One man needed for trip to Antarctica!

Sev · 17-09-2009 5:40pm #1

Hi,

I have been planning a trip to antarctica for the last year or so with a number of friends. We've chartered a 75 ft yacht, the Australis (http://www.ocean-expeditions.com) with a skipper to take us from Ushuaia in Argentina down around the antarctic peninsula for 3 weeks, departing on the 3rd of January.

The yacht berths 9, plus 2 crew (though we're still expected to take watches) and at the moment we have 8 people paid up and ready to go, but we have one space still available.

Our plan is to spend the first 3 days getting massively sick while crossing the Drake passage, and the next 2½ weeks seeing the icebergs, whales, penguins and volcanoes of the antarctic peninsula.

A few of us are into hiking and climbing, so we're hopping to have a few day expeditions on the mainland for trekking or climbing on a few of the more accessible peaks!

The cost of all this is about €5000 - 5500 for the yacht charter (depending on exchange rates, and based on 9 people sharing) plus flights to argentina (around €800) plus beer and spending money and other incidentals.

So, if anyone has the time and the cash* and you're interested, let me know.

Thanks,

Stephen

p.s. Most of us are sciency-type postgrads in TCD, so if you don't think you can handle being trapped in a boat with 8 physics nerds for 3 weeks, it might not be for you. Most of us are nice though.

*Bear in mind, all the yacht charter and flights need to be paid in the next couple of months, so if you don't think you can realistically get that much money together,please don't waste our time.

PCPhoto · 17-09-2009 5:45pm

just curious - would I actually have to do anything apart from turn up and travel with the group ?

Am tempted .... and could be fun.

j-g-giant · 17-09-2009 5:53pm

You don't even need to turn up. If you want to just give us the money, that'd be fine.

Seriously though, more or less all activities are optional. Some of us want to go trekking/climbing, some want to go snorkelling, or kayaking, but mainly are going just to see the place and enjoy ourselves. The great thing about chartering the yacht is that we get to do whatever we want to do.

Mena · 17-09-2009 5:55pm

Anyone want to hold onto my wife and child for a while so I can take up this offer?

Sev · 17-09-2009 5:55pm

PCPhoto wrote: »

just curious - would I actually have to do anything apart from turn up and travel with the group ?

No of course not. The reason we have chosen to travel to Antarctica on a yacht instead of a cruiseliner, is because of the degree of flexibility and autonomy we have. We will have control over where we want to go and when we want to go there, and our small yacht will be able to visit locations not accessible to a large cruiseliner. The yacht is effectively our expedition support vessel, they'll take us where we want to go!

As of yet, we have no set itinerary, except to spend the three weeks sailing up and down the Antarctic peninsula. We understand that any ninth member we recruit may have their own ideas of what they want to get from antarctica and will be able to have an input in the preparations and planning.

Evil Phil · 18-09-2009 11:15am

If I wasn't emigrating, and I had the cash, I'd be in there like a shot. Climbing on a few of the more accessible peaks?! Damn, that would be f*cking brilliant. Well worth a few days of sea sickness.

You should try over on http://www.climbing.ie/ as well.

Bugger, I wish I could go.

Evil Phil · 18-09-2009 11:24am

You know what, let me think about this.

Evil Phil · 18-09-2009 11:27am

Having been to Uishuia before I would recommend getting a flight from Buenos Aires. It is probably the world's most boring bus journey. I did half of it, 32 hours on a coach, and was ready to chew my own foot off at that stage. Both towns are great though, I hope none of you are vegeterian.

fergalr · 18-09-2009 8:16pm

Wow, if I hadn't just gone back to college..!
Sounds like a great trip. I like sailing, I like mountains, and I like hanging out with sciency postgrads.

Sounds like a really interesting way to go about it too, hiring a yacht with friends - would never have thought of that as a way of going on a polar trip.

Only 2 crew though? If none of you can sail, make sure you don't lose them in high seas!

Sev · 16-10-2009 4:13pm

The spot is now filled! Thanks.

K09 · 27-01-2011 1:06pm

Hey Sev,

How did this trip go??? Sounded very exciting!!

Sev · 27-01-2011 4:58pm

This is just a copy and paste job from an email I sent while away. I've attached some photographs at the end too.

