Wanderings: A Travel Journal

Crossing from Croatia to Bosnia & Herzegovina (without getting any passport stamps), the difference was noticeable immediately. Our bus turned inland, leaving the shimmering Adriatic Sea behind and making straight for the rugged and inhospitable mountains that we had been driving alongside for the past few hours. Five minutes after crossing the border, I saw the first mosque, and not long after that I saw the first Ottoman mosque, which would have been right at home in Turkey but seemed very out of place, despite having been there for centuries, in an otherwise typical medieval European village. This feeling of strangeness would typify my first 24 hours in the country, which seems to be a juxtaposition of all sorts of cultures and eras, jumbled together in a way that I’ve never seen before.

Meanwhile, the sight of six cemeteries (four Muslim, two Christian) on a 10km stretch of road near Mostar, with many headstones giving dates of death in the early-to-mid 1990s, was my first reminder of the war that is so recent to still be etched into people’s minds here.

Arriving at the bus station on the outskirts of Sarajevo, I felt as though I had landed behind the Iron Curtain in pre-1989 Eastern Europe. The city trams and buses were ancient, the buildings and weather were bleak, and there didn’t seem to have been any infrastructure development since the 1984 Winter Olympics were held here. In fact, just outside the train station I even saw an old, barely legible sign welcoming visitors to the 1984 Games.

I took ramshackle tram 1 to Bascarsija, and on the way a different Sarajevo emerged – one full of buildings long since abandoned, or pock-marked with bullet holes, or both. And it became clear that the physical city has not fully recovered from the 1992-95 siege by Bosnian Serb forces, not only in these partly destroyed buildings but in the Soviet-style ones as well – it was the siege and the subsequent recovery that prevented Sarajevo from shedding its communist appearance like other former Eastern bloc capitals did during the same period. Later on, I saw that the city hall – a once-beautiful triangular Islamic-style castle – is boarded up and abandoned, and is only now being restored with funds provided by other European nations who can afford it.

When I got off the tram I stumbled into a third Sarajevo, the Turkish quarter that could almost be Sultanahmet with its Ottoman mosques (and one madrassa), tea-shops, kebab stands and Muslim bazaars. This is where I stayed for two nights and spent most of my time, wandering through the bazaars past shiny daggers, tea sets and hookah pipes. Then, just as I almost forget entirely that I was actually in Europe (Slavic women in headscarves aside), Saraci street becomes Ferhadija, the cobblestones become European pavements, the mosques become churches, and the fourth Sarajevo – its late 19th century incarnation as a city of the Austro-Hungarian empire – suddenly reveals itself.

All of this makes for an extraordinary city (if not a beautiful one), and I found it a pretty fascinating place to spend a couple of days.

Finally, an anecdote that I found interesting: both mornings in Sarajevo I was woken at 6am by the sound of elderly people chattering on the street outside my window. I peeked out and saw that they were lining up for something but in my sleepy state I didn’t figure it all out. Later on the second morning, I walked past the same street to find that it was a bakery and the people were lining up for bread. I watched for a few minutes and noticed that every single customer paid not with money but with food stamps.

Today, I’m resuming my ‘beautiful medieval towns of the Balkans’ trip by heading to Mostar for a night to see the famous bridge and wander through the old city. Then, after all this rain, it’s back to Croatia and sunny Dubrovnik.

Way back in February, when I assumed (correctly) that Swiss immigration would not ask for a return/onward flight when I arrived from the United States but that the airline would, I bought a budget one-way flight from Geneva to Split in Croatia, one of the closest non-EU/Shengen countries, just to be safe. Four months later, here I am: the need to get out of the Shengen zone for a while sees me travelling without Wendy for the first time in eight years.

I arrived in Split on Saturday night and yesterday morning began my first exploration of the former Yugoslavia. The central attraction of Split, of course, is the palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian, who built the palace near the Roman town of Salona after he became the first sitting emperor to voluntarily stand down in the first years of the fourth century AD. He spent the rest of his days living in his enormous palace and planting cabbages.

Today, the palace is an extraordinary ruin, unique in the former Roman Empire in that it is a living city that has never been abandoned since the residents of Salona took up there several centuries after Diocletian’s death. Within the walls of the palace today there are Roman columns, basements, marble debris, an old Pagan temple and the intact mausoleum of the visionary emperor himself – but that’s only half the story. There are also Renaissance mini-palaces, churches and houses, and in the 21st century it all comes together in a fabulously mismatched city-within-a-city. Today, 3000 people live inside the palace walls, many in buildings with Roman foundations, and it’s still the beating heart of Split. Wandering through the palace is a great delight and you never know what you might come across – like a modern bank with an original Roman column standing in front of the tellers. All of this makes Diocletian’s palace one of the most fascinating Roman sights I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. I’ve probably spent about 4-5 hours wandering through it over the past two days, and I’m not done yet.

