Antartica, The Expedition - Landing on Almirante Brown 20th Feb, 2014

The earlier night, we were already briefed on the ‘Landings’ for the 20^th February. There were two landings on a single day and that was the first time ever, since we entered the continental waters.  

The landings in the morning were scheduled from 0900 hrs and those in the afternoon were from 1600 hours. Everyone was now a master of the drill of breakfast – Lectures/ landings – lunch – more lectures/landings – dinner. I could feel that we didn’t even need the announcements to call us to Deck 2, to get in our shoes and life jacket. The Fram’s policy was to give each group out of the seven assigned an equal chance of landing first on the site. It was the chance of group number 6 that morning.

The expedition team went first on land and made a path for the passengers. The Almirante Brown was a small Argentinian base station we were told and had a resident population of 10 – 12 engineers and scientists. From the Fram’s observation deck we could see our expedition leaders wearing red overall’s trekking up a tiny little summit of about 1000 ft. Some of the passengers who saw the two human figures walking at an angle of nearly 60 deg up, exclaimed ‘this is crazy who will walk up there, in all that snow’. There was place only for a few to stand at the highest point of the summit, which was a rock face. In the next few minutes I could already see that the summit is going to be crowded with blue jackets, as the people from group 6 and already begin the ascent in the distance.

To the summit of Almirante Brown

You should slide all the way down, said a woman in her late sixties, as she got back into the ship. I could sense the child like excitement in her voice. She was from Canada and probably did slide down such a height when she was in her teens. I on landing, didn’t wait to talk to the base station residents like I did, when I was at the Chilean base station, and headed straight for the summit. It was not as tough as it looked from the ship. The people sliding down included some of my tourists and I was happy to see them enjoy the snow. The view however kept on getting beautiful as I gained altitude and I decided to just lie down in the snow for a while and take in the surroundings. I could see a lone figure on the top of the summit. It was really narrow up there and after some rethinking I decided to go all the way up.

I don’t know how long I stayed up there. For the first time I didn’t feel like leaving. There were only two of us on the top and we didn’t have a camera. We just stared into the vastness, I saw a smile on her face, and I knew she did on me too. I knew she felt the same way as I did. I knew she said to herself, ‘this is Antartica!’

Before the American’s tried to come up with a digicam in their hands, we decided to leave the top. It was a smooth slide down, which at times felt exciting enough to make us shout. By the time I reached the base, there was snow in my pants. I let that be and just took some time more on the clean snow.  Scotch with glacier ice was a thing some people had done before. I didn’t have the scotch with me, but the snow from the sky made up for it. It felt high enough.

View from the summit, my Antarctica moment!

When I got back to the ship, I felt peace. I felt like I could go back today to Argentina as I had already reached the moment.

The second landing was at Neko Harbour. I don’t know why it was called that. There were more Penguins there than any other landing site. I saw what the instructor meant on day one, as I saw a male penguin picking one stone at a time to build his nest. By this time I was not too excited in taking the ‘penguin pictures’ and so I just saw them doing their thing.

It was sometime during the dinner that we heard the captains voice for the first time on the speaker since the welcome note.

 “We have bad news for you, there has been a medical emergency on the ship. We have tried getting help from helicopter but the bad weather wont let it land till the next two days, so we have decided to sail back to Ushuaia”.  A post briefing about the next day was cancelled and was replaced by a meeting of all passengers with the captain on the observation deck. People were really disappointed that they had to cut their trip a day short. I wasn’t worried about that. I was just happy that I felt Antarctica that day.