“A sense of the future is that the present generation is morally responsible to future generations.”

~ Andrew Aakharov and C.P. Snow

Woke up – still have the lurgy – but after another decent nights sleep thanks to the rocking of the ship, not feeling too bad.  Today we had another light schedule to look forward to and then the saddest bit of any trip, the packing that signalled the end of our adventure. *sniff sniff*  I can’t believe our trip is coming to an end so soon.

We had a light breakfast and then a mid-morning presentation called “Looking North”, that I had really been looking forward.  The Expedition Staff were going to tell us all about their northern hemisphere summer jobs – most of them work the other half of the year in the Arctic!  We had already heard tales from some of the staff over dinner, or just while chatting when hanging out around the ship or on shore; this morning’s presentation was effectively a ‘Where else can Quark take you?’ which told through the experiences of their expedition staff.

Franny:  “Well, golly gosh we are nearly at the end of our trip friends and no doubt you are feeling sad about having to leave Antarctica and our beautiful Ocean Diamond.  Well, friends, fret not! We have the Expedition Team in the Main Lounge with a presentation of exciting Arctic adventures!”  We are going to miss Franny and her “golly goshes” and her “fret nots”.  🙂

Woody our Expedition Leader was up first, he works out of Svalbard, Spitsbergen, Greenland and Iceland, taking people on trips deep into the Arctic region searching for polar bears and walruses and other crazy wildlife.  He also spoke about how unexpectedly green and flush with wildflowers some of these areas can be.  These voyages start in the very north of Norway and then go further north from there.  I didn’t have any of the materials they showed us in their presentations, they were mostly personal photos and such, but I found some content on the Quark website, and Woody is in this promotional video I found basically explaining what a typical day is like on a trip like this in the Arctic.

Next to speak was Naomi, and she spends her northern hemisphere summer working in the high Canadian Arctic.  These trips are often photography land stays where visitors can explore the high tundra regions looking for musk ox, polar bears, arctic fox, beluga whales and other unusual wildlife. Visitors get to explore in Unimogs (all-terrain vehicles) or go hiking as you choose to get in amongst the ‘Badlands’.  These trips start from Yellowknife in northern Canada and then go to a static camp called the Arctic Wilderness Lodge.  It looks very remote and very interesting as well.

But the presentation I was really looking forward to was Pato’s.  He had mentioned to us over dinner, how he was working next season on the ’50 Years of Victory’ – the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker that Quark does expeditions to the North Pole on… and when they get there, his main job is taking people on hot-air balloon flights.  This trip looks simply amazing… I mean who would even think that hot-air ballooning at the North Pole should be a thing?!   The expeditions start from Helsinki where you then fly to Murmansk in northern Russia to board the icebreaker and head to 90° north.  Pato said being on the icebreaker is like ‘living through a mild earthquake for a week or so’.  Sounds like a truly unique journey.

We left the ‘Where to next?’ presentation feeling inspired… with so many travellers on this ship having a wide variety of interests and experiences, we had already gathered a huge list of cool places to add to our respective ‘Bucket Lists’ – but now that the expedition team has shared some of their favourite polar expedition experiences in the north, we have even more places we would love to see.

Just after the presentation, we had an announcement on the PA that we were coming up on Cape Horn.  The weather was a bit overcast but we had been given permission by the Chilean government to approach the Horn. It looks pretty much how I remembered it from last year… a remote little rocky island with a solitary statue/monument of an albatross on it.  Only last year we had bluer skies and nicer weather.
It was raining and most of the rain was definitely frozen… We did see a remarkable ocean to ocean rainbow though – that was very cool and I haven’t seen that phenomenon before. Back to moody, ‘romantic’ weather!

After this, we had a bit of lunch and then there was a ‘Global Warming and Climate Change’ lecture with Norm, the geologist.  I chose not to attend the climate change lecture in favour of getting a headstart on my packing.  By all accounts later, it was as doomy and as gloomy as I would have anticipated and all I can say when I think about the polar regions melting and sea levels rising is – what are we going to do about Venice?  Build a bio-dome over it and only visit it by submarine?  The environment is going to hell in a corporate handbasket of greed, and globally our governments – all of them – are not doing enough to halt the destruction.  It’s sad, and it’s depressing and it’s going to be a mess our children end up having to clean up.

After Norm’s lecture, we got to hand back our delightful clown shoes and PFDs (Personal Floatation Devices).  Goodbye clown shoes – I won’t miss you even though I will miss the amazing places we went together.