The other highlight of my trip so far was a morning spent at World Heritage listed Trogir, a small medieval city about 25km from Split. The architecture (including a glorious Romanesque church), the setting and the boats on the city’s shore gave it a classic Mediterranean feel, a world away from the same-period Germanic village of Stein am Rhein that we visited the previous weekend in Northeast Switzerland. I happily wandered the streets of Trogir for a few hours revelling in the beauty of the place. As a contrast to Diocletian’s Palace, which is very hodge-podge and disorderly (and I say that with love), Trogir is better laid out but still retains its laid-back Mediterranean air.

Today I had planned to go to the island of Hvar for the day, but the forecast of rain and the prospect of a 10.5 hour day-trip (as the boats aren’t running with high season frequency yet) meant that I decided to stay in Split, explore the palace some more, and plan my next move. Tomorrow I’m hoping to visit the ruins of Salona and then travel by bus across the Bosnia & Hercegovina border to Sarajevo. It’s a city that has intrigued me for years because I love the name, because it’s known as the European Jerusalem owing to a significant presence of all three monotheistic religions, and because it’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 15 years since the city was liberated from a three-year siege during the wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Since we’ve been living together in Geneva for nearly three months, it’s probably about time I posted an update on what life is like here and what we get up to.

To start with, we are both really enjoying ourselves and our new European life after a year-and-a-half of virtually non-stop travel in Asia and South America. As a city, Geneva has nothing on Rome or Paris (despite the Parisian reference in its nickname cited above), but it’s brilliantly located near the Alps and the Jura, as a gateway to Lake Geneva and beyond to France, and it’s smack bang in the middle of Western Europe. Many people label Geneva as ‘nice but boring’, but we don’t see it that way at all and are very content here in such an international city.

We live in Paquis, which is a supposedly seedy area of the city but in reality is perfectly fine, at least in the part of Paquis that we live in. Our apartment is on a pedestrian-only street, just 1.5 blocks from Lake Geneva, the largest lake in Western Europe, and half a block from a nice square with a fountain and some restaurants. From Paquis we are walking distance from everywhere of interest in the city, so that’s how we get around – it takes Wendy about 30 minutes to the Palace of Nations each day and it takes me about 12 minutes to walk to school.

Our passion to experience and discover new places still burns brightly, so we spend our weekends exploring Switzerland if the weather’s fine. So far we’ve enjoyed four-day weekends in both Ticino (the Italian-speaking part of the country) and German-speaking Central Switzerland; a castle-spotting weekend away in Thun and Spiez in the German part; and quite a few day trips to the areas around Lake Geneva in French-speaking Switzerland (‘Suisse Romande’ – literally Roman Switzerland, which I thought was quite a nice touch for us). There’s another public holiday next Monday, so this weekend we’re going to German-speaking Northeastern Switzerland to visit the famous medieval library in St. Gallen and a few other places of interest.

When we have free time in Geneva itself, we spend it walking and rollerblading/skating around the lake a fair bit, trying different restaurants, hanging out with a nice group of friends we’ve made here, reading, working on languages and watching (ice) hockey. Having spent the 2010 Olympic hockey tournament living with two Canadians in Whistler, I got a bit hooked on the sport and that carried over when I came here as the Swiss league playoffs were on and our local team, Genève-Servette, made it all the way to Game 7 of the finals before losing to Bern. We went to a couple of games including the hugely exciting Game 6 of the finals, and then we watched all of Switzerland’s games in the World Championships on TV until their elimination yesterday. I’m also following the NHL playoffs and gladly noting that the team I arbitrarily picked as my favourite three months ago, the Montreal Canadiens, are suddenly doing very well.

As for keeping myself busy while Wendy is at work, I’m going to French class at an excellent school for three hours each afternoon during the week and enjoying it quite a lot. With my background in other romance languages, French was pretty easy for me to pick up (relatively speaking), and in two months of classes I’ve advanced to a level that is supposed to take 10 months to reach. So I’m pretty delighted with that, even though not everything has sunk in yet and I’m still fearful of speaking outside the classroom and the apartment.

As for our future, we are hoping to find out soon if Wendy will be offered a permanent UN posting at this time since there are a couple of spots available here in Geneva. If so, our move will be ‘official’ and we’ll finally settle down after all these years of travel (though, naturally, we’re hoping to squeeze in a few more months of wanderings between the end of her freelance contract and the start of her permanent one). If not, then we’ll continue to work around her freelance contracts with 2-3 month trips here and there, which isn’t half bad either. So it’s basically a win-win situation, one that we’re very fortunate to be in.

In the more immediate future, I’m heading to Croatia/Bosnia/Montenegro for a couple of weeks next weekend for a visa run which I’m quite looking forward to, since I have never been to the Balkans despite wanting to go for years. Then on my way back to Geneva we’ll meet up in Rome for our annual visit to the Eternal City. As always, we can’t wait…

It’s funny how after a month of living in Whistler and barely even considering hitting the slopes, it only took three days in Geneva before I was skiing in the Swiss Alps. Or the French Alps. It was a bit confusing actually*, since we were literally right on the border. I think we bought lift passes in Switzerland and skiied in France. Or the other way around.