Olah,

We arrived in Buenos Aires to beautiful sunshine and a warm 28C, quite a change from back home where we were suffering one of the coldest winters on record! After wandering around town a bit we ventured out for our first steak of many in a restaurant with a stuffed cow outside welcoming us in. Restaurants here seem to be great value and you can get a fantastic fillet steak (lomo) almost anywhere in Buenos Aires (and Argentina for that matter) for less than 45 pesos which is about 8 or 9 euro (Beers are cheap too and often come in nice big litre sized bottles).

Next day we met Sorens Argentinian friend Gabriella and went on a walking tour of Buenos Aires, which doesnt impress me a whole lot, but then again, I dont really enjoy cities, theyre all the same and Buenos Aires has a very familiar European feel to it. We aimed to visit La Plata with Gabriella, but after waiting for an hour or two at the bus stop and seeing no bus, we had to abort the plan and ended up seeing Boca instead, which was a worhty alternative. After walking for half an hour through rather desolate and empty residential areas, you stumble upon this really interesting town near the sea in which all the buildings are painted in different bright colours, why I dont quite understand. Its excessively touristy though, the most crowded touristy place weve visited yet.

On New Years eve we spent about an hour wandering around town finding that restaurants were full or had excessively overpriced menus. Although we began to realise that this was the norm in every restaurant. We eventually settled on this place where it was only 200 pesos for the set meal (including free drinks all night). After 12pm the staff cleared all the tables and chairs in the room upstairs where we were eating and the place became a nigthclub of sorts. We got talking to the Texan owner, apparently the raised stage near the window where we were all seated for dinner used to host sex shows in a previous reincarnation of the premises.

The following morning (new years day) we were up bright and early for our 11am flight to Ushuaia. 90% of the flight itself is rather boring, since its mostly over the sea, but in the final 5 or 10 minutes or so, you suddenly fly in over the Andes, and the plane makes a wide sweeping circle over the Beagle Channel to land with an amazing backdrop of snowy mountains. Down here is much colder than Buenos Aires, its like 7-12C each day in Ushuaia.

As soon as we were settled in our Hostel, we headed down to the yacht club looking for the vessel we were to be spending the next 3 weeks on. Which we found, thankfully, it turns out the yacht did exist, and we hadnt just sent 50,000 euro to Nigerians. **** had just got real. The next day was spent sorting last minute bits and bobs (buying crampons, food for camping/climbing (carbohydrate slop and cup a soup) and booking our tickets to El Chalten for when we got back)

The initial 6 hours of sailing down the Beagle channel is rather pleasant. We saw nice mountain vistas and a picturesque lighthouse (Les Eclaires, a popular site on postcards in Ushuaia, and a sort of symbol for the town and Tierra del Fuego). Unfortunatley we didnt quite see Cape Horn (except maybe in the far distance) since we left on a Sunday and couldnt get clearance from the Chilean oficials to sail through Chilean waters.

Then we hit the drake. The Drake passage is the turbulent body of water which lies between the tip of south america and the antarctic peninsula. It is renowned for its tempestuous seas, since it lies in the furious fifties, the unbroken band of wind that stretches the way around the globe. I opted not to take any sea sickness so that I could prove a point to cormac, but most of the other guys did, although I dont think it really did much for them. The people with tendencies to get sea sick still got sick, and those who could stomach it, did just that. We were lucky with the weather. The first two days had pretty low winds, and for a time the water was rather glassy (the drake lake as they say) but there was still quite a swell. This seems to be a feature of the drake passage, there may be no weather, but that doenst mean there cant be massive waves.

Our home would be constantly rocking with a predictable frequency for the next 3 days. Life on board the yacht was pretty sweet. We had two crew: Ben, the skipper and Skye, the cook. The food was excellent, way way better than we expected and the yacht was extremely well equipped. There was a folder in the kitchen which had an alphabetical list of everything you might every need, next to the name of that item was its exact location in the boat which you could find with the aid of a map. We convinced steve to make a curry one night, and he was first reluctant, and tried to make excuses such as not having access to fennel seeds and cumin and ginger etc. of course the boat had all these things in stock. The boat had EVERYTHING in stock, and in just the right quantity. We also had a nice large flat screen tv in the main room with a considerable DVD collection and a particularly awesome rotating table with a lazy susan. But we spent most of our time playing bridge. Bridge is actually a really really good game, with many layers of strategy. Carlos taught us all, and rationed out knowledge of the game in small quantities as we played it. Everybody is pretty much addicted to it now.