Then we had a disembarkation briefing which was basically to let us know what to expect in the morning and that people who had booked to fly home the same morning that the ship was due to return to Ushuaia were to mark their luggage differently and were to disembark first so they could go by bus directly from the ship to the airport to make their flights.  We met people who had flights booked to leave Ushuaia at 10am, which I have to admit just had me baffled.  Travel by ship is oftentimes unpredictable, so booking a flight home barely two hours after your scheduled disembarkation seem to me, to be almost inviting trouble… What if we had bad weather and were held up?  What if we had technical problems and ended up completely off schedule?  It happens all the time with sea travel, so I’m not sure why people would court disaster by allowing themselves so little time to make connections.  *shrug*  With people from all over the world on the ship – many of us had long transits ahead to get home.  I’d say the average transit home was ranging in the 24 to 30-hour bracket.  A LOT of people were finding themselves in the same situation as us, a 3 hour flight from Ushuaia, followed by an annoying 8-10 hour layover in Buenos Aires, followed by long-haul flights.  Yuk.

After this, we had our Final Expedition Recap, on the way to which I went out on decks and could see land – it was probably Chile that I could see, but it meant that we weren’t far off from heading into the Beagle Channel, and from there only hours to Ushuaia. The whole Expedition Team were at the Recap to briefly talk about how their area of the expedition went. Woody had been updating the laminated maps that were kept near Reception, but he put up a more detailed map now that gave a better idea of where we went.

The proper map:

We also had a look at the Bridge Reports and abstracts from the Expedition Log which shows exactly where we were each day:

Annie shared some information on the vast array of wildlife that we had seen throughout the duration of our voyage – there had been a running tally of sightings that was kept at the Expedition Counter near Reception which staff and passengers were able to update and it was an impressive variety of wildlife by the end of the trip.

We also got an opportunity to see some of the photos that passengers had been sharing in the Photo Journal.  Some of my photos made it into the slideshow which was nice. Acacia showed us a video she put together of our entire trip, which was very cool – that first landing at Stonington Island seemed like ages ago now! 🙂

Jean announced the winners of our poetry competitions – this entry from Bill (a paediatrician from Boston):

The penguin is a concept absurd,
in behaviour, more fish than bird.
And its pectoral fins are just vestigial wings
Which only makes the distinction more blurred!

And this entry from Paul from Houston:

Ode to the Humble Krill
I watch in wonder as humpbacks breach,
while all around seabirds wheel and screech.
I walk with Gentoos on the shore
while high above, cold mountains crack and roar.
I gaze in rapture as leopard seals stalk and glide
while swimming penguins baulk and hide.
And as I close my eyes tonight
I have a clear and sharp insight
All this beauty would be for nil
Were it not but for the humble krill!

Then Pato showed us a video he had put together of our crazy Polar Plunge swim!  Trish is in here, seen jumping into the water, and the photo of me coming up out of the water makes an appearance towards the end too.  🙂

This is the last voyage for these guys this season and they too will scatter all over the world tomorrow after we disembark.  Our guides are from Australia, Canada, the US, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, and basically as diverse as the passengers. So they were getting a little sentimental with their farewell speeches as they don’t know when or if they will be working together again… so there were some choked up staff and a few sad faces among the passengers too.  Then it was time for cocktails before dinner.  We had another amazing dinner, and an opportunity to thank Gunter and his wonderful kitchen and Dining Room teams.  The food service on the ship was exceptional – it far exceeded our expectations.

This was followed by drinks and fun in the Club.  But being still in recovery mode, I had decided on a fairly early night instead.  Well, that was the plan anyway…

My early night involved having a shower and going to bed and of course, updating this.  And by the time I had written most of the above it was just after midnight.  I thought we must be getting close to Ushuaia by now – I knew we were ahead of schedule thanks to missing the storms, so I drew back the curtains and what greeted me, but we were not only close but through my salt-grimed window, I could see we were docked at the Ushuaia pier!  I mustn’t have heard the thrusters positioning the ship because I was listening to music as I was writing.  I was immediately excited that I would be able to call the family in the morning when I found some wifi, and I put the laptop away, brushed my teeth and tried to go to sleep.

That lasted all of about five minutes before I was up, out of bed, and quickly rugged up and out on deck making ridiculously expensive phone calls back home to let everyone know that we were back safe!  I just knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I had called home.

