Antarctica — Dreaming of Ice (part 1)

Sheets spill like a snowy landscape over stray pillows and outstretched legs, like a vast rolling tundra in the chill of the air-conditioning. I'm deep in the white covers of a comfortable bed. Outside, the summer sun is exploding, all nuclear heat and searing light. Reminisces of Antarctica milkshake-swirl like a dream mixed with news reports, documentaries and make-believe — icebergs being towed to the middle-east, a BBC episode on frozen polar seas, and a sci-fi horror story from 1931 that I’m currently reading — the real, the surreal and the imagined — sometimes it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. The last of the night’s sleep hazily froths over the top of my thoughts. It’s bizarrely apt to wake up thinking of ice on a hot day.

Ushuaia, Argentina - at The End of The World

At the very tip of South America, the Andes tumble into small foothills, and the watery Beagle Channel divides Chile and Argentina. Ushuaia, self-styled as Fin Del Mundo — The End Of The World — is a frontier port town.

Red, white, yellow and blue shipping containers lie scattered across it like tumbled Lego pieces, waiting to go off and build lives in remote corners of the world. A blue domed summer afternoon in February turns pink evening as the Ocean Endeavour slides south towards Antarctica carrying 200 passengers and crew.

The Ocean Endeavour

In Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel — God reaches out a finger and breathes life into Adam. At the base of the world, the Antarctic Peninsula reaches for the tip of South America — fresh un-breathed air swirls, mighty weather systems form and the currents of the South Pacific and the South Atlantic collide. It’s the edge of wilderness and everything feels biblical here.

The thousand kilometers between the landmasses is the Drake Passage. Frances Drake circumnavigated the globe in the 1500s, passing under South America. His name is liberally scattered over world geography and adventure history. I wonder where explorers will go in the coming years...

We’re crossing the passage in two days — a day dreaming of a lost continent, watching Albatrosses, terns and gulls on an ink blue sea, and another, doing the Drake Shake to the pitch and fall of 12 meter waves the colour of pewter under an angry sky. Dr J is handing out hallucinogenic sea-sickness pills — all the better to find God with. Some people don’t like her evangelism, but I think I’m in love.

A convoy of birds follows in our wake and I remember the The Rime of The Ancient Mariner . Albatrosses can fly to the moon and back 14 times in their lives, but they’re bound by gravity, commitments and a need to feed their chicks.

Albatross

On the 26th of Feb, the winds are dying down as we approach the Peninsula. Explorers of old must have been mad or desperate to do this in the seafaring vessels of their time. I wonder what they dreamed of most.

In the cold dark sea around us, melting ice floes appear first — some snow-white, some sky grey, some transparent like crystals. Chunks of glaciers float by in brilliant luminous blue, the air compressed to tiny pockets of time, trapped for centuries in the ice, now freed by the forces of global warming.

Glaciers are luminous!

We can finally go top-deck as the wind is dropping to below 100 km/hour. The satellites and equipment here — all buffed white, on orange holdings — make it feel like a spaceship bristling for the unknown. Fin Whales appear to starboard, not far from the ship. In the distance, someone spots the fountaining blow of a Humpback. We’re in whale country! Is this what all the oceans once looked like? At the prow of the ship, a welcome committee of Fur Seals loops in and out of the water. In the distance, a ragged snowy mountain range appears… my first glimpse of the Antarctic continent.

Land Ahoy!