Theres not much to see outside when sailing on the drake except waves and miles of ocean in all directions, but there is wildlife. We saw plenty of albatrosses (black browed albatroses and wandering albatrosses with the largest wingspan of any living bird) and petrels. Theres either a high density of albatrosses uniformly spaced over the drake passage, or they tend to follow the yacht, because there was almost always one or two of them visible off the bow. Also, we had easterly winds which was unusual, it meant that we would be greated by nice clear skies and good weather when we arrived since the air is crips and dry and cold from travelling over the antarctic mainland.

We didnt really have to perform much duties on the yacht because the two crew we had could usually handle everything themselves, but during the Drake, when we weould be continously sailing 24 hours a day, we had to take watches so that Ben and Skye could get some sleep. Carlos and Garrett volunteered to do most of these, although I subbed in on one or two. Nothing to exciting really, you just sit in the wheel room and look out for anything funny, such as ice bergs dead ahead, changing weather or the instruments doing anything funny. Mostly they just navigated by gps, and they had an autopilot that would correct the boat so that it always kept on the right heading. Ben put the sails up during the drake to supplement speed, but mostly we just motored around.

The third night of drake was reasonably rough, but nothing Ben couldnt handle, the waves got pretty big though compared to our tiny boat, not sure exactly how big the swell was, but Ben apparently got uncomfortable at times. We spent a lot of time in the wheel room that night just watching the sea, as if it was some interesting movie, watching what it does next, wondering how big the next wave is and what the boats going to do when it hits us. Oh and we crossed a point of equal longitute and latitude, when we reached exactly 61 Deg 32.597´ South, 61 Deg 32.598´ West. Sleeping was surprisingly easy considering that every 10 seconds the boat would lurch about 70 degrees and I would simply fall onto the wooden divider that separated myself and Steve.

On the morning of the 6th we arrived at Deception island, passing Smith island on the way (which Ive dubbed razor island of death since its really exposed to the southern ocean and its contours rise really steeply out of the water, Ben said some crazy frenchies were heading down to climb it this season). We crossed the drake in almost exactly 72 hours which Ben believed to be his fastest crossing yet.

Deception island isnt relaly that pretty a place to behold, but its definitely intersting. The island is simply a ring, it is the caldera that is visible from a submerged volcano with a tiny entrance, 230m wide that boats can sail in, referred to as Neptunes Bellows. Apparently its a fantastic natural harbour. That said theres a piece of torn sail in the yachts main living room signed by a bunch of spaniars on a previous australis trip as a reminder of a day in which the boat suffered 120kph winds when anchored at deception island.

Ben seemed to be against the idea of visiting the place as our first port of call, since it lacks the impressive glaciers and ice sheets of other places on the peninsula. There is however, the remains of an old whaling station which was destroyed by a mud slide which occured when a volcanic eruption melted a glacier on the island. There are a couple of spots on the beach where the sand and sea has been heated by volcanic activity and its possible to bath comfortably in the antarctic waters, although apparently IATO regulations wouldnt let us do this anymore. We hiked to the top of the island, the rim of the volcano, to see plenty of ice bergs in the distant ocean, we were to see plenty more. We also saw our first grounded penguins (chinstraps and gentoos I think) and a crabeater seal was lounging on the beach. That night I remember taking a video of deception island, because it was simply so insanely quiet and still, and barely a ripple in the sea, this was to be a common occurence on the antarctic peninsula, many of the bays and inlets are spectacularly sheltered from the ocean and its not rare to find the surface of the ocean flat like a mirror.

The following morning, we set sail across the passage of sea separating the south shetlands from the rest of the antarctic peninsula, to a place called Enterprise island. Now we started to see the mountains and the vast glaciated slopes of the mainland. Everything here, even if its just 100m high, looks like the top of a high himalayan peak.You cant really travel anywhere on the mainland without it being over a deep glacier. Glacier ice just oozes off everything. At Enterprise island we anchored beside a rusting shipwreck of a whaling resupply vessel. Apparently it caught fire, and the captain ran it into shallow waters to save the crew and supplies on board.