Best $36.40 I ever spent.  <3

“I find the greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as is which direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

The fantastic movement of the ship meant I slept in until 0730. What a simple pleasure after being on someone else’s schedule for the last couple of weeks. We had some respectably rough seas overnight causing the ship to rock and roll a bit and it was awesome. I love it when it gets a bit rough 😉 so I slept like a dead thing and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m still having trouble breathing from this flu, I might even have been able to say I felt ‘rested’ for the first time in years. I need a bed that moves like this at home; keeping your body moving all night and no particular pressure on any one point on your spine.

For a change, we went down to breakfast to get some tea and a bit of Vegemite on toast… (yes, second last day and I found out they had Vegemite on the ship) whereupon we ran into a young American couple wearing seasickness wristbands who claimed they hadn’t slept at all because the weather was so rough and their cupboard doors and coat hangers in the closet had been clattering about all night, and they did not like the motion of the ship at all. I think perhaps that they might not have travelled by ship before or they would have taken the coat hangers out of the closet and put them on the floor or in a drawer, or tied them together with a bathrobe belt. Before we went to bed last night, I had taken nearly everything off the desk and secured stuff in drawers, bound the coathangers in the closet together with thick rubber bands, that I always bring on ships for this purpose, and basically secured anything that could slide around. We have two heavy chairs in our room, which they could have been placed in front of cupboard doors that wouldn’t stay closed, but apparently, they were trying to just line up their Muck Boots in front of the closet…? You live and learn I guess.

The program for the day consisted of a few lectures – “Life of Plastic’ with Liliana the ornithologist on board. She is currently working on a project where she is collecting plastics from every single zodiac cruise she goes on. She has a 1m wide net that she drags behind her zodiac and it sieves the water for plastic particles which are then funneled into a tiny collection bottle at the end of the net. These are then sent back to a university she is working with to study the presence of micro-plastics (beads and plastic fibres) in Antarctica. She was telling us about a story of a shipping container that had 90,000 plastic rubber ducks that fell off a Chinese cargo ship 17 years ago, and how these had been washing up all over the world. Ocean plastic is not becoming a huge problem, it already is a HUGE problem – there is now an estimated 80,000 tonnes of plastic floating in the Pacific Garbage Patch. 

She also talked about an Albatross colony in North America where all the baby chicks were inexplicably dying, confusing scientists and creating a terrible smell of rotting chicks in the colony. Scientists removed the dying chicks and lay them out away from the colony to decompose. After a few weeks, they returned to find that most of the chicks had their little guts full of plastic – plastic bottle tops, plastic pen lids, even a plastic toothbrush. The chicks, with their guts full of plastic, were unable to fit enough real food into their little tummies and they effectively started – and the poor unwitting parent birds were bringing them back more and more plastic contaminated food.

This is happening throughout the marine food chain from seabirds and fish, to seals, dolphins, sharks and whales… all of them have masses amounts of plastic in their guts. Microplastics are just as bad and even harder to eliminate.  Did you know that a single washing of a polyester polar fleece jumper/jacket can put up to 19,000 microplastic fibres into the waterways? They are too tiny to be filtered by any water treatment plant and will end up straight in the oceans.  The biggest culprits are plastic drink bottles, single-use plastic straws, styrofoam cups, and plastic bags.  We all have to work harder to keep this shit out of our ecosystems.  :/

Later there was another presentation on “The Antarctic Food Web” which focused on what is feeding on what in the Antarctic environment – a lot of which boils down to ‘everything eats krill’ – poor krill – then the higher order animals eat the krill-eating animals.  🙂

After our lectures, we returned to our room to find a certificate for us saying that we had completed an Antarctic voyage below the Antarctic Circle. Approximately 35,000 people each year travel to Antarctic but barely any travel below the Circle. For example, this was only one of two Quark Expeditions to go below the Circle this season – and they have been running two-week trips on this ship from last November to March. Most Antarctic voyages spend a fair bit of time in the South Shetland Islands or the South Georgia Islands or even going as far north as the Falklands before heading briefly towards the tip of the Peninsula. So it’s quite rare for tourists to come as far as 68° south. We were also presented with a sew-on cloth patch commemorating our Polar Plunge!

This afternoon there were some more presentations – a screening of Jacque Cousteau’s, ‘Voyage to the Edge of the World’ which showed some very old school irresponsible ecotourism practices from the world famous oceanographer, including doing dangerous stuff like climbing through tunnels in icebergs that could roll?! ☺

As well as another history lecture – “From British Imperial Expeditions to International Polar Science’ which was talking about the geopolitical status of Antarctica over the years.

