Tuesday February 28th, 2017
(I thought I’d leave this in, as a quasi summary of Antarctica. I edited it slightly when backdating the posts relating to Antarctica that I couldn’t actually post from the Polar Explorer.)
Well, we are finally back into the internet connected world, in a posh hotel in Punta Arenas. It was beginning to look as if we might be overwintering in Antarctica! Well, almost …
We had some pretty wild weather late in our cruise, and our flight from King George Island to Puntas Arenas was rescheduled twice. If you are reading this, it will be because it finally arrived and took us off the island. (Otherwise, we are spending another night on the boat!)
We were warned this was an expedition, and on expeditions plans may change due to various reasons. Weather is a principal cause of change! As it was, we had few changes, but then a couple of days ago a ripper of a storm came through that made the Drake Passage seem serene (which it wasn’t), giving us force 7 winds, horizontal snow, and the exterior of the ship all iced up …
Also, 50% of us on the boat, us included, came down with some lurgy picked up in Ushuai, and despite the best efforts of the ship’s doctor, we are now coughing and spluttering our way around the world.
Now that we are back in the wired world, I’m putting some more posts on the blog, and later will gradually back-date them. I have written some stuff about Antarctica but still need to select some photos … maybe when we are in Santiago tomorrow afternoon.
In the meantime, here are just a very few …
My first penguin … a gentoo
Tucker time – you can see it coming and going down!
A fur seal – once seriously exploited, now plentiful
A leopard seal trying desperately to open an eye
Yes, there was no shortage of wildlife! But the scenery was awesome, too …
An iceberg, around 100+ m high.
Traversing the Lemaire Passage was awesome the first time, but on the way back it was rain and heavy low cloud and certainly no mill-pond!
Well, as I said, we did get to Punta Arenas, but any possibility of sending blog posts didn’t pan out as it was extremely late, and the hotel wifi was clogged by 35 expeditioners all trying to download nearly two weeks of emails at the same time.
So this is heading out to you the following morning from Punta Arenas airport with us enroute to Santiago. The other Antarctic posts will just have to wait …
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