Elite Traveler November-December 2016

INSPIRE ANTARCTICA

On Salisbury Plain, 40,000 king penguins were flirting, cawing, fishing, flapping, shuffling, shimmying, feeding, squatting and generally having a massive beach party

The Vavilov is a research vessel, originally built for Soviet oceanographic surveys. Its crew remains Russian; the captain was one Valery Beluga. After the Cold War melted at the end of the 1980s, the vessel was refitted for cruise expeditions. It was not exactly luxurious on board, but it was toasty warm. The cabins were quite spacious, and the ship’s strengthened hulls and water-ballasted stabilizers meant we could take on big seas and make headway through the jumble of bergs and floes that surround Antarctica. The voyage began calmly, as we puffed down the Beagle Channel. I took my first walks on the observation deck, admiring the jagged, snow-flecked tops of the mountains behind Ushuaia. On the starboard was the mysterious Navarino Island, owned by Chile and thinly populated. It has its own spine of mountains – the Dientes (teeth, in English) – which pierced a low carpet of moody clouds. The last human habitation of any note was the Estancia Harberton, home of the Bridges family. Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges had traveled to the region in the late 1860s to convert the Fuegian tribes. He established a mission, learned the Yahgan language and became one of Tierra del Fuego’s foremost pioneers. His grandchildren have inherited his genes and their homestead stands romantically alone beneath empty southern skies. Then, after passing some small islets and recruiting a flock of shearwaters, we were out in the Atlantic. The swell was slow and heavy. From inside my cabin I committed myself to getting accustomed to the pitch of the ship. For a day and a night I ate very little, avoided alcohol and had turbulent dreams. I awoke on the western capes of the Falkland Islands. Shimmering low islets were spread out across the near horizon, bare as if polished by an eternity of winds. The burnished land was edged with white sands. It was the most serene of arrivals. White gulls dipped around the bays and a pod of dolphins sent tremors across the pellucid water as their dorsal fins pierced the surface. At Stanley, we toured a little England of cozy pubs serving pints and pies, a monument to the late UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher as well as a museum about the colony, complete with stuffed penguins and model ships in showcases. Land Rovers zoomed about with British purpose. Then, the sea, the sea: it deserves naming twice, for it was absolutely all there was – with its steady and repetitive rhythms – between