This morning we landed on Petermann Island, another desolate place of rock and ice and penguins. It was colder than anywhere we have been before. In the near distance was a steep hill, the top lost in cloud, and on landing we had to walk across rocks like stepping stones to get to shore.
All 120-odd passengers disembarked and most followed the bird-watcher up the hill to where there is a colony of Adelia penguins (unsure of the spelling on the name). Their heads are entirely black, without the bright beak of the Gentoo or the white patches of the Chinstrap. I mentally christened them Ninja Penguins. They are not as active or curious as the Gentoo, and mostly they looked at us looking at them.
After a while I left the crowd there and walked back across the island to where there is a cross. In 1982 three British sailors were stranded here. The story as told by one of the staff is that they stayed for two weeks, then made a break for it and were never seen again. I suppose it’s possible that they just got bored and took a stupid risk but I don’t quite buy that version of events. But whatever happened, all that remains of them now is the cross.
I went reasonably close to the edge of the rocks and sat down and stared out to sea. In the near distance the island curved around and I could see the glacier cliff and floating icebergs and smaller pieces of sea ice, the ship a red dash in the middle of it all. It was a peaceful scene. I was joined there by Nina, a German girl who I may have mentioned already as the person who is cycling around South America. We sat in silence, as we have similar views on getting away from the main group, and then a staff person came over and asked us to come back from the edge. I pointed out we were not near the edge. They asked us to come back anyway, in as friendly a way as possible, and I did not argue further. They have a job to do, and instructions from on high.
I wandered over to the other side of the island instead, not far from the penguin colony, and found rocks there to sit on. The view was even more artistic – the wall of the glacier half-enclosed a little bay where huge icebergs bobbed up and down with the waves. I have a video of it, though to upload it from this ship would be about the price of a new SLR camera. (I kid, but data is expensive – 10mb is USD30, and it goes up from there with discounts for bulk purchases.) I sat and watched and let myself slide into it and became faintly aware of someone calling, and realised eventually they were calling me to come back from the ‘edge’. I pointed out again I was nowhere near anything you could fall off, and was again gently asked to come back, and again I gently acquiesced. I went and sat on a rock in the middle of the island where the greatest risk is being hit by a meteorite and the view is over snow and tourists and cameras.
I have thought a lot today about the nature of tourism and what it means to be in a place like this and what it will mean for the place itself as more people visit. We touch on such a tiny, tiny percentage of the total Antarctic, which is larger in area than Australia. We only land on the mainland once, as I have already noted. It is undoubtedly better to see it with a hundred others than not to see it at all, and it is usually not hard – despite today’s indications to the contrary – to get away from the group enough to feel alone, to feel the spirit of the place, the immensity and solitude that have cloaked it for the aeons. And all of the people here are trying to make it a unique experience, a personal one, something real to them and them alone. It’s an impossible task on a tour boat, though the framing a photograph can help propagate the lie. Why, though, do they come? Why do we come? What is it that we are hoping to see here, to learn, to do? Or is it enough to have the photographs and the fact of completion, the dinner party line about being at the Antarctic and you should see the pictures they’re amazing? If we could answer this we would know something about human nature, something shallow maybe, dressed in the clothes of exploration but at its heart just another symbol of status and money.
When I was sitting near the cross, before the horde came to that side of the island from the Ninja Penguin colony, I managed to get a photograph that I like. In the left foreground is the ship and in the right the cross. In roughly three layers are the stone of the beach, the water, and the ice melding with the sky. Everything you need to know to frame the debate on Antarctic tourism is there – the beauty and brutality of the land, the death of its explorers, the safety of its tourists. Here’s a random prediction for you: if I live to the average age of the males of my generation, I will be able to see the number of deaths from tourism increase over time as the number of people who try to get somewhere truly remote and inhospitable increases. Maybe we are not supposed to live lives without the adrenaline of the danger of the world. And maybe – most unacceptable thought in the politics of our day – the deaths of a few will be an acceptable price to pay to rediscover it.
