World Travel Adventures

The next day we landed on another Antarctica peninsula, and this was one of my favorites – Cuverville Island. This was the most incredible place I’d ever seen to this point in my 20 years of travel! It encompassed my previous description and more – worthy of repeating: snow-covered, pristine white mountains; gorgeous ice-blue glaciers; seals, penguins, and humpback whales; beautiful azure blue sky; loud, attention-demanding explosions, visually yielding huge chunks of ice breaking off from the immense glaciers, creating mini-tidal waves (big trouble if they create big tidal waves!); and then, as you looked back, there was our little red ship looking like a toy boat (seriously!) in the engulfing blue ocean. This was paradise to me as a photographer, and I clicked-off nearly 200 photos in 2 hours.

Not all of my tourmates made this landing; several were still seasick. I ran to a group of others to share my glee, and they shared theirs as well. It was more like delirious euphoria!!! I spent time roaming around with a couple of the younger gals in their 20s, from Vancouver and Sweden, which were two favorite places of mine as well. I had won two Journalism awards in college and had an outstanding vocabulary, but really couldn’t find the words to describe this, at least not in English. So my mind immediately searched its foreign rolodex. “Spettacolare! Spettacolare!” from the first Jungfrau mountain sighting by the Italian Eurail passengers in Switzerland wasn't even close. I asked the gals I was with if they had any words to befit what we were seeing. They didn’t, either. We just kept looking around, turning, pointing, gaping, making sounds like “oh!” and “ooh” and “wow!” followed by lots of picture-taking.

The sunny day made a huge difference, I’d imagine; that was the whitest snow I’d ever seen. More “quacking” from the penguins (mainly Gentoos), roars from seals, splashing by whales, and cawing by the birds amidst all this. We saw thousands of penguins in their colonies, standing totally upright at attention, waddling around, flapping, molting, and more. We only had a few hours there before going to our next peninsula landing, Neko Bay. I could have spent all day in either place. Neko Bay was just as gorgeous, maybe more so than Cuverville Island. OK, this was my new favorite place in the world, beating the old one which was a few hours ago! I remember the mirror-like water with ice chunks, atop which there were some seals, but especially the smaller ice dotting the ocean giving it a shimmering luster in the sun. Several of us hiked up a snow-covered hill that overlooked a glacier and the bay. “Spettacolare! Spettacolare!” – and multiply by infinity. Chunks of ice were again calving off the glaciers, dropping into the bay, and floating downstream. To the thousands of penguins, seals, and other wildlife in the vicinity this was probably just another day in Arctic paradise. But to us, it was definitely a “wow!” I especially liked seeing the mountain reflections in the ice-streaked waters. The water right next to the glacier chunks was a color I’d not seen before, an iridescent greenish-blue. The closest I’d seen to it was in Alaska, but this color looked even more striking and brilliant. Maybe it should be called “spettacolare! blue.” Perhaps some artists out there can develop it into a color for mainstream usage. There were other gorgeous blue-family colors, too.

Another awesome view occurred on a zodiac ride immediately after the hike down the hill. We went in shifts since only about 8 people could fit into each zodiac. Several zodiacs were out at once, and I took photos of my fellow zodiac-mates both inside my own and also of others motoring nearby. We saw a few humpbacks and out came the cameras. An interesting photo in itself was of the others poised to take photos of a whale, with their long lenses held rock-steady, pointed at the water, just waiting. We saw several. I knew whales were big, but this was the closest I’d got to one and it was gigantic. Several were “logging,” lying flat face-down looking for food. Their habits were explained to us. We were just amazed; this was all surreal! And the weather was such a help. It actually got up to 40 degrees at one point, so like the penguins, we started shedding – our layers of clothes, that is. For reference, the warmest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica was 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and the coldest – which is the coldest ever recorded on the planet – was -128 degrees Fahrenheit (without the wind-chill factor). To be in 40 degrees along that continuum, with dazzling sunshine, was nothing short of incredible.