Do we get a day off because George Bush is in town! They had to shut down the main roads for security. The announcement came through the previous afternoon… and with the rain that started to fall from the darkened sky, it brought back old feelings of snow days…
And then, the rain fell…and fell... puddles everywhere, the roads crazy, quick-footing through ankle-deep, chilly water on the way out of the parking lot..
And two more days off of school! (due to “adverse roads, weather conditions, and the forecast for even more rain”). Granted, we had a staff PD day for one of them, but you won’t catch me complaining!
And now, the purpose of this entry – my Antarctic adventure!
41 hours after we piled in a cab with all of our luggage, we walked out of Santiago’s airport into the bright summer sunshine… quite a change from the brisk cold we experienced on our just-long-enough-to-escape-the-airport layover in New York.
Santiago was a relaxing start to the vacation! Our hotel was in the quaint little cobblestoned Paris-Londres neighborhood. We spend the next four days wandering the bustling streets and parks of the city, riding the open-topped bus for free, taking a fabulous wine tour, sitting under umbrellas, drinking pisco sours, and playing lots of cards and Pass the Pigs, and people-watching in the Plaza des Armas.
We met our tour group for one night in a big-comfy-bed hotel before flying off to Ushuaia, the southern-most city in the world, sitting on the edge of the Argentinian side of Tierra del Fuego, with its wood-frame airport and snow-capped mountains. We hopped a bus for a tour for the highlights of the National Park – trees and lakes and hills and mountains – beautiful!
That evening (Christmas evening, actually) we boarded our ship, the MS Fram!
We sailed away down the Beagle Channel after a fabulous Christmas dinner, with beautiful scenery on either side and our wake streaming behind us…
We woke to rolling waves and soaring albatross the next day, and completed our Drake Passage crossing quickly with the help of good weather and some sea-sickness drugs, passing the gray day with lectures, reading, deck-wandering, and (of course) cards.
Our second morning, we awoke to…. Icebergs!! Well-worn and eerily blue, they ushered us into the Nelson Strait, between two of the South Shetland Islands. We hung a right and motored to Half-Moon Island for our first landing, penguins leaping through the water around the boat.
They broke us into groups, and each group was called down to Deck 2 to load, 8 at a time, into rubber-edged Polar-Cirkel boats to speed to shore. Half-Moon is small, rocky and snow-covered, and home to a rookery of Chin-Strap penguins! They were so fun to watch – they move through the water with such grace, but on land they’re so awkward, hopping and waddling through their paths in the ice, curious about us, but not afraid – they have no land-based predators.
We celebrated our landing with a wonderful bottle of Chilean wine, and were getting excited for our sail through the sunken caldera of Deception Island, when we heard the ding-dong an upcoming announcement and learned that there was a medical emergency on board, so we took a detour, heading to King George Island and its airstrip. The next morning, we received word that the plane was delayed due to weather, but while we were here, we were going to land at the Polish research station of Artowski. The bay was beautiful under a blue sky, ice falls tumbling down to the brilliant water….
The landing was amazing – sunny and windy, and providing not only more penguins but seals as well, basking on the rocky beach, we quietly crept in to take photos and watch them loll about. Bleached whale bones lay scattered about, and as the wind picked up I wandered down to the station, and quickly peeked into the main building – it was warm, wood-paneled, and smelled like lunch – it looked inviting and cozy, a place to socialize… but I wondered what it would be like to spend months on end in these small buildings with the same people, here at the bottom of the world… the wind-whipped waves were fierce on the way back to the Fram, spray splashing cold in the sun as the bow slapped up and down on the swells…
After a doze in the sun-filled observation lounge and a briefing on the new plan, we started to cruise through the Antarctic Sound, the end of the Antarctic Peninsula somewhere off to our starboard side. Passengers gathered on deck with cameras as huge tabular icebergs started to float by, looming up out of the gathering mist, sides dripping with icicles, glowing blue, with deep cracks and smooth, flat tops.
