As I said in my first post, we took a lot of photos in Antarctica. I can’t believe anyone could go there and not do that. What astonished me though were the number of people who apparently only had their iPhones or iPads for cameras, or at best, a pocket digital. I bought a DSLR especially for the trip, and a combined standard and zoom lens, which together cost around $2000 – and I don’t regret a cent of it. When you are on the trip of a lifetime, at fantastic cost anyway, why skimp on the equipment? We did take a compact digital for quick and dirty shots in towns and so on, but the quality can’t be compared at all with those taken with the bigger camera. The things people choose to economise on, astonish me.
Anyway, the next three posts will be photo heavy, which is why I’m breaking this part of the journey up.
To give you some perspective on where we went, this is the overall itinerary map provided on Holland America’s website:
And this is a more detailed map of the Antarctica peninsula I found on the internet:
Holland America/the Zaandam’s crew kindly provided us with route information and at the end of this section of the trip, a detailed map of the route we had taken. I have redrawn this map from their data:
We were supposed to arrive in Antarctica on 31 December, but our captain, bless him, heard that visibility was likely to be reduced on 1-2 January, so he set off early from Cape Horn on 29 December, so we arrived on 30 December. Better still, although the ‘official’ start of the scenic cruising wasn’t supposed to be until 2pm on that day when we entered Dallman bay, when I woke at 6am that morning, there were icebergs and distant land masses already visible, and by breakfast, we were seeing penguins and whales 🙂
As you will see from the next post, the weather for our first day was stunning, and we had it until 11pm that night, by which time we were exhausted from the sheer loveliness of the day we’d had. Also sunburnt 🙂 (damn hole in the ozone layer!).
I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, but one little bit of stupidity I can’t not report. While you are looking at those stunning photos, you should remember that there were some people who had paid the huge cost of a suite for this trip (as we had) – and who spent at least half of this glorious day in a windowless members lounge, chatting, and were utterly unaware of what they were missing out on until I finally urged them to go take a look. They came all that way, spent all that money, to do what they could have done on any sea day on the cruise, or indeed, in their local café. Humans!