Tags
“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
Back out in the open sea headed for South Georgia, the sea had gotten slightly rougher since we went to through the Drake Passage. That was mostly 3 meter seas, and now it was mostly 4 meter, 12 feet crest to trough. Rough enough that the ship started to position crew casually at the bottom of the major stairways, just working in that general vicinity. The waiters were more than happy to carry plates from the buffet to your table. The chairs were chained down again. You made sure the camera gear was in the pack on the floor when it wasn’t in use.
I think the average passenger age was firmly senior citizen, so there were falls. One little bird like woman was half way down a stairway when the gravity failed and she flew the rest of the way, had to have stitches on her chin. I was told the gym could be a danger zone, particularly from people who didn’t wipe their sweat off the floor. I don’t think anyone broke anything and it wasn’t bad enough that they closed the outside decks. My traveling companions were still out there, shooting birds on the wing.
I hope you don’t think less of me that I wasn’t sea sick, but I took a sea sick pill, a Dramamine, every night, just in case, couldn’t hurt.
But we were back in the dreaded biosecurity zone. Because South Georgia is the place that’s really serious about this stuff. More vacuuming of gear, more lectures about your hats and gloves and camera straps, more pledges to be signed, swearing you’d defend the polar region with your life, your last breath. Don’t you people know that you’re keeping me from some serious book reading, siesta time? (And since you asked, it was almost February, so I’d started my Black history month reading, as well as, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910-1913 by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, which is about Captain Scott’s South Pole expedition.)
And you need the cliff notes for that… The South Pole expedition of 1910-1913, also known as the Terra Nova Expedition, was led by British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. The primary goal of the expedition was to be the first to reach the South Pole. The expedition faced numerous challenges, including harsh weather conditions, equipment failures, and illness. Despite these difficulties, Scott and his team successfully reached the South Pole in January 1912, only to discover that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it by just over a month. Unfortunately, Scott and his four companions perished on their return journey, succumbing to starvation and extreme cold. Found dead in their tent, 8 months later by his crew, only 11 miles from their food / fuel depot. The fact that always sticks in my mind is that when the bodies were found, they had been dragging 35 pounds of fossilized wood that they came across, making these the first fossils found in Antarctica. Obviously, I was never intended for the role of polar explorer because if I was dying of starvation and frostbite, I would’ve left the rocks behind.
Bird photos by Erika Sayers
Cape Petrel (or as Erika called them QR code birds)
Wandering Albatross
Prion
Black Browed Albatross
Snow Petrel
And for some reason in the nightly recap, someone (a passenger someone) started asked pointed questions about our leaving the ship back in Argentina a the end of the trip (which was still 2 weeks away). But it turned out this was the beginning of a major drama. You see, we (as passengers) had been told that we would get in sometime in the morning and get a shuttle to the airport and don’t, don’t, don’t get a flight out before 2 pm, that you would barely make that. Which made the transit home very hard because none of the flights lined up. Most people ended up spending an extra night in Ushuaia or Buenos Aires. I had applied every bit of my travel kung fu and had managed to find a flight from Buenos Aires at midnight to JFK to San Francisco which really felt like going around the horn. But it turns out that we’re getting into the dock the night before and getting kicked off the boat with our luggage at 4:30am with no airport shuttle. And they knew this 6 months or so in advance because that’s how far in advance these things have to be scheduled. They just didn’t bother to tell us so that we could plan accordingly.
Now, I pride myself on only having the amount of luggage that I can pick up and run with; a duffle bag with wheels as checkin and a carry-on backpack for my camera gear. But there were 80 year old people on this boat, who can’t handle their own luggage, and you’re dropping them on a pier in a town where nothing opens for another 3-4 hours and if they did have hotel reservations, they can’t check in for 12 hours. And it’s very small airport that is really only open twice a day for the morning and then the afternoon flights. There are no services, so you can’t wait there.
People were unamused. And Eva, you remember Eva, the Intrepid representative from the start of the story, she got up and said, you will leave the boat when I tell you to leave the boat and you are not my responsibility once you leave the boat. That went down like castor oil. But she just left the room and made herself unavailable for further discussion. She had spoken.
Now another thing to add into this was that internet on the boat was terrible. I joked that it was obviously cobbled together by their drinking buddy, Fred, who must have been a great guy, but had rather limited knowledge of the internet. They didn’t charge you by the data transferred which is really the representation of how hard you’re using the system. They charged you by minutes. You bought 30, 60, 120 minutes and the clock started when you logged in and continued running (no matter what you were doing) until you logged off. So, checking your text messages and streaming video cost exactly the same. Except that many times, most of the time, it would randomly go down and not allow you to log off and the clock would keep running, burning through your very expensive minutes, even if you weren’t doing anything on the internet. Some of my fellow travelers bought minutes. One of them had her own business, so even though she has a great staff, she needs to be able to check in with them. One of them just had that running text conversation she had going with her husband and wanted to keep in touch. I just did a digital detox and when someone asked me for information, like someone’s name, or when did we do what, I would tell them that half my brain lives in the cloud and I don’t have access to that information right now. So, it was hard to make plans for the last day from where we were.
Also sharing the boat was a travel group called Wild Women. And I’m going to say this very quietly, but I actively avoid all women-only activities, such as women only travel. Don’t get me wrong. Obviously I end up many places where it’s all just women, I get along with women great. My best friends are all women. Wait, wait, I am a woman. It’s just the women that tend toward women-only organizations, well, they’re not my people. If you’re worried about having men along because they will hijack the agenda, you are not my tribe. I got really in trouble one year when I was asked if I wanted to go to the Grace Hopper women only STEM conference (and Admiral Grace Hopper is a hero of mine) and I turned it down by saying, wow, too much estrogen for me. The Wild Women group were the ones who organized the “History of Women in Antarctica” lecture. Which surprisingly enough was not about women who had done science and exploration in Antarctica. The lecture was mostly about a woman who have crossed Antartica on skis unassisted and was setting up to make another attempt because she didn’t have the speed record and she wanted that.
My cabin mate, the Mayor of Pumpkin Patch, went up to the speaker afterwards and pointed out that just in our little group, she had been a mayor for over a decade, another woman in our group owns one of the biggest printing operations in Canada, another woman was a champion water skier, and I do what I do. That maybe there were successful women just sitting there in the audience who had done more interesting, more harder to do as a woman, things than setting speed / endurance records for skiing across Antarctica. I’m always better at sitting in the corner being snarky, but you go, girl. I am not going to get in the way of a good rant. I may, in fact, take notes.
What I’m trying to say is that the periods on inactivity on the boat is where all the fussing would happen. It’s been two days since we’ve done something fabulous and we’re at each other’s throats. If we were in a space ship headed for Mars, the ship would arrive empty. Thank gawd we’re about to drop into South Georgia.