It was the first time I had been on skis since I was five, when at one point I took them off and left them at the bottom of the chairlift (believing that’s what someone had instructed me to do) and proceeded to take the chairlift to the top of the slope without skis. Twenty-five years later, I didn’t fall over once (except when I took a semi-disastrous wrong turn into the forest on the last run of the day, but let’s not talk about that), and my instructor told me I was “full of it” when I said that I had never skiied before, save the aforementioned left-my-skis-at-the-bottom-of-the-chairlift debacle.

Having snowboarded a few times between the ages of 18-21 and enjoying it more or less but not really understanding what all the fuss was about (hence my absence from the Whistler slopes), I was a bit skeptical of how the day would unfold, but I have to say that I loved (nearly) every minute of it. I’m very keen to go back as soon as my ankle rashes from the ski boats heal, and maybe we can go two or three more times until the season finishes at the end of April.

Meanwhile, I have spent nearly a week settling in here in Geneva while Wendy earns a living for both of us as an ultra-talented United Nations translator. I’ve discovered that I quite like being a house husband and that I know more French than I thought I did (pending the results of the language school placement test I just took). And, of course, despite the cold and wind, there’s something special about simply being in Europe, especially after five weeks in North America.

So for now, we’re happy to be back together and living what is perhaps a preview of the permanent life we will someday lead. But, as always, nothing is certain and anything can happen…

* Very confusing, since apparently we were not in the Alps at all but the Jura. It’s hard to know with all these mountains surrounding you.

A few days can sometimes seem like an eternity.

Just last week, we were happily wandering down the colonial streets of Colonia as ‘compulsive travellers’ without a worry in the world. Now it seems like months ago.

We returned to Buenos Aires last Wednesday and on Thursday I flew via Mexico City and Los Angeles to Vancouver to work for ONS for the sixth time. I arrived on Friday night and spent a whirlwind 2.5 days in the city sorting out uniform and accreditation, receiving training and catching up with friends.

On Monday afternoon we headed to Whistler, where I’ll be based for all of February reporting primarily on ski jumping and Nordic combined at Whistler Olympic Park. It’s been nice to not have to worry about giving training, managing staff etc for a change, and I’ve been able to enjoy myself more and focus on writing.

Meanwhile, Wendy left Buenos Aires on Tuesday and is now in Geneva, awaiting the start of her freelance contract at the UN on Monday. She has already found a place to live and bought a completely new wardrobe (dirty backpacker clothes don’t go over too well at the UN, apparently).

I’ll be busy throughout the Games and won’t be updating the blog for a while. In early March I will join Wendy in Geneva until her contract finishes at the end of June.

After crossing the Chile-Argentine border for the eighth time, we returned once more to Bariloche and began preparing for our fourth and final multi-day Patagonian trek: the Paso de las Nubes (roughly: ‘Cloud Pass’), which we turned from a two-day trek into a four-day trek by adding some side trips. Fortunately, there were barely any clouds in sight, the trail was quite easy (though boggy in parts) and the scenery was, as we’ve come to expect, quite spectacular. The highlights are below:

Mt. Tronador: The entire trek is essentially an ode to Mt. Tronador (Mt. Thunderer, named for the sounds its glaciers make, both in Spanish and previously in local languages), which is easily the highest in the region at 3554m and completely dominates the area. The triple-peaked mountain is shared between Argentina and Chile (though it seems most of the good stuff is on the Argentine side), is covered in snow year-round, and all of the glaciers we saw hung from its slopes. Our best views of the mountain itself were on the first and last days, though the most impressive glaciers were on the second and third days.

Ventisquero Negro: We spent the first day admiring the peak of Tronador and jostling with the hordes of domestic tourists at the Ventisquero Negro (‘Black Glacier’), which owes 99% of its popularity to the fact that you can drive to it. (Naturally, we walked.) It was actually quite interesting to see how many people come to see this glacier when, as it turns out, there are two more nearby that are infinitely more spectacular yet barely visited because you have to hike to them. As for the black (actually brown) glacier itself, I dislike dirty glaciers as much as the next guy, but this one was so dirty that it was almost pretty in a way considering the incredible contrast between the stark brownness of it and the pristine whiteness of the Glacier Manso directly above it.

Glaciar Castaño Overo: The highlight of Day 2, and the entire trek, was the hanging Glaciar Castaño Overo, which we had completely to ourselves and was one of the most beautiful sights in this beautiful country. Emerging from a forest about 1¼ hours from the main trail, we suddenly arrived at the base of a sheer cliff with almost a dozen waterfalls streaming down it. At the top of the cliff stood the pristine glacier contrasted against the deep blue sky to complete the gorgeous scene (and give me a new desktop background). We found a nice rock to sit on, got out our breakfast of crackers and dulce de leche, and sat there by ourselves for some time, quite mesmerised.

