Jacksonville Travel: Antarctica

"You’re going where? And why?” friends back home incredulously asked one of our fellow passengers on the MS Fram. But the 175 passengers on the Hurtigruten luxury expedition ship knew the answer: We eagerly awaited that elusive stamp in our passports — Antarctica.

The Fram’s Norwegian captain, Rune Andreassen, noted, “In the last three or four years, this (destination) has exploded. Last year, there were 60 passenger ships in Antarctica.” There were 32,636 visitors.

Regulations support an “all to yourself” experience, though, allowing only 100 ashore per ship at any time, and ships of more than 500 cannot make landings at all. We only passed two ships in Antarctic waters.

Said the captain, “I think people have a good idea of what it’s like, but when you’re there on the wall of ice and the penguins are coming to you, it’s a completely different thing. Then you realize this is spectacular.”

The Fram, a very modern vessel, just launched last year and was built especially for icy waters (it also sails in Iceland, Greenland and Norway). It is named for the original Fram, which reached the North Pole and Greenland in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Most of Fram’s passengers are world travelers looking for that next great adventure and, like us, are looking to check off Antarctica. Among them were Jerry and Dottie Lunt from Green Cove Springs.

“It became the last continent for us (to visit), and that became the trigger for the trip,” Jerry explained. “ … I looked forward to climbing the Great Wall (of China) and seeing the Forbidden City. I didn’t think that would ever be surpassed, but it was on this trip. The light, the snow, the sun, the penguins — the whole thing was like a dream.”

Dottie added, “I think my favorite, the ultimate, was putting my foot on the continent.”

Jerry nodded in agreement. “That’s what the dream was about.”

For another Florida resident, Bonnie Wilpon from Tampa, that dream started to feel real five days into our 17-day cruise from Valparaiso, Chile, when she saw the first bits of ice in the water.

Bonnie’s face lit up like a kid’s at Christmas. “Now I feel like I’m heading to Antarctica,” she said of sighting the “bergies,” small fragments of the giant icebergs that awaited. From the time she was 10 years old, visiting there had been on her “bucket list.”

She specifically wanted this line because she had taken Hurtigruten before and loved it and “because of the way the (landing) boats load,” she explained, adding that her research showed others required scaling ladders. Fram’s Polar Cirkle boats have bench seating for eight with a center bar and exit bars for support, making them feel more stable and easier to get on and off than Zodiac inflatables.

“This is the place most people don’t go; it’s the end of the earth,” said Bonnie, who lived in Kenya while serving in the Peace Corps. “To go to a place that has no human inhabitants, that’s pretty cool.” (The 1,200 or so scientists and researchers are only temporary visitors.) “This is the first place I’ve ever been where there isn’t any indigenous culture. I find that incredible.”

But before any of us could set foot on the Great White Continent, we had other ports-of-call to explore first — some in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego:

Puerto Montt at the beginning of the Chilean fjord-system
Petrohue Waterfalls is a short bus ride away from Puerto Montt
Puerto Natales, gateway to the acclaimed national park Torres del Paine, a 10-hour excursion worth every minute.
Punta Arenas, Chile, which claims itself the City at the End of the World. Later in the cruise, Ushuaia, Argentina, claims likewise — the captain said Ushuaia wins.
In between, there’s crossing the Cockburn and Beagle channels before stopping to climb Cape Horn (another big check mark), then rounding it by ship, plus Drake Passage, which boasts some of the roughest water conditions in the world. Expedition leader Anja Erdmann promised our two-day crossing to Antarctic waters would either be the Drake “shake” or Drake “lake.”

Still, all of that is just gravy. The entrée of this sailing is a land that might more easily be compared to Mars than anyplace on Earth. It’s the last place on this globe touched by mankind’s footprint, and still feels otherworldly in its lack of people and its vast arctic landscapes. It holds 90 percent of the world’s ice, which constitutes 75 percent of the world’s fresh water.

Antarctica was prophesized by ancient Greek scholars. Aristotle and Pythagoras believed that the Earth was a sphere and that if there were a frigid zone to the north, there would also be one to the south. Arctos, the name given to the northern zone (associated with the bear constellation) would have to have a southern counterpart, appropriately named Antarctica (anti- Arctos). In the 16th century, the name Terra Australis Incognita — unknown southern land — began appearing in atlases.

