Because it’s there
Punta Arenas, Chile
January 16, 2024
In 1911, British explorer Robert Scott, attempting to become the first man to reach the South Pole, sailed with four men aboard the Terra Nova to Antarctica. After trekking halfway across the continent and reaching the pole, Scott discovered a Norwegian flag had been planted upon it 33 days earlier by his arch-rival, Roald Amundsen. On the way back to their ship, Scott and his men perished from starvation and cold.
In 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became trapped in Antarctic pack ice and sank, forcing him and his men to camp on ice floes. Just before the ice melted, the men were able to row lifeboats to Elephant Island where they survived on a diet of penguins. Knowing his crew faced certain death during the upcoming winter, Shackleton rowed a 20-foot boat 830 miles to South Georgia Island, whose mountains he had to cross, and, amazingly, found help who returned and rescued his men.
On January 4, 2024, I boarded a Princess cruise ship to Antarctica. One morning, I was annoyed to discover the buffet had run out of apricot jam leaving me no choice but to slather my croissant with strawberry jam or orange marmalade, neither of which I am particularly fond.
Great achievement always requires great sacrifice.
I’m on Day 12 of a 16-day cruise to Antarctica. I arrived in Buenos Aires Jan. 3; boarded the 16-story Sapphire Princess the next day; spent Jan. 5 in Montevideo, Uruguay; then sailed two days to Stanley in the Falkland Islands where I spent a day on a windswept beach observing a colony of penguins. That was followed by a day-and-a-half sail to Shackleton’s Elephant Island, about 150 miles north of the Antarctic peninsula.
That afternoon, the captain sailed 100 miles out of his way to take his 2492 passengers within a few hundred feet of the A23a, the world’s largest iceberg. One thousand feet thick, it is, at 1500 square miles, roughly 30 percent the size of Connecticut. The A23a broke off from the continent in 1986, promptly sunk to the sea floor, and didn’t rise until a few years ago, when it suddenly bobbed up like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction’s bathtub scene and began drifting north. Eventually it will move into the south Atlantic and melt.
Over the next three-and-a-half days, as the Sapphire sailed along the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, in and out of bays dotted with baby blue icebergs calved from glaciers, I saw thousands of penguins, blue whales, orcas, seals, sea birds and, happily, the reappearance of apricot jam a few days after I assumed that, like Scott and his men, it was gone forever.
On Saturday, Jan. 14, the captain headed the ship north across the Drake Passage, and the next evening sailed past Cape Horn at the tip of South America. Yesterday the Sapphire docked at Ushuaia, Argentina, the world’s southernmost city.
Today we are anchored a few hundred feet from the dock in Punta Arenas, Chile. Because the Sapphire is too large to park alongside the dock, passengers had to be tendered to the shore. I boarded the tender in an icy rain driven by gusty winds that, in Florida, would be classified as a category one hurricane. Within seconds of stepping off the tender, I was soaked to the bone. I walked a few blocks to the business district, stopped for a cup of coffee, took a few pictures, and tendered back to the ship for a hot shower and dry clothes.
Four days from now, the Sapphire will dock in San Antonio, Chile. I’ll fly home that night.
Why did I trek 8000 miles to the only continent that has no permanent inhabitants, no culture, no restaurants and — horrors — not even a Disney theme park?
As George Mallory replied in 1924 to a reporter who asked why he wanted to be the first man to scale Mt. Everest: Because it’s there. (Like Scott, Mallory's quest ended in tragedy. It wasn’t until 1953 that Everest was conquered by Edmund Hillary.)
I’ve visited the other six continents. Antarctica will be my last unless some smart-ass explorer discovers another one that’s been hidden away all these years, by which time I will be too old to travel to it.
I came here because, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the thought of a pristine frozen continent twice the size of Australia that, until the 1700s, nobody had any idea existed.
My great-aunt Grace Tate, a spinster who died in the early 1960s, left behind a collection of every National Geographic magazine published between 1917 and her death. My mom, who couldn’t bear to throw them away, stashed them in our basement. By the time I was a teenager, I had read them all, cover to cover. I was particularly intrigued with Antarctica and have yearned to see it ever since.
For years I’ve been begging my wife to join me on an trip to Antarctica, and was beginning to think I was finally winning her over until a year ago when a rogue wave in the treacherous Drake passage struck a cruise ship and washed a passenger relaxing in her stateroom out to sea. That did it for her but, to her credit, when I found a great deal in the late fall on a solo cabin, she told me to book it. So I did.
Having spent four days sailing through the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding islands, I’m more intrigued than ever. It is — this is the only word for it and it’s inadequate — awesome, beyond anything I imagined.
There are two ways civilians can experience the continent:
1. By a small expedition ship specially built to withstand the climatic challenges of the Antarctic. The ship drops anchor just off the coast and shuttles passengers on zodiac boats to the shore where they can walk among penguins and seals and, in some cases, even camp out with them. A lovely idea but not one that appeals to this thin-blooded Floridian who dons a Polartech pullover whenever the temperature dips below 70.
2. By a conventional cruise ship. Princess and several other lines offer “sail-by” cruises that pass within a few hundred feet of the shore as passengers stand on deck snapping pictures and watching wildlife through binoculars.
An expedition cruise can easily cost ten, even twenty, times as much as a sail-by of comparable length. And while it would add another notch to my travel belt to say my boots touched the ground on the continent, I spent more than 72 hours within a few hundred feet of it and saw everything I came to see, and more, from the top deck of the Sapphire. One day, I was so mesmerized by the scenery I stayed up there for 12 hours, ducking inside only for hot coffee or tea and fresh-baked cookies.
It is summer in Antarctica but it was cold as all get-out. I came well prepared with a puff jacket, gloves, battery-powered hand-warmers, waterproof boots, insulated socks, long johns (not easy to find in Florida, believe me), thermal sweaters and a leather flight cap with ear flaps and a chin strap that makes me look like a crazed kamikaze pilot.
Traveling solo on a huge ship can be a bit lonely, even though I’m surrounded by fellow passengers representing more than 40 countries from the other six continents. If I’m feeling sociable, I can share a communal table in one of the five formal dining rooms, go to the casino (which to my regret I did one night), play trivia, workout in the gym, attend a stage show, or grab a stool at one of the dozen or so bars scattered across the ship. When I want to be alone, I can eat at a single table in the buffet, or retreat to my stateroom and read, watch a movie and/or write.
The bottom of the world isn’t exactly the kind of place one goes to be social and, truthfully, I am enjoying the solitude, generally preferring my own company, doing exactly what I want to do when I want to do it.
And with that, I’m going to wind this up so I can be on the top deck as the ship sails out of Punta Arenas in a few minutes. Looking out my stateroom window, I see the fog has lifted and there will be, I’m told, snow-capped Andes peaks and glaciers to see as we head through the Straits of Magellan out into the Pacific for the long trek up the Chilean coast.
But before I do, I’d like to give a shout-out to my great aunt Grace. The farthest you ever traveled from Montgomery City, Mo., was to the teachers college in Kirksville, where you earned your degree sometime around 1915. From what I can remember mom telling me about you, you never even traveled out of the state, but clearly knew there was a big world out there, a world you would never see, so you subscribed to National Geographic.
You couldn’t have known that if you had left behind a million dollars, you couldn’t have left anything that would have nourished my young soul more than those musty stacks of black and white magazines I spent hours pouring over, dreaming about a world I hoped would someday be mine.
And it has been.
