Rosita Bolandbuys a ticket for a stormy, sometimes disturbing but always breathtaking cruise to Antarctica
The day before departure
"Ushuaia - End of the World, Beginning of Everything." These words, in Spanish and English, are painted a metre high on the harbour wall in Ushuaia, capital of the Argentinian province of Tierra del Fuego and the world's most southernmost town. The wall faces the port from where 38 cruise ships depart for Antarctica between mid-November and mid-March each year. I am freezing, standing beside these painted words, and I am staring, mesmerised, through binoculars.
I am staring at a red ship, a Chilean-registered former naval vessel named Antarctic Dream, which is docked at the far side of the harbour and for which I have just bought a cheap last-minute ticket for an 11-day cruise to the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. Full-price trips to Antarctica are not cheap, running to anything between €5,000 and €35,000 for a cruise lasting between 11 and 18 days.
But a few berths sell for much less than this, to raggle-taggle backpackers such as me, who turn up in Ushuaia shortly before departure, visit all the ships' agents and are prepared to travel at very short notice - such as the next day. It has not been easy to get a ticket: twice as many people as last year are looking for them. But I have one. I am one huge atom of excitement. I do not sleep that night.
The day of boarding
Walking up the gangway this afternoon to my ship (my ship!), lugging my rented waterproof boots and warm-weather gear and knowing I am sailing to Antarctica, is the most thrilling moment of my life. Travelling doesn't get better than this. I delightedly examine my cabin, number 118. For the next 10 days, although I don't yet know it, I will wake up to see wandering albatrosses, icebergs, storms, starlight and orca whales through its porthole.
The Drake Passage
The Drake Passage runs between Cape Horn, at the tip of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, and the Antarctic; it is also the point where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans slam together. They're wild, wind-scoured and prone to storms at all times, these infamous latitudes of the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties. I am lucky: I am one of very few of the 70 passengers who do not retire to their cabins for two days, floored by seasickness. Even the ship's doctor embarrassedly vanishes for the duration.I eat, drink, make merry, diary-write, stand on deck watching the astounding thicket of birds that follow the ship, plunder the Antarctic-themed library, go to all the lectures - pelagic birds, penguins, Antarctic explorers - and develop what I suspect will be an enduring obsession with Shackleton, Scott, Mawson, Amundsen, Wild, and Crean.
The first ice
On the third day, the first ice. We move through a shifting landscape of weirdly beautiful refracted light. Pieces of glaciers, tabular icebergs, massive chunks of the Weddell Sea: strange shapes, ice the height and size of cathedrals, apartment blocks, mountains. The oldest compressed ice is an extraordinary electric blue; it glows surreally even at dusk and casts the oddest light in this fantastical place. The word I repeatedly write in my diary during our days in Antarctica is "unearthly".
We are all on deck, and people keep pointing and saying this iceberg is shaped like a stage, or a dog, or a haystack. But I don't think the ice looks like anything except what it is. You can't domesticate this landscape by saying it looks like a dog or a haystack. We have no points of reference for it. It is utterly itself. Utterly compelled, I look at the icebergs and know they are severely beautiful yet also terrifying: they can steal your life, wreck your boat, ruin your plans. (And so it proves.
Three days after I get back to Ushuaia, Antarctic Dreamgoes to the rescue of the Explorer, the Canadian cruise ship that makes headlines around the world by striking ice and sinking within hours - but, thankfully, not before everyone on it escapes.)
The first landing
We will spend up to five days, depending on the weather, sailing to and from Ushuaia and five in Antarctica. Ice permitting, we will make two landings on each of our Antarctic days, and this is the first one. The wind chill makes me feel as if I am being slowly turned inside out. We are in groups of 10, in Zodiacs, the smallish rigid inflatable boats that we transfer into from the ship to make landings. We are at Cuverville Island. It is all so pristine - a word I realise I have never fully understood until now.
Landing is like suddenly being in a fabulous (and strong-smelling, as penguin droppings can knock you sideways) nature documentary. There are colonies of three kinds of penguins, all knee-height - gentoo, Adélie and chinstrap - and all of them seem quite unperturbed by our presence.
The penguins! It is mating season, and they build their nests from about 400 tiny but precious stones, so difficult to retrieve from compacted snow. Nesting is a constant noisy battle: as soon as one pair of penguins has collected a few stones, others try to steal them. There is a lot of flapping, and chasing, and tobogganing down the snow. I watch for hours and it feels like minutes.
I also watch the skuas, huge brown birds that sit in the snow near the penguin rookeries - or breeding colonies - like baskets of malevolence, waiting for the chicks to hatch and so present them with dinner. I watch giant petrels, snow petrels, blue-eyed shags and delicate white Antarctic terns, which fly like fans being snapped open and shut.
I learn more about people than penguins in this first landing, however. Antarctic Dawnhas a scientific crew, a mixture of ornithologists and marine biologists who give lectures for passengers and accompany us in the Zodiacs, to explain what we are seeing. They have ordered us to stay five metres from all wildlife at all times, to give penguins right of way and to observe wildlife, not disturb it.
