We’ve just spent the last 4 days in Antarctica cruising around the Antarctic peninsula. The track of our journey is represented by the yellow/green line shown in the image below. Even though it appears small, some of the distances between points are measured in hours.

The morning of day 29 we had our first views of the Antarctic peninsula. It was very overcast and we had just small glimpses of the land around us. Other passengers talked about how normal this was and maybe we shouldn’t expect any better for the next 4 days. How wrong they were!

Around noon, the sun came out and, at last, we were able to see what makes this land so magical: the mountains, snow fields, glaciers, and, of course, animals. We were lucky because we had good weather all 4 days!

To portray this land at it’s best, we decided to break this portion of the blog into several parts: Scenery, Penguins, Whales, Research Stations, and, Ice.

Today’s part is about Scenery.

Words cannot begin to describe the beauty and majesty of this place. It is so beautiful that it’s hard to think that in a very short time the weather can make this a very inhospitable place to be. It was on the warming side the first couple of days ( 37 degrees and above), then it turned cold as you expected it to be. We ended up wearing 4 layers of clothes!

One thing we did notice is that the Antarctic is not pure white. It is a lot of different colors depending on where you were and the amount of sunlight.

So turn your room temperature down to 30 degrees, turn on a fan, put on your parka and then look at the pictures below. Enjoy.