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Adelie Penguins are to be found in just a few of the places, that we have anchored at while cruising with the Bark Europa. Peterman island was the place with the largest colony of Adelie penguins in our cruise. They are also the smallest species of penguins by average size,just about 60 cm high.In order to breed they are searching for rocky grounds and they will start as soon as the ice is gone at these places.
King Penguins are living normally in another part of Antarctica, but how lucky for us, this King penguin had lost its way many years ago and is now living among other penguin species at Aitcho island.the King Penguin really looks impressive against the much smaller other penguins and he obviously also feels like a king, looking gently down on the other animals of the island.
It is certainly more a wish or a joke but in any way it is also a funny idea to paint 2 palmtrees on the large fuel-tank of Vernadsky Station, a station that was built by the british government and sold to Ukraine some years ago for the symbolic price of 1 euro. It was quite windy and a lot of snow there at the station, when we had been there in end of November, that should be equivalent to the month of may in the northern summer.
In Gerlach Straight we met this cute penguin taking a sunbath on one of the thousands of icebergs. It has choosen one of the icebergs with a soft snowy top and all of a sudden our ship came closer and closer, the ship finally cut the iceberg into 2 pieces, but at least the little penguin could escape in the last moment.My last 2 photographs are showing the penguin right under the net in front of our ship, that part of the ship is about 10 meters ahead of the bow. On our video we will have this scene as well and my brother Bernie had a better place to take the last few seconds of this scene.
In this island we first visited a ship-wreck at the rocky beach and it was interesting to see, that it was a small wooden boat with just a simple single hull without any isolation, it is hard to believe that working conditions of the whalers had been so hard! Then we were climbing over a hill that had a funny "penguin-highway" downhill to the beach. They look so cute, when walking up and down the hill, couriously watching us invaders.At the end of the excursion we hiked through a wide snow-field in order to get to the research-station of Argentina.
Take a walk over the pass of Aitcho Island and you will come to an almost unreal landscape with a scenery like in a science-fiction-movie. We saw some large whale-bones on the beach, a lot of penguins and also some seals. For an island like this it is absolutely necessary to wear real good wellies / rubberboots. Most of them will be really cold inside, but you will never know, here you have to walk through: More than once I was really glad to have rubberboots with a hight of 50 cm.
Chile has a research-station on Aitcho Island and we could see it from the distance, when approaching the island. Most probably the station is not used anymore at the moment but it was good to see, that people were living in this remote part of the world. There are lots of research-stations in Antarctica and once they were built, it would be too much effort to take it away, when it is not used anymore. I guess it is also a strategic position in most cases and nobody wants to give up an area they were controlling once.
Aitcho was the first stop that we had in the South Shetland Island : large colonies of pinguins and sea-birds nesting on this lovely island and I was also able to see some seals, partly in bad weather-conditions with grizzles of snow and rain and then again in perfect sunshine, the weather really changes so quickly in Antarctica.It took us 3 hours to explore the island, then we cruised back to our ship, had to clean our boots of penguin-poo and the fine sand of the island, that was really some hard work to do out on the deck of our ship, before we were able to get to our cabin and change the wet clothings
The Drake Passage is well known for its strong winds and heavy seas and the smaller a ship is the more easy its passengers will get seasick. 3,5 days was the time that we needed to cross the Drake Passage from Ushuaia to reach our first stop in the South Shetland Islands and only for a few hours we had been able to cruise by sails, allother time we had to use our engine.Lots of seabirds were following our ship through all of the Drake Passage, they live on the open sea and are used not to have a nest or other restingplace, except when breeding.And on the 3rd day we even saw a group of whales, that was wonderful, and partly they came quite close to the ship. The captain made an announcement and followed the whales for some while.
This is an iron pot, that was left back by the whalers in Halfmoon-Bay and although that was more than 60 years ago, the pot has still quite a thick iron-skin, because rusing and all weathering in Antarctica will take a lot longer than in warmer areas of the world.
Reviews and photos of Antarctica attractions posted by real travelers and locals. The best tips for Antarctica sightseeing.
Q: Hello, I'm so excited about my trip to Antarctica on 2/19 on Quark. Questions for those who've been there - 1. packing -...
A: There is a tiny place on Deception Island, where the ground is so hot that you can dig out a hole and let the sea-water in that will allow you to take a bath in hot...
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