Before we knew it, it was time for the evening recap where we got a weather update from Woody – we were making good time across the Drake Passage, and the South American storm cell that had been of considerable concern had fortuitously moved off to the west while the other storm cell was losing steam, so it looked like we were going to be lucky and not get caught up in either. So much so that the Captain has set course to take us to sail around Cape Horn in the morning, if we can get permission from the Chilean government to approach – ordinarily you are required to keep 12 nautical miles clear of the Horn, but if we get permission to enter their waters, we may get up to 3 miles off the Horn. Aunty Mary, Lyn and myself sailed around the Horn on the Sea Princess last year – twice even, as our at the time, Captain Genaro Arma was so excited to be finally (after over 20 years at sea) be able to be sailing around the Horn for the first time, that he turned the ship around and circled it clockwise and counter-clockwise. It’s kinda cool and not a little bit crazy that we are going to get to sail around the Horn for a third time considering none of us works at sea.

Scotty was busy out on decks photographing seabirds still, and overall we had a lovely quite day at sea.

After the recap, we had a Toast to Antarctica in the Main Lounge with the Captain and a Charity Auction in Support of an organization called Penguin Watch. Penguin Watch counts the numbers of breeding pairs of penguins in the Southern Antarctic Ocean and on the Peninsula. So we had our wonderful Expedition Team walking around filling us up with champagne while they auctioned off some wonderful and exclusive Antarctic souvenirs – including the Antarctica flag off the front of the ship, a charted map of our journey complemented by hand-drawn wildlife, a unique Antarctic Heritage woolen blanket and a backpack covered in Antarctica patches. (I didn’t have my camera on me, but Acacia shared some photos:)

After this, it was time for dinner – and we had Ema our onboard microbiologist and her friend Rachel from Switzerland joining us for dinner. Ema and Rachel met on an Arctic trip last year and have kept in touch, so when Rachel decided that she wanted to visit the Antarctic, she found out which ship Ema would be on. Most every meal we have been sitting with lovely people from all over the world*. Travellers, every single one of them – people who have been to some amazing places, and are happy to share their tips and favourite sites, and people who have plans to visit even more amazing places.

Many of them want to visit Australia ‘one day’ but for a change, they seem to know that they can’t just come for two weeks and expect to be able to ‘see Australia’ – believe it or not this is quite unusual. Many people we have met in our travels, (particularly Americans… who, I know I am generalising, but I have to say have a dreadful grasp of geography in general) expect that they can come to Australia for a 10-14 day holiday and will think that they have ‘seen Australia’. I have spent collectively roughly 3 months in the US, and haven’t even scratched the surface.  The travellers on this trip all seem to have plans for a minimum of 6-8 weeks to come see Australia and are full of questions on where they should go as they feel it is such a big undertaking.

We had a wonderful dinner (ooh, I should find some photos of the farewell dinner…) and exchanged details with Ema – I do hope if she ever comes to Australia that she looks us up.

* a couple of exceptions – the very odd man from Sydney with the carb-on-carb-with-a-carb motif, full-sugar diet. And a particularly odious man from South Africa. This bloke, John, sits down at a table of women and started immediately telling us stories of how he always travels first class, and how his grandchildren keep telling him to buy a Ferrari so they can drive it and blah blah blah… If you can’t hear my eyes rolling at his bragging, well, let me insert them for you: *ROLLS EYES VERY LOUDLY*. He told us about flying Emirates (first class of course), and how the flight attendants were asking him when would he like to have his shower – there are showers in first class you know, and how he started asking the ‘little Indonesian hosties’ (Indonesian? Really? On an Emirates flight?) which one of them was going to come in and scrub his back because first class should come with someone to scrub his back… I wanted to tell him that sexually harassing airline staff in their workplace was hideously inappropriate, but he was such a dinosaur it didn’t seem worth the effort. He too, also only went ashore on the first day and has now ‘seen Antarctica’!  Perhaps the two of them spent the entire trip hanging out together at the Club Bar!  The second time we had the misfortune to have him join our table he told us that his roommate was busy packing and that ‘he’d make someone a good wife one day’… to which, yet again, a table of five women, collectively sighed.  Am thinking about avoiding the entire country of South Africa to make sure I never run into him either.  😛