It’s official, we have run out of adjectives!

Last night, while all of us tourist were asleep, the boat sailed away from the islands that rim the coast of the actual Antarctic continent (similarly to the east coast of the united states – think Martha’s vineyard, or the outer banks of North Carolina, but with fewer people and a lot more icebergs and penguins!), and anchored by the actual continent – where we disembarked near a large glacier call the Nekko glacier (named after the boat that found it).   

We took the obligatory picture of “7^th continent”  – apparently, that’s what one does when finally reaching this milestone, and climbed a short but slippery trail to an overlook.   

And that’s where it officially happened:  we ran out of adjectives all together!  It simply would be foolish of me to try and describe this convergence of water, ice, penguins talking to each other, and the booming sound of avalanches from on top of the glacier.  So I won’t try – and again instead I will attempt to give a small taste of the experience with pictures (now that I’ve figured out how to use the panoramic feature on my phone, I can at least try to give an idea of what we are experiencing.

 We took this trail  through the rookeries to get to a point of view a few hundred feet high and starting taking pictures of everything:

 This is what a  rookery looks like- a place where many penguins build nests and raise chicks.   We often saw them picking up a small stone, considering it carefully, and then pick another one that looks exactly alike to bring the nest – they clearly have a vision of what they are trying to build, but it’s very abstruse to us.

This is the boat next to a pretty blue iceberg and glacier. 

 Jim Suzanne and me, about 1/2 way up:  Notice that Suzanne and me had dropped our big coat, and our hats an mitten - I was quite balmy in the sun!

 The Nekko glacier, seen from above,

From the top, I took this panoramic picture of the entire landscape – not filtered – the colors were …. Shoot, still don’t have adjectives left…..

Suzanne and I made it to the top before "the boys" because we had the good sense to drop heavy clothing on the way....  so we took another obligatory picture.

 Here are penguins enjoying the beach   - have I mentioned that I love penguins??


And below, they all line up to enter the water and go fishing (I have a good video of that - will update blog once back)

Then it was time for lunch – after which Suzanne and I decided to take a dip in the saltwater pool on the boat  just “because it’s there” – it’s nicely heated, but it was very cold getting out of it…  (as made clear from the large blue iceberg in the back ground.

After a bit of a nap, we went on a “zodiac cruise” around Paradise bay – which was so named by early whalers, so I guess they liked it too.  One interesting feature of this bay is that it shows that Antarctica is in fact not completely empty:  there are many stations from various countries – the biggest on being the USA and Russia (that was easy to guess, right?) – The USA has about 5000 here during the season (father south).  

 Here is the supply ship for the Chilean outpost (above), as well as the buildings of  the Argentinian one. 

We of course saw many more cool landscapes in our Zodiaks  – the weather was downright balmy – about 36 degrees (that’ MUCH warmer than NewYork right now) and when the sun came out, I had to remove my hats and gloves…   the sun is really strong down here.

 We encountered several seals on flows (but since there is very little that looks as much as a seal on a flow as another seal on a flow, I’ll save some bandwidth and not post this one….), as well as a shag (Antarctic cormorant) rookery.  However, Joe had taken the wrong super-duper lens on the boat (for a recap of Joe’s super duper lenses, read the blog of our previous trip….), so we could not document it….  But the wide angle lens he did bring was perfect to capture the arches and other structures, and colors of the glacier

(Just before reaching the glacier, another Zodiak flagged us, pretending to be stuck – In fact it was a few of the crew members, offering us glasses of Champagne, so that we could properly cheer the day!  It was silly and fun.)

These cliffs also have something very unusual here:  green!  Moss (one of the only 3 plants that form the entire flora of Antarctica is growing right underneath the cormorants rookery – maybe guano has something to do with it?

Back into the boat, we had a leisurely dinner (I’ll take some picture from inside the boat – which is really nice- during the return through the Drake passage, since there is not much to do then…..  Assuming the sea is calm and I feel OK….).