What A Traveler Would Think Of An Antarctic Trip

On the ship's navigation table, two nautical charts are laid out. They both show we are passing through waters that haven't been surveyed. The captain keeps us on a cautious course using depth soundings. He's been to the Antarctic many times before, yet has never sailed this particular channel.

Dusk sets in and reduces visibility. Then is starts to snow in earnest. I struggle to see the approaching icebergs as the large flakes fill the bridge windows. Thankfully, the floating barriers appear clearly on the radar. We can see large spots of orange, indicating icebergs, on the screen. A giant orange clump waits imposingly ahead. Three kilometers separate the ship from the mass.

At the one kilometer mark, the captain whisper a quiet order. The ship changes direction with the adept handling of the helmsman. Fog and snow cloud our vision, but we see a spooky sight; the tabular iceberg, which can only be seen in the southern ocean, appears. The top is flat and extremely wide, and the sides can rise straight up over one hundred feet.

The berg, with its massive size, found me awestruck. It was simply one more of Antarctica's treasures. We'd boarded the polar class cruise vessel with the intention of reaching the Antarctic Circle. Having passed many unsettled and unoccupied areas of the planet, we are nearly there. Seventy-nine years after being sighted in 1820, a person finally wintered over on Antarctica. Scientist followed after the first explorers who wanted to find the South Pole, but perished. Traveling to Antarctica used to be the reserve of the very rich. You'll spend as much to cruise to Antarctica as you would to experience the Caribbean, thanks to falling prices.

Some people say that Antarctica looks a bit like a manta ray with a curving tail. The very tip of South America is 500 miles away from Antarctica. This area, called the Drake Passage, is home to extremely rough seas. The slobbering jaws of hell, as the waters are also known, extract your true payment for wanting to reach Antarctica. We followed the advice of one passenger, who suggested we make sure everything was stowed and that the porthole latches of our cabins were secure before we went to bed.

After leaving Ushuaia in Argentina, we traveled through the smooth waters of the Beagle Channel and into the open ocean. The ship was tossed for two days on very rough water with no land in sight. The wind approached gale force for the entire time. As waves broke over the bow, ocean spray shot up beyond my fourth deck window. Depending on the level of your seasickness, you could see swells from 15 to 40 feet.

Two days of travel brought us to the Southern Ocean. A coastal archipelago was my first view the next morning. The water was calmer. High mountains were topped in wispy clouds. Looking like chocolate spikes through the glacier's frosting, angular ridges poked up. Unusually rough, the bumpy slabs of ice fall right into the sea. It looks like a huge mountain range has been plopped into the middle of the ocean.

One passenger thought that childbirth's labor was similar to our efforts to reach Antarctica. This continent, just like a spoiled child, is the coldest, driest, highest, and windiest of all the continents. The polar plateau only gets about as much precipitation as Death Valley does, even though it holds about 70 percent of the fresh water on the planet. Antarctica is owned by no one, harbors no indigenous human population, nor do animals live year round on her.

Due to the rigorous weather and poor conditions, sailing routes, as well as shore landings are dictated by the weather. Our first trip to shore was actually able to proceed, even though we'd been warned this may not be the case. The groups to which we'd been assigned assembled on deck. On our turn, my group of ten climbs into an inflatable boat. My group of ten nears the trip's zenith as the driver powers the boat towards land. And, with that last step, I become one of the few who can honestly say they've been to this seventh continent.