The following morning, we climbed the ice wall of the glacier overlooking the bay and Paul had our first crevasse fall, one of a total of six to be had on the trip, although never really spectacular. There are crevasses seemingly everywhere on the antarctic mainland, and almost all travel must be roped, especially in the season we were in. Because the temperature in January seems to stay always slightly above freezing, the snow low down is often very soft and slushy, making the snow bridges which cover the crevasses on the glaciers prone to collapse. The soft wet snow would also increase the avalanche risk!

That afternoon six of us went for a roped hike to the top of the island, to be greeted with a spectacular 360 degree panorama of mountains, snow, ice and glaciers in the most perfect of weather conditions. In the distance you would often hear the sound of glaciers across the bay calving and collapsing into the sea. At the top of the hike we spent half an hour trying to deduce if the dark thing we saw surfacing in binoculars occasionaly was a whale or rock. I have finally concluded it was a sleeping whale.

By the way, whales are EVERYWHERE. We would see an average of 5 whales a day, although always humpback or minkes. We would see whales while climbing, sailing, hiking, snowholing, abseiling off an iceberg... whatever the acvitivity, there was always a whale somewhere in the distance to observe with binoculars and you would be alerted to it by the distinctive sound of the blowhole when it surfaces which travelled over long distances. Some of the guys even had a very close encounter with a sleeping humpback whale from kayaks

We spent the next day travelling through Paradise bay seeing some spectacular ice bergs reflected in the still water. Some of them are like cathedrals, always carved in intersting ornate ways, with arches or holes, and often HUGE, they can be 100m high or more. We stopped at Cuverville island, home to a gentoo colony where we saw plenty of nesting penguins and their chicks, we seemed to be at the time of year when the penguins are still raising their young chicks. Soren also reported spotting a leopard seal catching a gentoo here.

We anchored that night in a place called Skunthorp cove, and aimed to get up early the next day to travel to the base of Jabet peak at Port Lockroy, which Ben recommended as a good initial climbing target. We had hoped that we could get everybody up this one, since we expected it to be simply a snow slog, but the initial 100m or so were an ice pitch straight out of the water, so it ended up as just myself, paul, garrett and soren. It turned out to be not entirely trivial, with some steep sections and a reasonably narrow ridge towards the summit. Ben picked us up in the zodiac post summit with a six pack of beers.

Next day myself and paul headed out early in kayaks to check out the skeleton of a humpback whale on an island off lockroy and see some penguins and seals from the water. Paul spotted some whales far out in the bay, and we immediately paddled off in search. They dive and resurface a lot, and in the meantime you kind of have to guess hwere theyre going and where to best position yourself for when they surface. I lost them at one point, to then find them much closer to paul, and then as I paddled at full speed in Pauls direction, they surfaced again and were coming straight at me, there was five of them I think, and they swam right through me. Two to my right, two to my left, and one probably right under the kayak. All the time while there were penguins porpoising past me and following in the wake of the kayak.

On the way out of lockroy we scoped out some nearby peaks whcih looked reasonably climbable and headed south through the lemaire channel to Hoffguard island, where we would spend the next 4 days. The lemaire channel is a narrow channel between Booth island and the antarctic mainland with steep walled cliffs towering overhead on either side and the usual abundance of vast majestic glaciers and ice sea cliffs. It was quite speccie as Ben would say. We arrived throught he lemaire channel near Hoffguard to catch sunset (sunset is a rather long event during summer on the antarctic peninsula where the sun just barely grazes the horizon and comes back up again) over a vast playground of bluey green icebergs reflecting the blue, greens and reds of the sky. Here we picked out a nice big ice berg to climb the next morning.

We woke up early and myself, Soren and Garrett headed out on a zodiac to scope out our iceberg. It turned out to be nicely within zodiac distance, and we got to stop on an island along the way to see some sleeping elephant seals. I picked this ice berg since it had a fantastic shallow beach of ice leading up to it where we could easily run the zodiac up onto and venture onto the ice. I hacked some steps initially so that I could step out onto the ice safely before garrett passed me my crampons. We always carried a "sharps box" with us for shore landings in which we stored all our ice axes, crampons and ice screws, since it is pretty dangerous to be carrying these things in an inflatable zodiac.