We sailed through them for hours before reaching Brown’s Bluff, where we were going to attempt an evening landing (9pm and not dark at all) on the Antarctic continent itself. However, as we sat and played cards, waiting for our group to be called, the sky darkened, the wind rose, and the waves became wilder – so we were not surprised that the landing was cancelled, but we were a little surprised when the power died a few minutes later, through we played on next to the windows.
Suddenly, there was a an announcement – “Ladies and gentleman, we have an emergency situation. Please dress warmly and come up to Deck 7 immediately.” Glances were exchanged, and we jumped into action to do just that, returning to our cabins to don coats and hats and climb up to Deck 7, where we realize just what the emergency is….
I was somewhere behind the guy… kindly note that kid saying “brace yourselves” and picture him hitting the deck as I grabbed a railing…
I won’t lie, it was a bit frightening at first, but we were quickly gathered and assured that there was no big damage, we were in no way, shape or form taking on water, but we were in fact stuck here – against the glacier that spilled from the land into the bay! The power loss had in fact been an engine failure, and we’d simply drifted over into the glacier!
So we waited, speculated, discussed – and kept an eye on all the icebergs drifting with us in the bay! Soon enough, the engines started again. Because the Fram is amazing, it can not only move forwards and backwards, but also sideways, so we simply pushed away from the glacier and made tracks back to King George Island.
The captain gathered us again soon afterwards to inform us that we were heading there not only for the airstrip, but to assess the damage to the boat and determine if we could continue sailing. This was where things got interesting, and we sat back and watched as some people became angry about the idea of going home early, some people got freaked out at the thought of sailing farther in our “damaged” boat (despite repeated reassurances), and others just realized that all we could do was wait… and then they opened up the bar, and we celebrated – celebrated that it could have been much worse, that our ship was okay, that we got away from the glacier – and pushed away the feelings of disappointment at all of our problems, trying to focus on the fact that we HIT a GLACIER and, really, that’s going to make a great story…
The next morning we were back at King George, and after a landing at the Chilean station Frei (which was obviously just an attempt to keep us busy) and the evacuation of our medical emergency (which was a stroke), we were gathered together (again) and told that “Norway” (ie, the powers that be) had declared we could no longer continue our cruise, and that we would join up with another vessel and follow them back to Ushuaia – albeit at a much slower speed than we were capable of - not necessary, but a formality we had to follow. The sunset that night was amazing….
the four of us engaged in a discussion about the necessity of setting foot on the continent itself to have “been there,” whether or not our trip “counted” or not, how to answer the question of “how was Antarctica?” etc – and decided that “we had been to Antarctica but not set foot on it” or, more simply “we crashed into it!”
But at that point it was hard to feel anything beyond disappointment at the amazing things we were so close to but didn’t see… and then, the next morning, yet another medial emergency (appendicitis) reared its head, so we ditched our “escort” and made fast track back to Ushuaia, on a more rollicking crossing of the Drake Passage.
Our early arrival was handled by sending us on a bus/catamaran tour of the national park – it was beautiful, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/sled-dog training facility, but it was a loooong day – and the next morning we disembarked for our flight back to Santiago.
We had enough layover time for another jaunt in NYC, and Steve’s parents even drove down to say Hi and drive us from La Guardia to JFK! We checked out FAO Schwartz, street meat, and WTC site, and a corner Starbucks, amazed at the fact that the city felt colder than Antarctica!
It was quite an experience, that’s for sure! I try to remain positive about the whole thing – because the things we were able to see were absolutely, beautifully amazing – but there’s a sense of incompleteness, of wanting to fully experience all that Antarctica has to offer, to set my feet on the continent itself, to fully savor that which we only teasingly tasted, to see a continent that is changing and disappearing at an alarming rate…
But for now, I’ll simply enjoy the fact that I can say I have crashed into a glacier!