Glaciar Frías: On Day 3, we waded through bogs, climbed to the Paso de las Nubes itself (one of the easiest passes we’ll ever reach), and then went steeply downhill through forest on the other side, eventually emerging on a rocky outcrop near the valley floor to find another spectacular view ahead of us: the Glaciar Frías. While not quite as beautiful as Castaño Overo owing to some dirtiness on one side of the glacier, it was a grander and more imposing scene, with more of the glacier revealed, mountains rising from either side of it, and waterfalls tumbling further down. We once again had perfect weather and, spending the night at a well-situated campsite within view of the glacier, we were able to admire it for most of the day and then see first light hit it the next morning.

Cruce de Lagos: We managed, virtually by complete accident, to stumble across one of the main tourist attractions of the Lakes District: a bus and boat tour that ferries tourists (mostly Brazilians) from Puerto Montt in Chile to Bariloche. After two days of seeing hardly any people (on the second and third nights there were only three other tents at the campsites), we reached the end of the trail at Lago Frías to find a boatload of tourists awaiting their next cruise. We bought tickets for the two boats and two buses remaining (which cost, between us, a very steep 380 pesos – US$100 – and amazingly all the money we had on us totalled 380.75 pesos, just enough to scrape by) and joined the tour – the only way to get back to Bariloche other than to walk all the way back to the start of the trail and take a bus. Both the boat rides on Lago Frías and Lago Nahuel Huapi were quite beautiful and despite the culture shock of emerging from a peaceful trail to suddenly find ourselves in the thick of high-end tourism, it was a lovely way to end the trek.

The next day, we completed our circumnavigation of Argentina by taking a bus all the way back to Buenos Aires, where we started this trip in early October. Now we just have time to duck into Uruguay for a couple of days before I head to Vancouver on Thursday.

The past six weeks in Patagonia, the Lakes District and Antarctica, while amazing, have all been pretty much about the same thing: nature. And the bases we’ve used to explore all that scenery – El Calafate, El Chaltén, Ushuaia and Bariloche – have all been touristy places unremarkable in and of themselves. So for our last sojourn into Chile, we chose a destination that we hoped would be a bit different and a bit more laid-back: the archipelago of Chiloé.

During the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the subsequent religious conversion of the natives, Chiloé was referred to as el fin de la cristiandad – the end of Christendom. The locals built fine wooden churches but their religion fused Christianity with their ancient pagan beliefs, a practice that has continued down to the present to make Chiloé the most distinct part of Chile. In reality, however, a few days in Chiloé doesn’t really give you any sense of this fusion (one painting in one church aside), and it seems to me to be something that guidebooks and newspaper and/or magazine stories pick up and run with as an interesting way to introduce the region more than anything else. Regardless, Chiloé was certainly the most religious place we’ve been to since arriving on the continent in October, if the churches and other Christian paraphernalia are any indication. Sixteen of the wooden churches are UNESCO World Heritage listed sites, and we visited six of them in a span of two days (as well as one other that doesn’t have the UNESCO stamp), ranging from a completely unadorned and unpainted countryside church in Vilupulli to the half-neo-Gothic, half-neo-Classical edifice that dominates Castro, the region’s largest city. All are quite interesting and picturesque and, though they range from 100 to 250 years old, they all still dominate their respective small towns.

The other unique aspect of Chiloé is its distinct food and drink, and we successfully experimented on both fronts. The latter included licor de oro, something more like a potion than a drink, and various chocolate or dulce de leche concoctions. The former is dominated by seafood, and while the chupe de mariscos (a kind of seafood bake with melted cheese on top) was my favourite, the curanto is the dish most worthy of description. When it arrived, shells from clams and absolutely enormous muscles protruded from our bowls, with potatoes, another type of starch and a further festival of meat including sausage, chicken and beef all lurking underneath. Once you shell the seafood, you then pour soup from a separate bowl over the whole thing (or at least that’s what we did), and then it’s ready to eat – very filling and very unusual, but not something I’d be in a rush to try again.

Churches and food aside, we spent the rest of our time in Chiloé admiring the residential architecture of the various towns, including some stilt houses in Castro known as palafitos, watching CNN’s coverage of the devastating earthquake in Haiti and continuing an eternally favourite pastime of plotting our immediate future, which is beginning to take shape. It was a relaxing and enjoyable few days and we were glad we made the decision to go. Plus, the archipelago defied its reputation of being a misty, cloud-covered land and was sunny most of the time, which always helps.

We arrived back in Argentina yesterday and spent today preparing for the four-day, three-night (including side trips) ‘Paso de las Nubes’ trek that we begin tomorrow around Mt. Tronador. Hopefully it won’t rain, the vistas will be as spectacular as advertised, and our tent and battered sleeping mats have one more trek left in them.

