For close to six days, the MV Ushuaia snaked through the hundreds of Antarctic islands while making its way down the peninsula.  Our plans were rigid enough that we´d all receive a rundown of each day´s activities on the prior evening, but flexible enough to change given bad weather conditions or other unplanned mishaps.  Unfortunately, our safety always had to come first, meaning bad weather could potentially keep us from certain activities, and not all tourist attractions on our itinerary would definitely be covered.

We were mostly lucky in this regard.  The only stop in high demand that was denied to us was a Ukrainian scientific base that makes its own vodka and hails its bar as the southernmost one in the world.  There, women drink for free, on the condition that they sacrifice their bra to the bar´s decor.

Every year, old bras are removed to make room for a new year´s additions, with the exception of one which is a permanent fixture. See if you can guess which it is.

While the ¨free drinks for your bra¨ plan didn´t offer me much other than potential live entertainment, I was definitely looking forward to paying a quick visit to their equally southernmost post office to get out a few quality postcards stamped from Antarctica.  Sadly, the only day we had available to pay them a visit found another ship already in port — they´d be restocking all day in preparation for the cold winter months and couldn´t handle any tourists.  Weak.

We successfully stopped at all other initially planned destinations, so in general our hit rate was fairly high.  Twice each day — once in the morning, and once in the afternoon — we would make landfall on the zodiacs (small but incredibly strong inflated rafts), with a few hours in between for the MV Ushuaia to take us to the new destinations.  Through the night, our ship would generally be moving along as well, though once out of the Drake Passage, movement was smooth and barely noticeable.

The following pictures were all taken from aboard the ship.

Dark black rock juts out from the sea, covered in brightly contrasted white snow and ice

The steady mist that covered over things much of the time gave things (like strange, ominous, dead islands) a consistently eerie quality.

Skies were generally gray and overcast, but there were moments of exceptional beauty.

The further south we get, the more the nearby ocean is littered with chunks of ice and large icebergs

Great shot of an entire iceberg, due to the clarity of the water

Low clouds and blowing snow often gave nearby landscapes this effect

Along the continent, a small, low base of dark rock would often be covered by hundreds of feet of ice. This effect gets more intense further south, such that Antarctica is the lowest continent in terms of land (massive weight of the ice pushes the land downwards) and the tallest (from the ice itself)

Oh yeah, that reminds me:

Facts About Antarctica

• If all of Antarctica´s ice melted, its land mass would slowly rebound upwards by more than 500 meters (the ice had been keeping it down).  More significantly, the waters oceans would rise by 65 meters.
• Despite being covered in ice, Antarctica is still mostly a desert.  It has not rained in the ¨dry valleys¨ for over two million years.  Antarctica holds records for being the coldest, driest and windiest place on Earth.
• During the winter months, the accumulation of ice around Antarctica doubles its land mass, adding on additional surface that is close to twice the size of the United States.
• 90% of the world´s ice is in Antarctica and 65% of its freshwater reserve.  Perito Moreno glacier was the third biggest freshwater reserve.  What´s number 2?  Greenland.
• At its deepest point, the ice in Antarctica is about two miles deep.
• Krill.  They´re like shrimp, but smaller and less flavorful (for humans, at least).  Yet they´re the primary food for both penguins and whales.  It might seem like they´d be too small to feed monsters like the blue whale, but they travel in tremendous swarms.  In 1981, one was tracked that weighed upwards of ten million tons — that´s like 178 million people all moving as a group.

Neptune´s Bellows. A small channel leading into Deception Island, which is basically a hollowed out volcano that you can cruise into. Yeah.

Rough Seas. These are the nastiest waters I ventured outside to snap a picture of.

Blurry, but you can kind of make out the enormous wave of whiteness exploding upwards over the stem.

A rainbow after the storm

Sunrise at the bottom of the world.

...and sunset

A fairly cool ice formation floats by.

Ice-gazing

Slicing through some of the denser ocean ice

...and the trail we leave behind.

It Started With a Dare

Things had gotten cold outside, as one might expect.  First a picture is taken in our t-shirts and sandals.  Next someone is walking around barefoot.

So really, it was only a matter of time until this happened: