Photos!

I finally completed all my photos and posted them to an album on Picasa.  I’ll be getting more over the coming weeks as friends who were on the trip send me their links, but for now, here they are:

http://picasaweb.google.com/BRAndrews/Antarctica#

Happy New Year to everyone!

Ice Planet

I tried to update the blog while I was at sea, I promise, but for some reason the emails that I sent from the ship never linked correctly to the blog.

In any case, here is one of the entries that never made it:

I’m writing this email as our ship the Lyubov Orlova coasts quietly through
the Gerlache Strait, mist shrouding the mountains on either side of us.  I
am in Antarctica.  Jagged black peaks veined with white snow, sheer ice
walls that roar as they calve and collapse into the dark waters below,
fields of alien carved gray blue icebergs that stretch into the fog in all
directions.  It is here, more than any other place I have ever visited, that
feels like a different planet.

This trip has been utterly amazing.  I was still getting my sea legs during
our first two days crossing the rough waters of the Drake passage, and while
I did get sick once, I could tell the sea sickness medication was working
because I was not nearly as miserable as I usually am under those
conditions.  Mostly I just slept for those two days which was fine because
there’s nothing to see in the Drake except an unending horizon of stormy
water and the occasional albatross.

Once we arrived into the sheltered bays of the continent itself, we started
our excursions.  Kayaking close in amongst the bergs, hearing them groan and
crack, seeing them calve and roll, and coasting along with curious seals and
groups of penguins has been the highlight of the trip.  There are a few
others who are also celebrating their seventh continent, so on Monday, our
small group of kayakers made landfall on a pathetic little spit of rocky
beach under a sheer 700 foot granite cliff and celebrated.  I’ve officially
completed my goal!

Last night thirty of us went camping on a small island in a cove in Paradise
Bay surrounded on three sides by a massive black ridge.  It was windy and
rainy and freezing from the moment we jumped ashore to set up our tents all
the way through to strike this morning and the gray gloom of twilight lasted
all night making the tents quite bright inside.  All the new clothing I
bought has held up amazingly well; the outer layers work so well it’s like
walking around in a portable tent.  I am incredibly thankful to have
experienced a night out on the ice.  Any time I wanted to complain about the
weather conditions I just remembered Ernest Shackleton and his men who were
forced to spend nearly eighteen months on the ice during the Heroic Age of
Antarctic exploration, and shut my mouth.

Today we visited a Chilean research station which also had a huge colony of
penguins nesting with their eggs.  One of my Australian friends slipped on a
rock and fell backwards into a huge pile of penguin guano.  Uh Oh!  Tomorrow
we’ll be kayaking at Deception Island and the South Shetland Islands before
heading back into the Drake passage Friday and Saturday. Then Sunday I start
the long journey home.

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!  I spent mine catching up with the family, eating loads of good food, showing off my beard (which I shaved yesterday) and playing a DVD I made of some pictures from the trip.  I’m still working on compiling them into an online album and will post the link here, hopefully in the next week once they are all sorted.

I also received news from a friend who was down in Antarctica with me that hundreds gathered in her town to protest Global Warming:

Home and Dry

After about 30 hours of travel and layovers I’m home.  And exhausted.

My apologies for bringing the snow with me.  Apologies also for the lack of updates – I did try to send two updates via email from the ship, but they don’t seem to have arrived.

Suffice it to say that the trip was absolutely amazing and I accomplished my goal of setting foot on the continent.  Multiple times in fact.  I can’t wait to share my stories and pictures and videos with everyone.

Here’s a picture of me on the Orlova in the Lemaire Channel and a quote that our expedition leader Kara Weller shared with us on the final night of our trip.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart.  Art, and it would be Michelangelo.  Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

-Andrew Denton

The End of the World

Hard to believe I was in Baltimore on Tuesday.  I left BWI that afternoon after running into my friends Mark and Andrew whose flight had just arrived back in from Green Bay where they had seen the Ravens play.  I flew to Miami and then an overnight flight to Buenos Aires where we arrived to a warm, sunny summer morning.  I would have loved to stay in BA a little longer.  I then flew south to El Calafate and on, finally, to Ushuaia, the self-proclaimed End of the World.

I arrived into the Ushuaia aiport yesterday, a building that looks like a cozy ski lodge from the inside, and waited for my luggage.  And waited.  And waited.  It didn´t arrive on the carousel so I spent some time at their check in desk inquiring about it and after a few minutes someone brought the bag out from the back.  I never did find out why it wasn´t on the carousel, but at least it was there with me.  I went to my hotel and collapsed and slept for 14 hours.  Now I´m heading out to tour Ushuaia.  We have a meeting tonight in the hotel and then tomorrow we depart!

