A polar to love (pt. II)

I was girding myself for a big entry about the 8 days or so I spent tooling about the Antarctic coast, but having just written the feature and spent a week putting the film together, I'm a bit polar-ed out. Not so much bi-polar as past-polar.

There's not much I can add to the photos, the scenery so good that even a point and shoot monkey like me can get stunning shots by aiming the camera in vaguely the right direction. The thing that struck me, besides the sheer choice of the all-you-can-eat buffet, was that the landscape was like nothing I'd ever seen before. This white bit at the bottom of the Earth is pristine, like no-one's ever been there before, and the air is so clean my lungs, used to London's oily muck of an atmosphere, almost rejected it. The icebergs might as well have been alien spaceships for all the familiarity they had. I don't want to get all eco-emotional, but seeing the ice caps and flows really makes you think what the planet was like before Starbucks and crisp packets and stuff.

As for the wildlife, the best, and simultaneously most disappointing, were the whales. Killer, Minki and Sperm, so I'm told. They're amazing because you catch your breath when you see this majestic grey mass moving around just below the surface, but then they don't really DO much apart from be grey masses just below the surface, and being the MTV generation, I lose interest quickly.

Penguins are a bit more engaging. At least they waddle about, and jump (though it looks like falling) into the water and have their young eaten by birds of prey as you watch on in horror, etc. But again, there are downsides. The thing is that they spend most of the time just sat around in their own doings, and what the guidebooks call a "barnyard" smell is actually really rank, depending on what barnyards you usually hang around in, obviously.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was the competitive spotting element of the trip, which got more desperate as time went on. At first people were boasting about whales and albino penguins, but once everyone had seen them, there was nowhere for the braggers to go. I remember coming down to breakfast and being boasted at that I had missed "two big brown birds", and, towards the very end, "a really big wave". OK, we're on an ocean that's tipping the boat up horizontally for fun, and we're WAVE SPOTTING? Pardon me if I duck out of the spotting game here.

Er, there's probably more stuff, but the time has passed and new pastures beckon, specifically temporary unemployment, which handily coincides with a week in New Orleans so I don't have to think about it. Off tomorrow. Gentlemen, start your livers.

I got a polar to love

Back, then, from two weeks guffing around the Antarctic Peninsula, a tale of derring do, seas rougher than a sandpaper facial and as many penguins as you could feasibly snort with frozen nostrils. It's way too much to write about in one boring fell swoop, so I will add episodes and bore you slowly. So slowly you'll hardly realise you're being bored at all, like a frog in a pan of gradually heated water. Before you know it, you'll be an exploded amphibian with boiling ennui for guts.

I'm going to fast forward through the first bit, which was an 18-hour flight to the Falkland Islands (via Ascension Island) and then two days there which need some reflection before writing about. More reflection, I mean. Anywackers, we joined our vessel - which had set off from Buenos Aires some days earlier - there, and set off for two days at sea. With nothing to see, but sea. See? Now read on...

Passenger's log: Day 2, Somewhere in the sea.

I’m on a ship. Or is it a boat? I know that one term is fantastically insulting to nautical types, and marks you out as a hateful Johnny Land-lubber, but I’m too embarrassed to ask which, so I just alternate usage to minimize the damage. I joined it (sorry, HER) at the Falkland Islands after the rest of the passengers had already been at sea for around five days, and apparently the best idea for newcomers is to beat the living crap out of someone on your first day so that they respect…no, hang on, that’s prison.

I’ve never really been at sea for more than a few hours, certainly not for two days without getting off or indeed seeing any land whatsoever. I’m obviously something of a salty old seadog now, apart from the ship/boat fiasco, but living at sea is mainly like trying to go about your normal business while someone randomly messes with the gravity settings. Your body is almost imperceptibly pulled in weird directions, even as you sleep, and then suddenly there can be a huge fluctuation that can be potentially awkward if you’re carrying soup or trying to look sober after one too many after-dinner ports.

Also, being on a ship is what it must be like to be OCD. To minimise the chances of an outbreak of something sinister in the trousers department, you have to wash your hands ALL THE TIME. There are handwipes on every available surface and you can’t go into a room without dipping your hands in something antibacterial.

The good side of the OCD behaviour is that you also can’t leave your cabin for more than ten seconds without the staff compulsively plopping some kind of present in there, from passable Belgian chocolates to newsletters telling you that Boy George has been sent to prison. I recommend the combination.

There’s not much to do, although there IS an important briefing going on in the lounge about the next days' landing, being conducted by the team of beardie on-board bird experts, which I miss to go for a well-earned massage by the non-beardie on-board relaxation expert(ess). I figure it will all become apparent in good time - we're going to see a lot of penguins I GET IT.