The boat leaves Ushuaia in the evening with albatross (albatrosses? albatri?) tracking her every move. On board, an older, obese Canadian woman wanders about the public areas in her underwear, carrying a blanket. Periodically she sits, stands, or lies down, all the while muttering to herself "oh no, that's not going to work".
Day 2: "No country for bulimics"
Most of the 124 passengers make an appearance at breakfast, but by lunchtime, the infamous Drake Passage accounts for about one third of those on board. It is a long day through swells of 5 - 8 metres, and as the rolling becomes more and more pronounced as we get further and further south, there is little to do but drink beer and run up and down the below decks corridors playing Inception.
Day 3: "We're going to visit the penguin"
Ahead of time, we reach Antarctica, and have a surprise landing. There are penguins, hundreds of penguins. We are excited. In a week or so, we will be so blase about penguins that this would have seemed like a waste of time, but it's pretty special.
Day 4: "Ice-Cream headache"
Sea water, they tell us, freezes at -1.8 degrees centigrade. Here, at Deception Island, the water is a balmy -1.5. What better way to knot your insides around your lunch than by throwing yourself into it with the full protection afforded by a pair of shorts? "Don't worry", they say, "we will come and find you with towels as soon as you get out". Nope. That said, the air temperature of +2 did seem quite toasty for the 5 minutes spent waiting as fresh towels are brought over from the boat.
Day 5: "The Toxic Avenger"
At breakfast, a girl declares that the food - which is exceptionally good - is "toxic", and demands to see the chef. He appears and her demands are extended to include "eggs, sunny-side up". He doesn't want to deviate from preparing the food for the other 123 passengers, but he relents. She is Israeli, you see. And they get to make demands that would embarrass the rest of us. As i write this in hindsight, i think the kitchen had their measure of revenge, as every subsequent meal on the boat seems to have a strong pork foundation. There are more penguins today, and more white. I joke to myself that i am surrounded by birds and up to my thighs in snow, and that i must remember to re-use that line in Colombia. Then i think that i need to get some new jokes.
Day 6: "The six minute war"
We make our first landing on the actual continent of Antarctica, where a 2 hour hike up a hill and a 60 second arse-grating slide down the ice makes for a highlight to date. As we wait for the zodiacs back to the ship, emboldened by their comrade's epicurean revolt yesterday, and enabled by a crew-member (who, at age 20 - her ship bio. tells us - in search of "adventure" and "the wild", went to live on a kibbutz), more Israelis make themselves known. Two start a snowball fight against one other person. It's a laugh for 11 seconds, then the Israelis take up an elevated position (the better to pelt their enemy from higher up), separate (the better to pelt their enemy from multiple angles), rope two American girls into the manufacture and supply-to-the-frontlines of snowballs ((the better to pelt their enemy without needing to waste time personally reloading), and then scream blue murder when somebody else (hit by a stray Israeli projectile) joins in on the side of their adversary. They stop playing. They are such fucking fun.
Day 7: "Somebody please put Adele out of my misery"
Hungarian Atila has a rudimentary grasp of English. He has an exceptional grasp of lounge music though (i just calling, to have say... looooooooove you), which helps in his role as one-man ship band. An American tour group of 10 people have a "singer-songwriter" amongst them, and they want her to "perform" in the bar tonight instead. She is, apparently, a professional, she has a manager and everything. She implores the audience of sycophants to "not put this up on youtoob", in a voice that says the thing she would most likely shag someone for RIGHT THIS MINUTE is if they promised to put as much of her set on youtoob as their memory cards will record. She is spine-meltingly bad, from something she - i believe - wrote herself about wanting a child, to a seasick-inducing cover of something from Adele - itself a crime against music - bereft of the twin musical conventions of tune and melody.
Day 8: "How many G'n'Ts would it take to use up all the ice in Antarctica?"
Today one of the zodiacs is tasked with retrieving some pure ice from the frozen waters. This is clear ice. Old. With the while of the trapped air bubbles squeezed out of it by so much subsequent pressure. The bar needs it, you see, for cocktails. It somehow seems wrong to listen to a talk about global warming and melting of the polar ice caps while sipping a whiskey (Irish, of course) and coke with chipped ice which is probably hundreds, if not thousands of years old.
Day 9: "!"
The Expedition leader's voice is like pizza deep fried in batter down the throat of the coeliac. After a time though, you block it out, the scenery is that stunning, and the wildlife that amazing, that when the condescending Canadian drawl comes over the intercom telling you (at a glacial pace) what you're going to be doing and seeing today, you can block it out, replacing it instead with your own, built-in Internal David Attenborough voice relaying such (by-now-2nd nature) Antarctic factoids as "Suchandsuch Island hosts up to 15,000 pairs of breeding Gentoo penguins", or "here [pause] in mid-summer [pause], the temperature can rise to as high as 3 degrees [mini-pause] centigrade".
Day 10: "My one's bigger"
Day one of the sail back north, and attention turns to photos and footage taken. Brewing under the surface the whole trip has been camera snobbery. This is manifest in multiple ways, but typically in lens comparison, and experience. At the top of the pile, the professionals (Fun Michael: Germany; 4 camera bodies; double-digit lenses; 17 years a professional cameraman), we slide through the raft of people carrying newly affordable DSLR cameras (Anka: The Netherlands; 1 base model Canon DSLR; 1 lens; camera acquired immediately prior to trip), through happy-snappers of various hue (me), and at the very bottom of the pile, the iPhoners. Strangely, those with NO CAMERA are looked on with scorn by some (Fun Michael), and jealousy by others, as though they have land rights to the moral high ground due to their ability to go somewhere like this and not NEED photos by which to remember it.
Day 11: "Every breath you take (you fog up my glasses)"
You don't "run out" of words to describer this place, it's that that, well… adjectives seem deficient in their descriptiveness. Superlatives seem not to be, well, superlative enough. Everyday words - words you know - eventually come to relay their meaning in a flat laconic monotony that seems at once brutally whimsical and savagely evocative. 'Ice'. 'Wet'. 'Wind'. 'Glacier'. 'Iceberg'. And probably above all, 'Cold'. I had thought i would do this once and it would be great, and then i could move on to other places, but now, as we sail back through the Drake Passage (not so rough this time, or more people have their sea-legs), i am not ready to leave, and i know i will be back. Well, i know i want to come back at least.
Day 12: "My beautiful laundrette"
We actually get back to Ushuaia last night, but stay on the boat by the pier for the night, before decamping to various parts. Right now, laundry is the most important thing, the faint whiff of guano needs to be gone before the flight to Buenos Aires tomorrow.