Southbound and Down

What does one bring to Antarctica?  I don’t know, but I’m hoping the answer is in the two bags sitting next to me right now.  I’m all packed and will be off to the airport shortly.

I went through a final gear check yesterday and realized I didn’t have enough motion sickness medicine.  So I called my doctor and they called in a larger prescription and within two hours it was sorted.  So if I get motion sickness on this trip I’ll know I’m some sort of mutant.   I also picked up two books; Dan Brown’s newest The Lost Symbol and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us which looks very interesting.  When I went on a road trip out west this past August I burned through Alex Garland’s The Beach in less than a week and felt naked without a book to clothe myself (since the bears had absconded with our clothes and our pic-a-nic basket).

I was on the phone with AT&T yesterday discussing sending text messages from Argentina.  Assuming there is coverage when I am in Ushuaia, I should be able to send text messages to update my Twitter account, on the right bar of this page.  I should also be able to update the blog when I am on board the ship via email, as they have “basic text email capabilities which are satellite dependent.”  So I will try my best!

I’ll be in Miami by dinner tonight, Buenos Aires by breakfast tomorrow and Ushuaia by the time I rest my head tomorrow night.  Thanks to everyone who has kept up with the blog so far and for the good wishes.  Off I go!

Five Days Left

I can’t believe I leave next Tuesday.  Time always seems to constrict in the final days leading up to a trip, much like water swirling down a drain.  I bought the final piece of gear on my list today – a power adapter for my video camera.  I’ll try to shoot as much as I can and see if I can cut it into something watchable when I return and thaw out.  So now I just have to sort through all the clothing and gear strewn about on my floor to see if I missed anything.  Then pray that my airlines don’t send me anymore schedule changes (they’ve already sent me two).

I went to a Baltimore Ravens football game Sunday night hoping to try out some of my new cold weather clothes but it was pleasantly mild, so the new outer layers will remain untested.  Those poor coats have no idea what they are in for.  And neither do I, I’m sure.

Much to do this weekend and then leaving on a jetplane Tuesday!

The List

Well a belated Thanksgiving to everyone, I spent the day with my family eating what felt like twice my weight in turkey and drinking just as much wine.

I braved the crowds on Friday and Saturday and finally bought all the clothing I’ll need.  I ended up going with a lot of Under Armour gear for my under-layers.  Now I’m gathering my cameras and batteries and taking stock of the last of the gear that I’ll need to buy this week.

One question that I’ve been getting a lot lately is “What’s next after Antarctica?”  My usual response is: “Space.”  I’m only partly joking about this, I really would love to go up into space and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is aiming to be the first company to take tourists up into space, but until they can drop the price tag, which currently sits at $200,000.00, I will leave this on The List.

The List is simply the places I still want to go and it’s very sneaky.  For every place that I visit, four more seem to sprout in its place.  It’s always close, and I’m always thinking about it.  In fact, one of the ways I deal with post-trip depression is to look at the list and start considering where to go next.  It’s a big world, and I love exploring it.

The List

Space Flight

India

Iceland

Road trip along the West Coast of the USA

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Alaska

Hawaii

Eastern Europe

Egypt

South Africa

Southern Spain

Portugal

Morocco

Angel Falls

Iguazu Falls

Scandanavia

Tibet

Nepal

Bhutan

Cambodia

Laos

Vietnam

Australia

Ireland

The Other Six

To make sure that those other six continents don’t feel slighted, I thought I’d give a rundown of my time on each.

North America

The easy one.  I was born here.  I learned to appreciate traveling and exploring at a young age.  Each summer my parents and I would visit my Mom’s family in Savannah, Georgia, for three weeks.  Getting away for that amount of time gave me a love of longer-term travel, even if it was only once a year and a few states away.  Later, my family and friends and I would go on long camping trips around the northeast, and up into Canada.  I’ve also spent time in Las Vegas as well as at the parks surrounding Vegas and this past summer my friend Brian and I went on a road trip out west, camping at the National Parks around Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and Colorado.  North America is where I grew up, but my concept of “home” has changed quite a bit since I started traveling.