Although speculated to exist, it was not until the 1500s that Ferdinand Magellan sailed through what is now South America, finding the Strait of Magellan. Sir Francis Drake, who circumnavigated the globe in 1577, went further south when his ship was driven there by a storm, and entered the waters beyond Cape Horn, later named for him.

The southernmost point of South America, Cape Horn, was discovered in 1616 by Dutch explorers and named for their home port of Hoorn. It was not until 1772 that British Captain James Cook, after a previously unsuccessful attempt, sailed in the name of science and discovery to determine if Antarctica existed. He crossed the Antarctic Circle in January 1773, and his records of prodigious populations of fur seals and whales prompted commercial ventures that led to unparalleled slaughter of sea life.

The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, 1895–1922, was a race by gallant men testing the human limits of a land that never supported any land-based creature. Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Dr. Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Roald Amundsen all vied to explore this domain, document scientific information and be the first to reach the South Pole.

Shackleton ran a recruitment ad in a London paper: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” The response was overwhelming.

Fortunately, about 100 years later, our contingency of warm, friendly tourists is drastically different than theirs. As expedition team member Simon Cook, an ornithology lecturer aboard, aptly put it: “It’s one of the accessibly most remote places in the world you can visit in luxury, and it’s quite spectacular.”

Antarctica is the highest, coldest, driest, windiest and most hostile continent too.

All Antarctica landings depend on weather, and expedition leader Anja promised, “The colder, the better; the more ice, the more snow, the better.”

Making good on that promise, the Fram calls at:

An unnamed island among the Aitcho Islands on the peninsula where we were so immersed in penguins we didn’t know where to aim our cameras first.
Neko Harbor, where we stepped onto the Antarctic mainland, watched more penguins and slid down an icy incline squealing with delight.
Cuverville Island, which supports one of the largest known Gentoo Penguin colonies, but rough conditions required a last-minute substitution. Instead of landing, we went ice cruising in the Cirkle boats to view the icebergs up close.
Verdansky, a Ukranian scientific station, and Port Lockroy, a British station (both permanently manned). The former exchanges vodka shots for bras for its bar collection, getting more from our group’s visit than all of last season, including one from a 70-year-old passenger. The latter houses a small 1950s museum, souvenir shop and the chance to send mail with an Antarctic postmark.
Deception Island and Whaler’s Bay, an old whaling station and one of the most visited sites in Antarctica, with its black sand beach and collapsed volcano’s caldera. A thermal “pool” — the team dug a steaming pit in the black sand — awaited the 27 brave souls who first took a polar plunge.
Walker Bay, with fossils, Elephant Seals and still more penguins.
Half Moon Island (our landing had to be scratched due to extensive sea ice).

During our Drake Channel crossing, ultimately calm, we underwent a special briefing for our Antarctic landings, including specific rules on how to keep the Great White Continent pristine:

No food or water ashore (easy since most landings are only about an hour).
Disinfect and brush-scrub our provided boots when we disembarked and embarked the ship.
Touching the wildlife is forbidden, but if penguins approached us (and they did), that’s OK.
Plus, instructions in case fur seals get aggressive: Never run, make yourself as big and intimidating as possible, and make lots of noise.

Thankfully, there were no attacks. It was the penguins that took center stage — adorable, funny, just as curious about us as we were of them and twice as photogenic as any grandparent’s progeny. We saw thousands. There are 17 species in all; six of which are found in Antarctica. We spotted Gentoo, Chinstrap, Adelie, Magellanic (in Chile) and King but missed seeing Emperors, which are farther south.

We also saw glaciers calve; towering snow-and-ice covered cliffs; an overnight snowfall of six-plus inches; sideways snow: 20-foot waves; icebergs measuring up to a half-mile and glaciers stretching into the distance; Killer, Humpback and Minke whales; Elephant Seals; Skuas (hawklike birds that prey on penguin eggs and chicks); Albatross; Giant Petrels; Gulls; and Terns. And did we mention penguins?

We agree with Captain Andreassen: “I think people should come here because it’s a fantastic experience. You have to see it; you have to be here to understand.”

If you're going:

The 318-passenger MS Fram is among the most luxurious expedition ships regularly calling on Antarctica. It features 97 cabins, 39 suites and seven grand suites.

Nine-day itineraries from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Antarctica and back continue through March and resume in November. In between, Fram cruises Norway, Spitsbergen, Greenland and more. You can reach Ushuaia on LAN Airlines at www.lan.com.

For more information, visit www.hurtigruten.us or call its New York offices at 800.582.0835.