We suffered a bit of a post-Antarctica funk for a few days while in Ushuaia and making the long journey back north (three buses, two pointless border crossings and 50 hours later, and we still hadn’t made it out of Patagonia!). But finally we arrived in Bariloche a week or so ago, ready to resume our Andes hiking tour, this time around the Lakes District in the far north of Patagonia.

For our first trek in the region, we picked the Nahuel Huapi traverse through the national park of the same name, but in the end there were some variations to the trail due to the third day requiring a guide (and then in fact being closed because of excessive snow/rain anyway), and due to a route-finding mistake on the fifth day that led us down the wrong path and unfortunately caused us to forgo the final part of the traverse. But when it was all said and done, it was a memorable six-day trek with some great moments, but it didn’t quite measure up to the more famous trails around Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine. Some of the best and worst moments are below:

Lakes: They don’t call it the Lakes District for nothing. Virtually every day of the hike we saw a new, gorgeous lake, and in all cases we looked down on them from above before descending to the shore. We even saw a completely frozen lake for the second time this Argentine summer. The prettiest of all was Laguna Schmoll, beautifully situated, surrounded by jagged peaks, and with part of it covered by a sheet of ice. We had breakfast there on the second morning, completely alone and bathed in sunshine, and it’s moments like those that make it worthwhile to hike for days on end with sore legs and sore feet and sore shoulders and even sorer hips from your crummy sleeping mats.

Rivers and Streams: For much of Days 3, 4 and 6 we hiked alongside beautiful streams with crystal clear water that flowed beautifully over red rocks and through canyons and produced lovely drinking water. The various methods we used to cross them ranged from rock-hopping to rope-holding to log-crossing to stumbling across rickety wooden bridges, and these were always pretty interesting crossings, especially when we had to traverse a kind of raging waterfall on the way up to Laguna CAB.

The Weather: After a pretty uneventful nine days, weather-wise, in Torres del Paine, this time we got everything imaginable: snow, rain, howling winds and glorious sunshine. The winds on Day 1 and 4 were the strongest we’ve faced in our short camping careers, but luckily our saggy Chinese tent was up to the task and it held up pretty well, especially on Day 4 when Laguna Negra looked more like the Pacific Ocean and the wind howled so much on the way up that I was half-seriously worried about being blown off the cliff. We actually did get blown over a couple of times and had to sit down on the trail just to stay safe. On a more positive note, Days 2 and 3 were stunning and produced most of our good memories (and photos) from the trek.

The Trail: We trudged through snow, clamoured over rocks (sometimes rope-assisted), hiked through forests, slid down snow (fast becoming a favourite pastime), stumbled down scree, squelched through mud and struggled up extremely steep slopes of loose rock and tree roots – yes, this trail had it all.

The Wrong Trail: Blame here is shared between ourselves and the trail markers. Having climbed to a pass above the Laguna Negra on the morning of Day 5, we did not actually pass the signs well to our left that pointed further up the mountain towards Refugio López, and so descended from the pass as you would normally do (following the same route markers – red paint splashes on rocks – that we’d been following for four days). We climbed down into a valley, crossed a river and then went up the other side (with everything still sounding more or less like the LP description), not realising until we arrived at Laguna CAB four hours later that this was the path to, well, Laguna CAB, and not to Refugio López.

Of course, we could have also carried a better map with us, and if I’d exhibited the slightest sense of direction (Wendy, bless her, doesn’t have any to begin with), we would have realised something was wrong a lot earlier. But in the end it all worked out OK, though we never made it to Refugio López. After lunch at the beautiful but rainy lake, we headed back down and camped by ourselves next to a river for the night, enjoying the solitude. The next day we hiked all the way back up to the pass (in record time), back down to Laguna Negra (this time as calm as could be), and then a further 14 kilometres to the park exit by 2pm, which gave us just enough time to scoff down some hot ham and cheese sandwiches before taking the bus back to Bariloche.

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We still have one more trek to do in the area, but since we’re pretty sore from this one and not quite ready to jump back on the trail again, we’re heading across the border once more to Chile tomorrow to check out the misty and mysterious islands of Chiloé, before coming back to Bariloche at the end of the week to tackle the fabulously named Mt. Tronador (Mt. Thunderer).

The short version is that Antarctica was absolutely incredible and contained the most beautiful scenery we’ve ever seen. The long version is below:

The Voyage

Our ‘Classic Antarctica’ trip took us to the South Shetland Island and then to the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, which is conveniently the closest part of Antarctica to South America, but also one of the best places to visit in the white continent because of the many offshore islands and the channels between them and the Antarctic mainland. The Google Earth shot below shows the Peninsula and the Tierra del Fuego.

For wildlife, there are no polar bears in Antarctica (they only live in the Arctic), and we did not see Emperor Penguins (of ‘Happy Feet’ and ‘March of the Penguins’ fame), because they live in a different area of the continent. We did, however, see three different species of penguins, four different species of seals, and whales.