At least half the passengers completely ignore these instructions. They walk into rookeries to get better photographs. They don't stop to let penguins pass. They shout at the Weddell seals on the shore and click their fingers to attract their attention, to make them move for action shots. It's pretty shocking. But perhaps I'd be naive to think that just because we have the indescribable privilege of being on the White Continent, the last unspoilt place in the world, some people will behave less selfishly and inappropriately than they do at home.
In 1985 only 200 people landed as tourists in Antarctica. Last season more than 37,500 tourists travelled here, of whom almost 30,000 landed. (The rest cruised around or overflew.) Even as recently as 2001 fewer than 13,000 people landed, so tourist numbers have more than doubled in six years.
Although tourists travel to only a tiny part of this vast continent, our presence, and that of our ships, is rightly controversial, for all sorts of environmental reasons - some of which I can see happening in front of me.
Stuck in the ice
On our fifth day at sea we are the first boat of the season to go through the Lemaire Channel. It's stunningly beautiful, even in a landscape where everything we see is surreally beautiful. Words don't describe it. Nor do images. (Besides, on this ship, as usual when I travel, I am the only tourist without a camera.)
More than anywhere I have been, I find myself thinking daily: Antarctica is utterly itself. A three- dimensional experience. You can't interpret it, capture it, describe it or photograph it. You can only be in it.
This morning we are cruising the Lemaire, not landing; taking turns in the Zodiacs. I am in the last boat. It is still early in the season, and the omnipresent ice, in the form of icebergs, glaciers and pack ice, is always unpredictable, depending on the direction of the wind, which defines everything in Antarctica. I sit in the Zodiac and gape again at this fictional-looking landscape.
Apart from the gradual movement of the glaciers, Antarctica's landscape is virtually unchanged from the way it was when the first explorers found it. Today I can sense both the immensity of the continent, its huge white space like a time capsule, and the ghosts of those who came looking to conquer it.
We stop for someone to photograph a blue iceberg; in the minute it takes, the pack ice closes in on us, and we are locked tight. It is a while before I realise what has happened. You don't have too many other points of reference in your life to realise that you're stuck in the ice. I am looking for the open channel we have just have been cruising through, and where it was is now solid ice.
It is as if the white sky above us has broken and fallen into the sea in a billion shattered pieces. Everything I look at is white, composed of ice of various ages. We don't move. Then we drift. Ride the ice. Get stuck. Use oars to push off. Make progress of a metre. Go backwards. Spin around. The ice opens, closes, shuts us into it again.
Apart from the cracking of glaciers, it is silent. Nobody else is in sight. Our ship is some distance away, invisible behind an iceberg.
I look at my watch and realise we have already been out for two hours. We had been due out for only 45 minutes. It occurs to me that I should consider if I am scared or not. I look at the ice floes and wonder how much weight they can hold. I wonder how much battering on sharp ice a Zodiac takes before its compartments start to puncture.
I think about the lifeboat drill on the first day and the crew's frank admission that unless you make it into a lifeboat you will be dead in less than three minutes in the Antarctic waters. I think about the extraordinary explorers of the heroic age, some of whose wooden boats were clamped in unyielding ice not far from here. I think about this place and how it has become a repository of dreams for so many, a place that remains essentially unchanged since being discovered, and so capable of holding anything, a place that nobody owns and that everyone can inhabit in their imagination.
I already know that this silent, intense time in the ice will be some of the strangest hours of my life, out in this extreme landscape, which is the opposite of any language of sentiment one could imagine. I feel bewitched. I love my time stuck in the ice.
We are rescued three hours later, when Antarctic Dream, which is not an icebreaker, inches carefully through the ice to reach us. When I see one of the chefs, in his white hat, out on deck taking pictures of us, I know this is more than a routine photo opportunity for the hardened Antarctica crew, some with 20 seasons under their belts.
Storm at Cape Horn
Eventually, after nine days out, we are leaving the bewitched, bewitching icebergs behind and heading back to Ushuaia.
We have missed landing at Deception Island; the ice was too thick for the ship to break through but not thick enough to allow us to walk over it to shore. Instead, the captain tells us, we will land at the famous Cape Horn at 7am the next day. Cape Horn!
At 5am I know we won't be landing at Cape Horn, because I wake up by being thrown out of bed and hearing everything in my cabin go crashing across the room. The boat is crazily pitching and rolling. I look through the porthole and see, with horror, the wildest ocean I have ever seen, huge waves flung together into a furious mass of white. Wind and water pound my porthole and those of cabins two decks above me. I am very glad that I don't know until later that we are in the middle of a force-11 violent storm. Force 12 is a hurricane. These seas have been the same for centuries. How did those explorers cope in their fragile wooden boats?
All over
Disembarking, there is a terrible, terrible sense of anticlimax. Roads! Houses! Shops! Cars! Other people! No icebergs, no snow, no pristine white landscape, no albatrosses, no sense of being somewhere utterly other.
You do not return from Antarctica quite the same person you were before you went there. It is as if you have briefly lived in another dimension, inhabited another reality, looked beyond. All morning I wander around Ushuaia in a daze, blankly staring at souvenirs of penguins. A few days ago I was looking at the real things. I don't know what seems stranger now.
For links to cruise operators, environmental information, schedules and more, see the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators website, at www.iaato.org