Anyway. Despite my complaints and dark wonderings we had a lovely morning, and when I got back to the ship I was tired. My throat, yet again, is acting up. I slept for a short while and got up for lunch, then went back to bed immediately after for two hours or so. (All day since then, people have told me I look tired.) At 3pm my group was called to the mud room for our afternoon activity. (Have I already explained the mud room? I cannot check the past entries to know. It’s the room where you go to put on your boots and clothes and get ready to go outside, and then you go down the stairs that are lowered into position from a crane above and step into the Zodiac with the help of what are called ABs, short for able-body seamen. At some point I will go through a day from start to finish and explain all of these supporting logistics.)
This activity was a one-hour cruise on a Zodiac around what they call an ‘iceberg graveyard’, a place where many icebergs gather due to the vagaries of the currents. And it was something special all right. On many of the icebergs groups of sea lions were resting, and we took many photographs. On one of the earlier Zodiacs, which went out straight after lunch, a leopard seal actually got off one of the icebergs, swam over to the boat and bit the side of it hard enough to puncture it. I would love to have been on that one. The Zodiacs are designed to easily survive and function with such a deflation, so they just went back to the ship and got a different boat instead. It must have been exciting though.
But what really appealed to me was the shape and the construction of the icebergs. They are acted on by the wind and the water and for some of them even the ground over which they passed to get to the sea from their parent glacier. The end result makes me think of great broken cathedrals of whiteness, shattered and exploded into otherworldly shapes, graceful and proud and pure, completely unlike anywhere else I have been. The Galapagos is a place where the things of the earth have reached a perfection, but the Antarctic as we saw it today is a place unfinished, raw and incomplete. Its beauty is alien and dangerous and hostile.
For the second half of our trip it first got cold and then got very cold and then it started to snow, and I got some hint of understanding of what it was like for Shackleton and Scott and Amundsen and the others of the Heroic Age, as the books call it. We had been warned in advance it would be cold and were prepared as well as we could be. Still though for most of the last fifteen minutes I sat quietly with my head turned away from the sleety snow, not seeing much. Let it be noted that I was wearing a woolly hat, gloves, my heavy jacket with the hood up, two fleeces, a t-shirt, a thermal top, jeans, waterproof pants, boots, and the standard underclothes. I was glad to get back to the ship.
In the early afternoon they clouds opened for a short period and the sun shone. The sky has been grey and overcast for the last several days – apparently it’s often the case that an easy crossing of the Drake means bad weather here. But when the sun shone we saw the mountains of the peninsula in the distance, some of them over 4,000m, and the play of light on the brightness of the snow, and came to know what we have been missing. For once in my life I am hoping the sun shines bright and strong in the next few days.
Dinner this evening was an exceptional affair, even by the standards of the ship where the food is very good. They made a barbecue for us, which would have been eaten outside if the weather had been conducive, which it was not by then. There were burgers, hot-dogs, pork ribs, chicken, steak, corn, baked potatoes, salad, and crumble with custard for desert. I sampled as much as I could, and everything I had was excellent. The next time I get on a Zodiac it will sink.
After dinner we had a briefing about tomorrow’s activities. In the morning we are to visit an island that has a British post office on it, which is rather surprising, at a place called Port Lockroy. It is part of a former research station that has been turned into a tourist destination. After the briefing this evening we watched a short BBC documentary on the bay and the post office, which was full of rousingly British remarks, and then rather surprisingly the four ladies who work in the station at present came up to do a live Q&A session. They come on board the passing tourist ships to use the showers, as they must conserve the water they have at the station and therefore can’t shower with it. Later on I saw them in the bar, so I imagine the showers are not quite the only attraction of coming on board.
For the last 45 minutes or so I have been back in my favourite chair in the library, typing these notes and reading the print-out of the Guardian newspaper that I have discovered they put here each day. There is not a mention of the election at home, but I see my old friends in Libya are among the Arab countries where dissent is being met with a bullet.
Snow is spattering the window outside, and it is darker than I have yet seen it. On the way back to my cabin I will stick my head outside to see if I can see any stars, but it will be too cold to stay there for more than a minute or two without dressing up in the full regalia.
And thus another great day passes, by turns frustrating and inspiring and educational and fun. Yet again, I give thanks for the chance to be here and to see these things for myself.
Goodnight.
[Less chance than usual to tidy this entry, apologies for typos and hyperbole!]