A day by day account follows:

Day 1: The Beagle Channel

We boarded the M/V Ushuaia, originally built in the 1960s by the U.S. for Arctic research, at about 4:30pm, and within an hour-and-a-half we had left the port, champagne in hand from the welcome party, and were navigating the calm waters of the Beagle Channel. The Ushuaia has space for 84 passengers, and its previous trip 10 days earlier was sold out, but in our case there were only 70 passengers on board. (The previous day in Ushuaia we saw a last-minute price for US$1200 per person lower than what we paid – damn! – but even that special deal wasn’t enough to fill the ship.) To everyone’s surprise, including their own, the 28 Dutch passengers made up by far the biggest national majority, while at the other end of the spectrum there were solitary travellers flying the flags of Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Northern Ireland and, surprisingly, Australia.

Even though we booked the lowest class of accommodation on board, it was still quite nice and comfortable. We had our own two-person cabin with two bunk beds as well as a desk, wardrobe and sink, with a semi-private bathroom shared with a (Dutch) couple in the next cabin.

After a late dinner (caprese salad, chicken teriyaki and chocolate brownies with ice cream – hey, I could get used to this cruise thing), we were quite tired and went to sleep at about 10pm.

Day 2: The Drake Passage

We awoke in the middle of the night to discover that the Beagle Channel was well and truly behind us, and that we were now navigating the treacherous open waters of the Drake Passage between Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, which has been described as the roughest stretch of water on the planet. For those prone to motion sickness such as myself, the rocking of the boat (which I as a non-sailor would have described as significant) made it virtually impossible to sleep thereafter and, when morning came, moving about the boat and doing basically anything except lying down was tough for me. To rub it in, the crew kept saying how fantastic the weather was for the crossing and how calm it was and lucky we were.

Outside it was indeed a gloriously sunny day (9.5 degrees Celsius), but it was wasted in the Drake Passage where you cannot see any land. In the afternoon, by which time I had become used to the swaying of the boat and could move around comfortably, we went out on deck and watched several different types of birds fly around the boat, some with wingspans twice as long as a grown human. Having had a lecture on the birds of the Drake Passage earlier in the day, we all used our newly-minted expert status to differentiate between the different types of albatrosses and petrels.

After dinner (pasta salad, breaded beef with mashed potatoes, and strawberries and cream), we watched a documentary on the doomed early 20th century Antarctic voyage of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, who survived over a year-and-a-half in the Antarctic after their ship was wrecked without the loss of a single life. Then I put the missing pieces together of the story I was trying to tell some other hikers the previous week in Torres del Paine: Shackleton’s Australian photographer Frank Hurley, mentioned and quoted several times in the documentary, was the great-grandfather of my friend Flip, who is herself a kind of modern adventurer and made news last year in Australia for her (sadly aborted) walk across Greenland.

Day 3: Half-Moon Island

Because of the excellent weather conditions in the Drake Passage, we arrived at the South Shetland Islands, close to the Antarctic Peninsula, about 3-4 hours ahead of schedule which allowed for a bonus landing. (Though, entrenched as I was in the Memorias de Idhún, I missed out on the reward of a bottle of wine for the first iceberg sighting.)

For the first time since leaving the port at Ushuaia, we dropped anchor in the cove created by the half-moon shape of the appropriately-named Half-Moon Island, and prepared to make our first landing. Unfortunately, the sun of the previous day had disappeared and it was pretty gloomy outside (3.5 degrees Celsius) – dark grey clouds blanketed the sky, lifting a few metres above the water level to reveal glimpses of glacial and snowy islands in an unusual light. But it wasn’t windy or raining, so while photographers weren’t too happy with the weather, both the ship staff and the penguins thought it was pretty good.

We took the zodiacs (rubber motor boats usually accommodating 8-10 passengers) to shore and disembarked, immediately seeing the first of two types of penguins on the island: the Chin-Strap penguin, so called because of a black line that extends from ear to ear underneath the chin like the strap of a helmet. Later we also saw the red-billed Gentoo penguin, and three different species of seal, including a baby that one of the staff said was the smallest he had seen in six years of doing these voyages. He added that on the Ushuaia’s previous voyage (i.e. the one we had tried to book but missed out on), they had not seen any seals on Half-Moon Island. Though we’d seen sea lions (very similar to seals) before in Peru and just a few weeks ago on the Península Valdés, it was the first time we had seen penguins in their own environment so that was quite thrilling. There were hundreds of them on the island, waddling about awkwardly as they do, and probably many more swimming offshore.

Satisfied then with our first landing, we sat down to dinner (ceviche, beef sirloin and apple compote) and then prepared for the night crossing of the Bransfield Straits, known as the mini-Drake passage.

Day 4: The Gerlache Straits

“As you can see, conditions are quite Antarctic today…” came the morning announcement over the intercom. Owing to heavy snowfall and poor visibility, we abandoned our first planned landing of the day at Hydruga Rocks and instead did a ‘cruise’ on the zodiacs (in 1.5 degrees Celsius weather!) through Gouvernøren Harbor. We saw a 1916 shipwreck but otherwise it wasn’t a great outing owing to the cold and the virtually horizontal snow fall, and we were glad to be back on the ship once it was over.