Europe

During college I spent half a year studying abroad in Leicester, England.  My routine would be: Mondays through Thursdays go to class and work on papers and Fridays through Sundays travel around the UK.  I traveled to some amazing places, like the Lake District, Glastonbury, Bath, Brighton, Canterbury, Salisbury, Stonehenge and London more times than I can recall.  I even skipped school for a week and went up to the Highlands of Scotland, through Inverness and west out to the wild coast near Ullapool where I caught a ferry to the Hebrides.  Once classed were over, I set about planning a trip around the continent.  I started in London and took the chunnel train to Lille, France, connected through Brussels to Amsterdam, to Munich, Germany, south to Zurich, Switzerland, then the most stunning train ride I’ve ever taken east across the Alps to Innsbruck, Austria and Christmas day in Vienna.  From Vienna south to Venice and south along the Italian coast to Brindisi where I caught a ferry to Greece.  Athens for a few days and then off to the Greek Isle of Mykonos where I spent New Years drinking with the locals and watching fireworks over the Mykonos harbor.  Then back to Italy through Naples, Rome and Florence, north to Monaco and Nice on the French Riviera, then to Barcelona and north through Paris back to London where I promptly collapsed.

South America

I spent about a month in Peru backpacking south along the coast from Lima, up into the Andes to Cuzco, hiking and camping along the Inca trail over four days to Machu Picchu and finally ended up at a lodge deep in the Amazon rainforest.  This trip was, in a way, a pilgrimage.  I had always wanted to see Machu Picchu, it was a site that I couldn’t get out of my head and it was a tough road through the Andes, plodding through the rain in the dark on the final morning.  But when we finally arrived at the site, the clouds broke, the sun crested the mountains and a rainbow fell right in the middle of the city.

Africa

If each trip has tested me in a different way, the test of Africa was minimalism.  When I arrived into Nairobi, Kenya, British Airways had lost all of my luggage and I was forced to do the entire month-long safari with nothing but one pair of clothes (the ones I happened to be wearing) and the money in my wallet.  I’ve been in a lot of stressful situations when traveling, but being alone in Africa when I realized that my luggage was not going to make it was one of the most stressful I’ve endured.  Looking back on it now, it seems rather silly that I was so worried about having a fresh change of clothes each day when most people I saw in my time there could barely afford clothes at all.  Camping on the open Serengeti plain at night and rising at dawn to see the fat red African sun on the horizon was an experience I will never forget.  Oh, and watching a hyena chase down a flamingo and rip the poor thing to pink shreds was pretty cool too.

New Zealand/Australia

Of all the countries that are close to my heart, I think New Zealand is probably the closest.  I endured the twelve hour flight from LA to Auckland and landed in the country not knowing a single soul, but I ended up with the most amazing friends I could have ever hoped to meet.  We all traveled around together, having met in my favorite city in the world, Wellington, and moved south to Christchurch.  I also spent two weeks in Sydney, Australia with Adam, my boyfriend at the time.  Australia is too large to see in two months, never mind two weeks, so we planted ourselves in Sydney and explored the various beaches in and around the city.  Back in New Zealand, we rented a car and toured the rest of the South Island before heading off to…

Asia

The first few nights in Bangkok, Thailand Adam and I stayed on the Koh San Road, which is the backpacker land where the book “The Beach” begins.  After exploring the delights of Bangkok, we headed north into the jungles outside of Chiang Mai for a two day elephant trek which finished with us navigating river rapids in a rickety bamboo raft that had been lashed together before our eyes only moments before.  Then the long journey south to Thailand’s fabled islands where I spent the first few days in a classroom learning the equipment and proper terminology for scuba diving.  By the end of our time on Koh Tao, I was an officially certified open water scuba diver.  We headed south to the wild beach parties of Koh Phangan and south again to Koh Samui.  Then we cut west across the country to Phuket and then out to the tsunami-ravaged Koh Phi-Phi islands where we went scuba diving til the end of our trip.

Icebreakers and Underwear

The Russian Icebreaker that was caught in Antarctic ice is now free.

The article is here.

I’m coming into the home stretch with the final gear I need and am now researching the clothing that will be next to my skin when I am out on the ice.  The guidelines that I’ve been told are not to wear any cotton and not to wear anything too tight.  So I’m in the market for fleece pants to wear under my windproof/waterproof shell pants, some sort of nylon or polyester underwear and long sleeve and short sleeve shirts.  R.E.I. sells a lot of good gear, as does Under Armour, so I’m narrowing down my choices each day and hope to have this wrapped up by the end of the week.

Then it’s on to the technical gear – cameras, batteries, binoculars, etc.

Two weeks to go!