The rule hear when trying to estimate the size of icebergs or cliffs, is to multiply by at least 3. We figured our iceberg was reasonably small, maybe one pitch, 20m perhaps? We were so far off. It turned out to be 3 pitches of climbing. About 100m or rope length in total. Steve has some photographs of us at the top, we look like tiny dots. This thing was absolutely enormous, a floating mountain of ice. When I had made it to the final pitch and was setting up my belay for garrett and Soren, a sizable chunk of ice calved off the side of the berg. We couldnt see it, but we heard a loud sustained grumbling noise coming from no particular direction, and the feeling of rumbling at our feet, like it was our very own private earthquake. Needless to say we started getting our skates on. Garrett quickly climbed up the final pitch, and I lowered him down and Soren went next as garrett began chipping away a bollard to abseil off. To be honest, I wasnt too worried about anything happening. I figured if it did wobble or pieces came off, wed probably still be in one piece at the top after it settled. I was concerned however of catastrophic structural failure of immense proportions as the entire iceberg carved apart. Anyway, three abseils later and another whale sighting, we were down and safe in the zodiac, yachtbound for lunch.

That evening we built a snowhole on Hoffguard island. We could see a nice snowbank high on the island from the yacht, whcih I figured would be a perfect place to go, and wouldnt involve any glacier travel to get too, since we could get to it over rocks. But we ran into an impass of sorts, and were blocked from going any further by high tide and a steep ice wall. We had to settle with what we had, whcih was about 2 and a half feet of snow, on a rather gently sloping hill. In order to make this work, we would have to pile the snow we had excavated on top of the room we creating to create a roof over our heads as we dug. I was skeptical at first. But about 4 hours later we had a rahter cavernous little 4 man snowhole. Myself and Garrett had designs on a mountain nearby we thought looked climable, and opting for a decent nights sleep and no fuss in the morning, we opted to sleep in the snowhole the next night, after a good days snow consolidation.

The following morning, myself and garrett headed out early to the base of Wandell peak on Booth island at like 7am. We had spotted, in binoculars, a reasonbly gently sloping ridge which looked like it would take us to the summit without too much trouble. Unfortunatley, that morning the base of the cloud cover was rather low, and our view of the summit was obscured. We had hoped that having started early, the clouds may burn off as the sun rose, but the weather only got worse. The cloud level got even lower as we climbed.

The first 300m or so was a walk or scramble over snow and rocks, followed by a 200m section of more technical scrambling over loose rocks punctuated by sections of icy snow. From 500m or so to 650m, things got more technical, with some narrow ridges, and some sections of 55 to 60 degree hard icy snow over large drops followed by more steep scrambling over loose rock, passing abseil tat left behind from a previous ascent. At 650m we topped out at a very narrow corniced snow ridge with steep drops to either side. We had extremly still wind, so the going ahead woudlnt have been too dangerous if we were careful, but by now we couldnt see a thing. We were well and truly immersed in the clouds and had no idea of the nature of the drops to our left and right, and could barely make out the surface of the snow from the clouds behind... it was a whiteout. Furthermore, we could not make out the ridge ahead, and couldnt judge how much more there was to go. Faced with blindless, and the knowledge that we were to leave for Vernadsky that evening so that we could shelter there for an incoming storm, we reluctantly decided to turn back. We made two full length abseils through the technical section, and then retraced our steps in the fog along the ridge and back down to the landing point to be greeted by gentoo penguins and the first Adelie penguin I had seen. We made soup and waited for the zodiac. No beer this time

After coming back to Ushuaia, Karen looked up Wandell peak on wikipedia. It turns out, as of 2003 at least, it is unclimbed, despite numerous failed attempts. It is quoted as being one of the most challenging unclimbed objectives on the antarctic peninsula. Had we known that at the time Im sure we would have pressed on!

That night, myself, Steve P, Marguerite and Garrett played bridge and slept in our snowhole on Hoffguard to wake up to a champagne and chocolate breakfast. After a mostly lazy day, myself and Soren headed out to a nearby ice wall and set up a top rope so we could get some of the other guys ice climbing. Despite the windy weather conditions, we managed to find a really well sheltered location, although we were nearly blown off the cliff once or twice while setting up or snow anchors.

We visited the yallour islands for some more penguin spotting on the way to Vernadsky station. Vernadsky is a rather large Ukrainian research station, which I believe was bought from the British. We were given a tour of the station by one of the staff, and then we chilled out a bit in their bar upstairs, which was rather surreal. It was so strange after so much time at land and sea in such a remote area to see different people again, and in such a familiar pub environment, with a bar and a snooker table. We got a lot of info that night from some of the Ukrainian researches who had climbed a few of the mountains in the neighbouring area that were within zodiac range, namely Mt. Scott, Mt. Demaria and Mt. Shackleton, which was 1500m and a two day hike. We decided that wed attempt Demaria the following day since we were told it was non technical and that we could get everybody in our group up it.