In the afternoon, we reached the Antarctic continent for the first time and began navigating alongside it, a pattern that we would follow for the next several days. We also saw humpback whales for the first time (but certainly not the last, as sightings soon became routine). Our afternoon landing at Danco Island yielded more penguins and what would have been a spectacular 360 degree viewpoint, but clouds obscured the view in all directions.

The conditions had made it a pretty disappointing day, but as we entered the Andvord Bay, where we would anchor for the evening (dinner: soup, chicken, chocolate ice cream with fritters), our moods began to improve. The mist that had hung over Antarctica for most of the day disappeared, replaced by a blanket of deep grey clouds that, while still obscuring the views beyond the shoreline, created a surreal atmosphere. Navigating through this land of ice and snow and eerie light, I felt as though we were on a completely different planet.

And, as dusk fell on Antarctica, ever so slowly the sky began to clear…

Day 5: Antarctica (Christmas Eve)

I don’t even know how to begin describing how amazing this day was, but l will try this: if every other day of the voyage offered nothing but howling winds, non-stop snow, no wildlife sightings and no views whatsoever, then the entire trip and the US$8350 it cost us would have been completely worthwhile just for this one day. It was, by far, the best single day of ‘travel’ we have ever experienced together and we saw easily the most spectacular scenery of our lives.

Our morning landing at Neko Harbour, at the end of Andvord Bay, was our first on the Antarctic continent, and with the sun out and blue skies around us we trudged past Gentoo penguins through the snow to a lookout point offering spectacular views of the peninsula’s peaks, glaciers and green, iceberg-strewn waters. One glacier that we had been looking at from the ship since the previous evening now revealed itself to be a glacial iceberg detached from the mainland that we estimated as being 10 times the size of the Ushuaia. After the extreme cold of the day before, we were actually hot and had to take off our jackets, and more than a few people got sunburned. When we returned to the ship, it had been surrounded by small icebergs to create yet more postcard views.

Our afternoon landing, our second and last on the continent itself, was not as glorious, but remarkably, the highlight of the day was yet to come: a zodiac cruise in Paradise Bay that was so indescribably magnificent that even ‘jaded’ travellers like ourselves were completely blown away . Icebergs, shimmering glaciers and snow-capped mountains combined to form a white wonderland that almost completely surrounded us and was brilliantly reflected in the Antarctic waters and immeasurably enhanced by the sunshine and blue sky. We approached an enormous glacier in our zodiac and sat there for about half an hour, mostly just staring open-mouthed at how incredible it all was.

After dinner (king crab, turkey, and cake), we navigated through the stunning Lemaire Channel, no more than 150-200 metres wide at its narrowest point and with glaciers and peaks rising up from both sides. While I won’t ever say that Perito Moreno wasn’t awesome, it’s kind of funny to think that today in Antarctica we saw literally dozens (scores? hundreds?) of glaciers, many of them just as tall and beautiful, and all of them pristinely white with that magical shade of blue hiding in the cracks. Add in the odd humpback whale, the ‘afternoon sunshine’ (at 9pm) and the channel was indeed as fantastic as I’d hoped it would be.

After watching sunset from the bow at 11:35pm, 18.5 hours and 750 photos since I woke up at 5am to go on deck and see if it would be a nice day or not, we stumbled into bed, utterly exhausted simply from looking at so much astonishing scenery.

Day 6: Iceberg Alley (Christmas Day)

Waking up at 5:30am on Christmas Day is nothing new, but instead of running into the living room to open presents we instead made a very cold 6am landing on an ugly Antarctic Day on Peterman’s Island, the southern most point of the voyage at 65 degrees 10 minutes. On Peterman, we saw our first colony of Adelie penguins (the third type we saw and the only one of the three exclusive to Antarctica) and three very small chicks, only 7-10 days old and still being sheltered around the clock by their mothers. Some light snow (and the blizzard that hit us in the afternoon) gave us a white Christmas, the first one I’ve ever had unless you count the pseudo-snow that surprisingly hit Mobile in 2004.

After breakfast, the day’s second excursion was another great highlight: a zodiac cruise through Iceberg Alley, a spectacular section of water dotted with hundreds of icebergs – small and big, sharp and curved, some with tunnels, others with brilliant shades of blue. We also saw an ice sheet with 14 crab-eater seals on it, which we were told was a significant number to see in one place. If we had the same weather as the day before, this trip could have been almost as magnificent as Paradise Bay (no easy feat). In any case, the dark grey clouds overhead added another colour to the Antarctic spectrum and it was still a fabulous cruise.

Our afternoon landing at Dorian Bay was postponed because of the weather, but we were able to do it after dinner (soup, salad, roasted lamb with vegetables, sundae) as a night landing at 9pm (‘night’ being a relative term in Antarctica in December, when it is never actually dark). But since it was pretty cold and there wasn’t any wildlife, it wasn’t an especially memorable landing.

