, so why was I using a phone to take pictures? Simple logistics. I brought it ashore to take videos, which is much easier than using my big camera. But because of the much stricter restrictions in place now—no kneeling, crouching, or resting bags or any equipment on the ground—I would put my camera away in my backpack before dealing with putting a life jacket on. So if I saw something I wanted to take a picture of while waiting for the next zodiac, I had to use my phone.

Gentoos porpoising in Neko Harbor.

I LOVE penguins, but sitting in a boat watching them leap out of the water around me is one of the things I love most. Penguins porpoise in order to breathe, but also to navigate, and sometimes just for fun. I have never managed to get great pictures of porpoising. They swim so fast—gentoos can swim 22 miles per hour—that they’re gone before you realize they’re there and you can’t predict where they’ll surface again.

The weather—and the light—changes very quickly. It can go from dazzlingly bright—if overcast—to sepulchral and back again very quickly.