So we set off nice and early the next day at the base of the long snow slope that is Demaria. We had two roped teams of four. I had myself, Paul, Marguerite and Steve. And Garrett had Soren, Steve P and Carlos. The snow was very soft, wet and slushy for the first 500m, and it wasnt entirely comforting to see that the first 150m or so took us over the path of a rather extensive recent avalanche. By 500m however, we had reached the freezing point, and the snow began to crispen up. We passed and possibly crossed at least one crevasse on the way up, and by about 550-600m, the terrain was relatively steep and exposed. The other roped team chose to take a break in the shelter of some rocks, while we made a final dash to the summit. At the top we had a view to the sea on the other side of the mountain and the extensive scattering of ice bergs, and to our left we could see a line of magnicifent steep cliffs crowned by large overhanging cornices, the summit itself was a large snow cornice. We stayed well back from the edge. We rested up for about 10 minutes, to take in the views and take some photos before beginning our descent.

As we started back down, there was no sign of the other roped group, they were still sheltering in the rocks, it turns out that they had started heading down. Carlos was beginning to suffer from fatigue and was not comfortable continuing. So we all began our extremely slow descent. Due to Carlos´ completely exhausted condition we had to lower him three full rope lengths through some of the steeper sections of snow slope, before regaining the easier trail to the base of the mountain. It was a long day. Summit team bided their time skimming stones at the shore while waiting for Team Carlos to get down and radio in the zodiac. It was around then that I decided I was too warm, and took off a layer and left it on the stones below the high tide mark. Six hours later, when I had realised back in Vernadsky, my cheap regatta soft shell, and more importantly my camera was most likely drifting somehwere in the southern ocean.

We celebrated our semi-successful ascent of Demaria that night with a round of vodka in Vernadsky and we took it easy the following day with a tour of an old british research hut and did some more ice climbing on the nearby ice cliffs. The following evening we would entertain our new found Ukrainian mountaineer friends with their homebrew vodka with dinner in our yacht. They drew us a detailed map for climbing Mt. Scott, and we resolved to get up early to climb it the next day.

The weather was rubbish the next day, so we played bridge instead. After taking a quick look for my soft shell and camera back at the demaria landing, we headed back north stopping at Petermann island along the way, another large Adelie and Gentoo colony. It was here that I formed a nest building partnership with an eager gentoo penguin.

I had noticed that there was one penguin that was constantly racing back and forth picking up pebbles from a nearby stream to bring back to his partner who was minding the under-construction nest. The stream probably served to dislodge the rocks from the gravel and soil making them easier to pick up. I decided I would help by picking up lots of what I believed were perfect penguin beak sized stones and placing them in a pile much closer to his nest in the middle of his usual trail that he travelled. It took him a while to cop on to the constantly increasing resevoir of awesome stones, but he did eventually. And soon I had made sure he was building his nest with only stones I had expertly preselected for him. With soren´s advice, I then began to place my hand behind the pile of stones each time he came to pick up another to get him used to the presence of my hand. And eventually I placed a number of stones on my hand over the pile, so that he would take the stones directly from my hand, Soren has managed to capture the moment on camera.

Due to Ben and Skye having an overlapping charter wtih the Antarctic Heritage trust to help with the construction of a hut at port lockroy, we were originally supposed to be heading back from Port Lockroy on La Diamant, a cruise ship. However, due to some screw up, La Diamant had sold all its berths, so Ben had to call in a few favours to get us back over the Drake on time, This meant we were all to be split up and divided amongst three cruise ships that were operating in the area and due to arrive back in Ushuaia around the 23rd of January. Myself, Paul and Steve were to go on the Professor Mulchenov, a Russian 50 passanger converted ice breaker research vessel, Soren, Marguerite, Steve 3 and Carlos on the Fram, a 240 passanger Norweigan fancy and shiny new purpose built Antarctic cruise ship, and Garrett and Clare were to go on the Polar Star (I think), a 90 passanger ice breaker.

