Quotes of the Day
I've crossed the passage over 40 times, and this is the worst I've ever seen it," was the promising summary from our expedition leader Aaron, as 20-meter waves smashed over the bow of our ice vessel. The wind was bordering on cyclone intensity and, with another lethal wall of icy water rearing up, I began to appreciate why the fierce 1,000-kilometer Drake Passage—renowned for consuming ships as they round Cape Horn—is considered one of the fundamental barriers to Antarctic tourism. The others are exorbitant cost, the remoteness and (should you ever forget it) the cold.
Despite the difficulties of visiting the most Plutonic of all continents, nearly 15,000 people a year make the schlepp. Antarctica stands at the lofty apex of adventure travel; it is the loudest of holiday boasts. Ninety-seven percent of its visitors depart from the southernmost Argentine port of Ushuaia, where about 20 international tour operators sell cruises on 100-meter ice vessels, each carrying about 100 passengers. Other trips leave from Christchurch, New Zealand; Hobart, Tasmania; and South Africa's Cape Town. All offer a beguiling array of experiences from close-up views of mothballed whaling stations to courtesy calls at scientific ghost towns inhabited by haggard meteorologists and bearded seal watchers. Even more spectacular are vistas of primordial glaciers—vertiginous, 2,000-meter mountains and icy bays teeming with whales and penguins. It doesn't get more pristine or elemental than this.
It wasn't until the fall of the Soviet Union that cheap Russian ice vessels and their crews became available to tour operators, and Antarctic tourism could really begin to develop, with the 1990-91 season setting a then record of 4,698 shipborne arrivals. Some predict that by 2005 as many as 22,000 people annually will notch up a visit, all on hardy hulks like the Akademik Ioffe. Air travel is costly and almost impossible, due to Antarctica's furious climate, which plays more havoc with schedules than any who advisory could ever do. (The weather can delay flights for two weeks or longer, with no flights at all during the evil winter.)
For the moment, the brain-numbing magnitude of Antarctica—it's more than one-and-a-half times larger than Australia—makes regulating tourism there almost impossible. "We do this all on the honor system," said Bill, a crew member with a face nicely crisped by the omnipresent UV (Antarctica lies directly beneath the ozone hole). "No one monitors us, so it's up to us to do this kind of tourism safely and responsibly."
He told me about the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, a voluntary organization created in 1991 that encourages member companies to minimize the impact of tourism on the continent by following strict environmental guidelines. Nearly every Antarctica tour operator complies, but that could easily change as more companies elbow their way into this lucrative market, charging die-hard travelers up to $20,000 for the trip.
It is hard to set a price on Antarctica's allure, though. What British explorer Ernest Shackleton called "Antarctica fever" is there for all to see in the eyes of the Canadian, Australian and American guides on the Akademik Ioffe. It leads them back time and again to the great, blinding white south. It is also utterly contagious, for after a few days of this heartbreakingly beautiful landscape, pure light and incredibly clear water, no one is immune. Taking in the ethereal magnificence from the relative protection of my kayak (wet suit carefully donned), I felt like I had left the earth for some other planet. This is the celestial payoff awaiting all travelers' efforts and expense.
Shortly before our voyage came to an end, some of us took up the offer to camp overnight on the ice. The temperature that southern summer evening dipped to a balmy -3°C, and the perfect silence of the sky enveloped me like a blanket. It was then that I understood the quote by Apsley Cherry-Garrand, the 24-year-old member of Captain R.F. Scott's tragic 1910 expedition. "Polar exploration," he wrote, "is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has ever been devised." And what a beautifully, wonderfully bad time it still remains.
- Matt Link
- Antarctica: A hell of a place that's heaven on earth