By my very toes

Advised schedule for Day 2

• 7am Palmer Station
• 10am Le Maire Channel

We were supposed to return to Palmer station to drop off the manager whom we’d picked up in the morning, but because there had been a risk of Palmer being iced in, an alternative plan had been set in place, bringing the manager’s replacement with us from Santiago. So that morning the two had swapped over, and the existing manager, due for leave, simply continued with us the rest of the trip. That allowed us to spend more time in the Gerlache Strait, visiting Paradise Harbour (only just ice free enough for the Zaandam to enter) to see penguins, and visit Cuverville and Enterprise islands. Continue reading “Antarctica – Day 2, 31 December”

Advised schedule for Day One:

• 2pm Dallman Bay
• 2.30pm Canal Schollaert
• 3.30pm Gerlache Strait
• 4.30 Neumayer Channel
• 7.30pm Anvers Island

This was my first glimpse of Antarctica, at 6 am on 30 December: Continue reading “Antarctica – Day One, 30 December”

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. Continue reading “Antarctica – Overview”

A cruise isn’t a great way to see a country’s urban spaces, but that’s okay because I’m not usually all that interested in them, especially not on this trip. And to frank, none of the towns (with one exception) were particularly nice or fascinating (or clean). It didn’t help that I injured myself twice, once in Santiago and once in Buenos Aires (BsAs as the locals refer to it) so saw very little of either, but Doug saw more of them and had the same opinion. Let’s just say that civic pride – as opposed to national pride – doesn’t appear to be a major virtue in Chile or Argentina. Continue reading “Urban spaces”

We saw four species of whales – humpback, fin, minke and southern right – and one other kind of cetacean, dolphins, one of which we think was the dusky dolphin). I can only positively identify two species in these pictures – fin because of where we saw them and what the experts thought they were, and southern right because we got a good look at them.

As some of you know, whale photography is frustrating. Whale spotting is relatively easy – you look for clouds of vapour. But the little suckers usually move so fast, you’re lucky if you can photograph the ripples where they’ve been. So we did pretty well, I think.

These were our first Antarctic whale sightings: Continue reading “Whales”

Another largely text free post. These were all taken by Doug at Iguassu Falls. Warning: some spider images under the cut. Continue reading “Bugs and butterflies”

Of the 5,000 or so pictures we took on this trip,10% were of penguins. I think another 10% were whales, 20% icebergs and the rest were waterfalls 🙂 ). We wanted to see penguins in the wild, and we did. Thousands and thousands of them. Continue reading “Birds which are penguins”

Hola! and Happy New Year to our dear friends and family.

We arrived back in Brisbane on Friday 15 January, having left exactly four weeks previously for a cruise from Santiago de Chile to Buenos Aires, with a pre-cruise stopover in Santiago and a post cruise excursion to Iguassu Falls. We’re not home home yet because of an overrun on the bathroom renovations but we hope to be back in the house tomorrow. We spent Christmas, New Year and Doug’s birthday on board the beautiful MS Zaandam.

My dears, we had a blast. Seriously. And it will take many posts to cover it all, so be patient. But briefly: Continue reading “South America and Antarctica”