Tags
antarctic fur seals, king penguins, landscape photography, South Georgia, travel, travelogue, wildlife photography
“You just don’t know that it is the last time. But I think that’s a good thing, really, because if you did know, it would be almost impossible to let go.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
We’d gone to bed in Cooper Bay at the southern tip of South Georgia with the expectation that we had one more day in South Georgia and then we were moving on to our next stop in the Falkland Islands. But the winds outside the shelter of the South Georgia bays had gotten significantly worse and the Falkland Island main port at Stanley Harbour is closed to cruise ships when the winds are over 30 knots. So, if we headed off toward Stanley Harbour, there was a serious chance that we would not be able to get off the ship again until we arrived back in Ushuaia, i.e. an entire week bobbing around in the southern oceans without a landing. So, there was a conversation back to the mainland about what were the options.
But while that was happening, they took back up the coast to Fortuna Bay. Remember earlier when I talked about the hike that cruise ships used to offer that was on the path Shackleton took to Stromness? Fortuna Bay was where they usually dropped you off to start the hike. There’s a 7000 breeding pair colony of king penguins. There’s Antarctic fur seals and elephant seals. There’s the Fortuna glacier. There’s a small cave where the seal hunters would hole up and render the blubber. It was a very shallow cave and didn’t look like much of a respite from the weather, but it’s been studied by archeologists who talk about the clay pipes found there.
Each one of those brown shapes on the grass beyond the penguins is a fur seal.
But one way or another, this was our last day in South Georgia, the last time walking with penguins on the stony beaches.
I talked about the caribou that the Norwegian whalers bought in for hunting and food and how they had finally been eradicated in 2017. But what always amazes me is how long unprotected bone lasts in an environment. The beaches of South Georgia where covered with the rib cages of penguins chicks and seal pups that didn’t make it over the past years, there were whale bones left over from early 20th century whalers, and these caribou antlers had to be at least 6 to 7 years old, if not older. And part of it is the cold, things don’t break down as easily with only a limited amount of bacteria and fungus in the soil and air. But bones also are a hard, mineral like infrastructure (wrapping the nuget center of our soft bone marrow) that doesn’t break down easily under the best of conditions.
I want someone to step up and argue with me about whether our bones are alive, whether snail shells are alive, whether crab exoskeletons, which crabs cheerfully discard when they get too small, are alive. Because hermit crabs will use whatever beach trash they find and don’t grow their own. Certainly, bones are organic. Bones are the part of us that remains when everything else about us is gone and even our names have been forgotten. But are we carrying around liveless scaffolding inside of us? Are they just a part of the boiler that holds the fire?
I asked the penguins. They didn’t know.
But as we pushed off from shore from our last South Georgia landing, the sea boiled with swimming fur seal pups.
And then we sailed away from South Georgia.
What they told us when we came back on board was that we were not headed for the Falkland Islands. Because of the weather and very real risk that we would not be able to enter Stanley Harbour, special permission had been asked for and given that we were heading to the South Orkney Islands, an archipelago with 4 main islands back toward the Antarctic Peninsula. And the guides rejoiced because the South Orkney Islands are a pristine, seldom visited place and who knows what we would find there. We were going off the normal Antarctic tourist route. But there was no way to get around the 2 days at sea to get there.
Which means the next post is going to be all about spilling the tea. Hope nobody gets murdered…
lheringer 