All Ice in Wonderland

We tied up early this morning in port, the seas had been almost mirror flat for 48 hours, no joke. Thing is we’d expected to be hurled all over the place, there was an epic storm in the channel the day before and another vessel turned back, or at least that’s what the crew was telling us. We had about 24 hours of “rough” seas, and then, I kid you not, it was like a ferry ride on Puget Sound in July. The sun was out, everybody was on the stern deck, all the way at the top, behind the bridge, drinking hot chocolate and spotting dolphins and grinning like idiots in the sunshine. It was gorgeous.The water stayed that way all the way to the Beagle Channel, it was perfect, just perfect.

It’s been, as you can imagine, a breathtaking trip. I saw hundreds, thousands of penguins, really, THOUSANDS, lots of fat gray chicks and tuxedo wearing birds everywhere. I saw fur seals and crab eater seals and Weddell seals. I saw humpback whales (and they saw us, they were that close to the ship) and dolphins, and sometimes, penguins swimming like dolphins, that might have been my favorite thing.

I was seasick something fierce on day two, and then, the doctor gave me something, and I slept for a few hours and woke up starving. That happened once again on a day when we had some swell, but mostly I slept through it and the weather was bad so I didn’t miss too much. On our return crossing, I was double dosed on the medication and I was FINE, a little uncertain, but I ate three whole meals, after spending one uneven night below deck.

Today the ground feels a uneven, it’s funny to be on land, and I’m not particularly looking forward to flying, it would be nice to check in somewhere and have a shower in a room that isn’t moving. Instead, I’m squatting in the lobby of the hotel we stayed in before we sailed because they have wifi.

I have a lot of pictures and some video I’ll post. I don’t have the smell of penguins, not since I washed my pack — it was getting terribly ripe and every time I opened the wardrobe, I got the whiff of penguin guano. It might still be in my rain gear, I’m planning to air all that stuff out but good, and do some laundry, once I arrive in Santiago.

I was kind of overwhelmed at breakfast yesterday, I was looking out the window at the glaciers, and I thought, wow, I got to go to the 7th continent! Who gets to do that? And who gets to do that as part of a writing job? When people on board asked what I was doing, what brought me there and I told them, they would shake their heads and say, wow, that’s quite a gig. To which I could only say, “You’re not kidding! I KNOW!”

I had weird dreams most of the trip, probably from the medication, but also, from being in a constant state of amazement. You have all seen the pictures of Antarctica, beautiful documentary photography of the icebergs and the wildlife, You know, already, that it is gorgeous, that the colors are extremely sharp and the ice is blue and the penguins are the physical comedians of the avian world. But to stand in the middle of it, to have all of this wrapped around you for 360 degrees… I struggled every day when I sat down to write, trying to find new words to explain what it feels like to be in the middle of this wonderland.

If you’ve been reading Nerd’s Eye View for any time at all, you know that I love to write about landscape. Now, I feel completely at loss, as though two days flying down and a difficult crossing and wild weather and potentially dangerous storms and obnoxious travelers and weird food and lousy Spanish language skills are easy obstacles. The hard part is now, in trying to tell you, in words, what it is like to be in Antarctica. I am stuck with one cliched phrase as I think this puzzle through: It is like no place else.