Between that evening and the following afternoon, we all packed our stuff for our respective rendezvous with our cruise ships at scheduled locations and times in the area around lockroy and paradise bay. Myself, Paul and Steve were the last to leave the yacht and said goodbye to ben as we cruised over to Professor Mulchenov in a zodiac as ordered by their angry sounding grumpy captain. Having arrived, and before being shown our cabins, we met some of the passengers in the bar. The first thing they wanred us about was the captain, the angry man who never smiles.

It was an intersting change from the yacht. Our days on board the Professor Mulchenov mostly involved sleeping, eating and bridge. The food was pretty good, we never ate a normal animal.. it was venison, guinea fowl or duck for dinner. Our ship was scheduled to visit hannah point on the way back before the drake (as well as deception island) which was worth seeing since there was tonnes of wildlife (lots of elephant seals) and the location of our only sighting of a lone macaroni penguin.

But Antarctica on a ship is not like Antarctica on a yacht. Firstly, our arrival on the boat significantly decreased the mean age of passengers. And we had to obey by rules which hadnt existed before, all of a sudden the expedition leaders and staff felt responsible for us. On deception island, where Ben and Skye had originally dropped us off, shrugged all responsibility and let us do what we pleased, we hiked to the top of the island. Now we had special rules regarding where we could go, we were landing with 50 other people and they even enforced a strict protocol on how we should disembark from the zodiac, which was plain silly. Its such a different world to our previous freedom to simply point at an iceberg and say, hey Ben, we want to climb that ice berg, please take us there. Over the drake however, we saw some experienced force 10 gales and something like 10m swells, and we were damn happy we were on a ship. Had we been following the original plan of going back in the yacht we would probably have been delayed a day or two due to the storm.

When we arrived back in Ushuaia, we had one full day before our 5am bus to El Chalten which we spent hiking up to the Martial Glacier above Ushuaia. Having just arrived back from the land of vast glaciers, ice sheets and mountains... the martial glacier was a joke. Definitely not worth the 35 pesos we spent on the chair lift up that we took that travelled at 2mph.

Our journey to El Chlaten was a complicated one, which involved four passport stamps, a ferry, and two connections. The 12 hour leg from Ushuaia to Rio Gallegos, was initially rather scenic as we passed through the tail of the andes as we left Ushuaia, and the lower half of Tierra del Fuego was of vast green rolling plains. But soon, we encountered the monotonous and unchanging steppe of patagonia. We did however see flamingoes... thats something. Because of the way the argentinian half of Tierra del Fuego, is curiously detached from the rest of the country, we are forced to travel through Chile for about 5 hours to make progress north. This meant two tedious border crossings. We also made our crossing out of the island of Tierra del Fuego over the Straits of Magellan in Chile at Punta Delgada at the first narrowing of the straits.The ferry trip lasted 30min. But we had to wait something like 4 or 5 hours for the fierce patagonian wind to die down before the ferry would operate

Having missed our connection, the bus company thankfully ran a second bus for us latecomers which got us in to El Calafate bus station for 2am where we slept on the floor, awaiting our El Chalten bus in the morning.

El Chalten and El Calafate are the gateways to the Los Glaciares National Park, which is the Argentinan version of Chiles Torres del Paine. The park encompases much of the Continental Hielo Sur, the largest ice cap on the planet outside the poles, and boasts Mount Fitzroy and Cerro Torre, some of the largest rock monoliths in the patagonian andes. Theres also the great Perito Moreno Glacier nearby which may be worth seeing, but I dont see how it can possibly compare to what we´ve seen in Antarctica.

El Chalten is a small frontier town in argentinian patagonia at the foot of the andes and a mecca for climbers and hikers. Its summer population most likely dwarfs its winter population. The town has actually only existed since 1985, when it was set up by the argentinians as a way to ascert their claim on the land when chile was trying to draw their borders over it. Its the base for expeditions to Cerro Torre and Fitzroy. The weather here is pretty wet and windy, and I dont think thats set to change, that said, we managed to get reasonable views of fitzroy today when we hiked up to the Laguna de los Tres.

We currently have designs to climb a mountain in the region called Aguja de la S. We´ll have to be very lucky to get the weather for it though, it seems pretty rough outside while writing this email. If we dont, there seems to be plenty of hiking and sports climbing to keep us occupied in the area!

Ok, its like 4am and I gotta get up early, better go to bed.