PENGUINS!!!!!

At last, we have reached Antarctica – or at least the outskirt of it: the South Shetland Islands.   As if this were not exciting enough, once we got past the “convection line” – where the water temperature of the ocean drops very quickly from about 40 to about 32, the long swells of the Drake passage disappeared, and with them, so did sea sickness.  Apparently, I’m a real wimp when it comes to sea sickness (which I knew already…), because the captain, and everyone else on the crew said that this was one of the smoothest and fastest crossing of the Drake Passage they have ever seen…..

Around 11am, we saw our very first iceberg! and all of us tourists got just plain giddy with excitement!  For one thing, the captain had promised a free bottle of champagne to the first person to report seeing and iceberg bigger than out boat (unfortunately, it was not us….).  




 But we quickly forgot our disappointment, because the ship was surrounded by hundreds of little penguins (PENGUINS!!!!!!!!!), jumping in and out of the waves.  Joe had lured me on this adventure, by promising penguins.  So he has declared victory, and can now relax with a job well done!  (We are getting much closer to the penguins colony later in the day, once we disembark near one of their colonies.)  

 In the mean time, we admired many interesting birds (mostly petrels) that are following our ship in large numbers (cape petrels – also known as painted petrels

    and some giant petrels too

We also got our first glimpse of the Antarctica landscape:

and some humpback whale were briefly visible.  We hope to see more as we go along.

But the real excitement came in the afternoon, when we climbed on Zodiak boats and landed near a very large penguin colony.

Here are a few of them, coming back to the nest after some time getting food for their chicks, surrounded by humans, for scale. These are on the small side for penguins.

There were thousands of them – and Joe “only” took 248 pictures, so I can’t show them all…. So here is just a very small (REALLY SMALL!) sample of our first encounter with penguins – have I mentioned I just love penguins?  They are just awesomely adorable!  Walking among them, I just could not stop giggling – they just make me happy…..

They hop around (kudos to Joe for this amazing shot….).

They walk around.

Some go down to the water to swim, while others go back up to feed their chicks (the ones who are going down are very dirty – because the colony- having been the sites of many hatching, and feeding (and pooping) is actually quite muddy and dirty…..  the ones that are coming back from the sea are very clean. They just don’t seem to mind us at all- it’s like we are not there….,

They just continue to take care of their chicks,

In large (and smelly) colonies .

 These were are chinstrap penguins, with a lone Macaroni penguin among them (in the middle of the picture, with bright yellow orange feathers around his eyes):  apparently, those like to hang out with the chinstraps.  It’s unclear why: possibly, they got tired during feeding, and could not go back to their own colonies, or they are stacking out the place to for a new colony.

We had to make a conscious effort to look at the magnificent landscape, because we were so focused on the penguins, but whenever we lifted our head and looked around, we could not help but just go “wow”….

I took some videos on my i-phone, which I can’t add to the blog right now because of bandwidth – but they are pretty amazing too:  of penguins just hoping around, and of –let’s just say it as it- getting it on!  This is the wrong season to mating – it’s too late for eggs to hatch and chicks to grow enough before winter – but apparently, the juveniles, just like to do it anyway, just for practice (Humans and penguins are much closer to each other than we think!).

Back to the boat, quick recap of the day, dinner, and time for bed, even though is still really light outside now – the sun won’t set for another hour (it’s 10:00pm….).  We are hoping to get up around 6am to witness  the Neumayer channel passing, which is supposed to be awesome…. We’ll see….