I excitedly told my dear old very well-travelled Dad that I was going on a cruise to Antarctica. “Oh,” he said in an unimpressed voice. "“Never been interested in going there. Just a pile of ice and birds.”
I didn’t have Antarctica at the top of my bucket list. It was my Husband who was desperate to go there.
In fact, I was a bit worried about the rough Drake Passage crossing (which you have to navigate twice) and whether I would feel very vulnerable out in the middle of nowhere.
Well, the Drake Passage wasn’t huge fun but I managed it OK with the help of travel wristbands and seasickness tablets. As for feeling vulnerable, I didn’t.
In fact, I loved it!
Never have I seen so much snow, so many penguins, so many glaciers (actually, I had never seen a glacier before!) and so many whales.
Yes, there was a lot of ice. But it was beautiful. We saw glacial ice, pack ice and ice sheets. We saw clear ice and dimpled ice, opaque ice and blue ice. We saw icebergs of all shapes and sizes. We landed on one beach which was littered with unique pieces of ice. From a distance, they looked like bubble bath foam. Up closer and you realised that this was a gallery of ice sculptures.
Depending on the size of the icebergs, we learnt that they have different names. For instance, an iceberg about the size of a piano is called a growler. Who knew??
Some icebergs look like puffs of meringue. I will never again shape a pavlova without remembering these amazing icebergs. Some icebergs look like white cliffs, cut with a knife. Some icebergs have little aquamarine “swimming pools” in or beside them. Some icebergs are just little blobs of ice floating on the water. Some look bigger than our ship. Whatever the shape, whatever the colour and whatever the size, they are works of art. And that is just what you can see as most of the iceberg is hidden under the sea.
We witnessed calving which is when chunks of ice break off at the end of a glacier. You hear it first – a thunderous noise and, if you’re quick enough to turn and find where the calving is happening before it’s finished, you see the ice breaking and falling. If you miss the calving (which lasts a matter of seconds), you can see the chunks of fallen ice in the water.
As dear old Dad predicted, we did see a lot of birds and my favourite were the penguins. In the areas of Antarctica we visited, we saw Gentoo, Chinstrap and Adélie varieties. We saw them incubating eggs, we saw them swimming, we saw them “porpoising” (rising and submerging in the water), we saw them feeding, we saw them waddling and we saw them travelling up and down the highways that they carve from the snow between their nests and the water.
More than the ice, more than the birds, what impressed us was the pristine environment and the grandeur of nature. Antarctica is the largest wilderness area on Earth, unaffected by large scale human activities. For a tourist, it is like a giant, open air museum. It is so much more than a pile of ice and birds.
Via the modern magic of WiFi, I was able to send my dear old Dad photos of our adventure as we went along and to call him daily. He remains uninterested in visiting Antarctica as there are no shops!
I, on the other hand, can’t wait to go back and explore more!
The Writer travelled to Antarctica on the magnificent Scenic Eclipse at her own expense. The trip she did was called “Antarctica In Depth.” For more information on the Scenic Antarctica cruises - Click here.
Leonie Jarrett, an avid traveller, lives in Melbourne, Australia with her Husband of more than 3 decades, her 4 adult children and her 2 Golden Retrievers. Follow Leonie here.