Day 7: Neumayer Channel and Around

Our morning landing at Cuverville Island was probably my second favourite landing of the trip after Neko Harbour. There are 5000 pairs of Gentoo penguins on the island, the most we saw in one place on the entire trip, and even after many, many penguin sightings in the past few days it was still impressive to see so many of them. The setting was beautiful too, with icebergs and glaciers very close to the landing spot. On our way back to the ship, we took a small zodiac cruise through the icebergs and we saw, relaxing on the icebergs, two pairs of mating leopard seals, which eat penguins and generally look a bit snake-like and scary. I took probably my best wildlife photo of the trip of one of them yawning with its mouth wide open and icebergs and mountains serving as the backdrop.

In the afternoon we finally saw baby Gentoo penguins at very close range at Port Lockroy and Jougla Point, which was fantastic and vindicating as that was one of the reasons we wanted to come to Antarctica later rather than sooner. The babies were still brooding, but every now and then we got a glimpse of one feeding or poking out from under their parents’ bellies. Since Gentoo penguins lay two eggs, we saw two babies under the same mother a couple of times and saw one baby with the other egg still unhatched another time (which means the first baby was no more than one day old). As part of the same landing, we also visited a British outpost at Port Lockroy, which was once a survey station and is now a museum and shop.

These were our last landings about the Antarctic Peninsula. After dinner we headed back through the Bransfield Straits to the South Shetland Islands, where we would spend our final activity day before returning to Ushuaia.

Day 8: Deception Island

At 7:30am, we reached Deception Island, a remarkable volcanic island among the otherwise Antarctic-looking South Shetland Islands. It’s a circular island with a narrow entry, Neptune’s Bellows, which we passed through to ‘enter’ the crater. After days of seeing virtually nothing but white, to see black volcanic sand, dark red rocks and the other bizarre aspects of Deception Island was quite extraordinary. However, our proposed landing at Whalers’ Bay was postponed, and ultimately cancelled, due to 30 knot winds with gusts of 35-40 knots.

That left us with only one landing left, at the Aitcho Islands in the South Shetlands. The wind was not as fierce there but it was still a cold landing in dull conditions. It wasn’t the best of landings, but we did see an elephant seal for the first time (our fourth different seal species of the trip), though it was too young to have acquired the elephant-like features that give it its name. And since we knew that this was our last landing, we soaked it up as much as we could, admired the Gentoo and Chin-Strap penguins and reminisced about everything we’d done and seen in the last four or five days.

After dinner (chicken schnitzel and salad/soup/dessert that I’ve forgotten) we headed into the dreaded Drake Passage for the long journey back to the Tierra del Fuego.

Days 9-11: ‘Lake Drake’, the Beagle Channel and Ushuaia

The journey back through the Drake Passage is always supposed to be rougher than on the way down, but somehow it was even calmer for us than it had been the first time. The staff were calling it ‘Lake Drake’ and saying that it was one of the best voyages through the Drake they could remember in years (though do they say that to every group?). Without the anticipation of an impending arrival in Antarctica, the trip back was actually pretty boring and we spent most of it reading and eating.

On Day 10, it became apparent that we were going to arrive in Ushuaia about 15 hours ahead of schedule, so we anchored in the Beagle Channel and had a celebratory BBQ and glass of champagne in the evening. After breakfast on Day 11 this morning, it was suddenly all over, but we will remember it forever as the best trip we’ve ever taken.

A few days ago we took an all-day bus from Puerto Natales south to the end of mainland South America, across the Straits of Magellan (via a car-ferry), into the Tierra del Fuego, back over the Argentina border, and ultimately to Ushuaia, the world’s southern-most city. From the ferry we saw Commerson’s Dolphins swimming in the straits (did Magellan see them too?), which was great since we had considered making a trip to see them on the Península Valdés a few weeks ago but ended up not going.

Ushuaia is a spectacularly located city on the main island of the Tierra del Fuego, surrounded by snow-capped mountains on three sides and the Beagle Channel on the other (beyond which lie even more snow-capped peaks on the Isla Navarino, part of the Chilean side of the Tierra del Fuego). We haven’t found the city itself to be particularly special, but this location and the nearby walks it affords makes it a nice place to spend a few days; on Friday we hiked through a forest alongside the channel for a few hours with Darin before he flew back to Buenos Aires.

Otherwise, we have been mostly waiting and preparing for what we hope will be one of the most memorable things we ever do: an 11-day, 10-night trip to Antarctica, including spending the longest day of the year on the boat tomorrow and spending Christmas Day on the Antarctic Peninsula. We start the journey this afternoon by boarding our boat (The ‘Ushuaia’), going through the Beagle Channel and past the famous lighthouse that is the symbol of Ushuaia before continuing to the South Shetland Islands and then to Antarctica itself. Apart from the ice landscapes, we’re hoping to see lots of penguins, some whales and many migratory birds.