Gone With the Wind

At the very farthest south of the Americas, where the seemingly endless Andes meet three oceans, lies a magical area of land known as Patagonia. An anomaly in this continent, perhaps having more in common with New Zealand or Tasmania than the rest of the Americas, Patagonia is absolutely nothing short of a natural wonderland to explore. Visiting here had long been a goal after so much hiking in Australia over the years and it was also the perfect excuse to finally get that tent out of the backpack which had been gathering cobwebs for a time now.

The thing about Patagonia is that there is just too much to see, so there is a real danger you could die from scenery overload. It's filled to the brim with the kinds of vistas that due to their their scale, aesthetic and tranquility can't really translate to a frame on a wall. There are dagger-like mountains of granite and slate that soar into the misty sky, rolling hills of green edged by cliffs of exposed swirling sedimentary layers of rock, incredible gnarled Nothofagus forests that resemble a gigantic bonsai garden, beautiful streams and rivers of crystal clear pure water, a sky resembling a science text book page on all the many cloud types, and snow melt lakes of the deepest aqua.

And this is just at the edges, in the centre lies the vast Patagonian ice field: the worlds third largest ice cap after Antarctica and Tibet. This ice is compacted deep and heavy here over the Andes here before it begins to slide inexorably down one of the many stunning glaciers throughout the region where you can hear the rifle-like sounds of them cracking before your very eyes. Patagonia is home to some of the world's very few advancing glaciers (most are melting and receding) and from time to time these glaciers can go a bit too far and collapse in spectacular fashion every few years or so.

Just Google Patagonia already if you've heard of it but never seen it, you'll get the idea of just how stunning this place is. You'll get the itch.

Coupled with all this scenery, the days are long here in Summer. When it gets light at 3am and gets dark at 11am it means you will invariably walk a lot more than you plan to, which in turn means you will see a lot more. All of the above just leads to all sorts of logistical issues with camera batteries and SD cards. You can take an embarassingly awful amount of photos of this place.

Trekking in Patagonia is also a survivalist's dream. The water is as fresh as it can be, meaning you can fill up your water bottle almost anywhere while hiking and there is an abundance of wild foods. While hiking in the warmer months there are wild currants and delicious Calafate berries in plentiful supply for a sweet hit, many types of dandelions and cats ears for salad greens, edible radioactive-orange fungi growing on trees everywhere, mussels along the shoreline and some rather plump European rabbits hopping around and juicy Canadian beavers who have been rather busy modifying ecosystems. You would be doing the region and immense favour to eat your fill of the latter two.

There is only one thing standing between you and the enjoyment of all this wonder. The weather. Forget what the forecasts say, they are wrong the moment they go to press. You can expect all weather conditions in one day, many times over.

And above all else you can expect wind.

Oh my lord, the wind.

The first clue you get as to how things blow here is when entering the rangers office at the national parks. When quizzed about the windy spots the ranger will point to a map and indicate that the wind is really strong "here, here, here, here, here" *pause* "here, here, here" *long pause* "and here, here here and here". At this moment you realise that the ranger has more or less pointed to the entire map except the ranger hut.

Another subtle clue is the fact that all rangers seem to be using broken tent poles as map pointing devices.

I think it is fair to say you just haven't truly experienced wind until you have been to Patagonia. It is ridiculous, relentless, ferocious and honestly drives people to mental breaking point. There are many times where you will simply be held up leaning in place against it, other times you will be thrown to the ground as if some invisible assailant had just pushed you over.

Sure, it can be fun at times to play with it, but it can be heart-stoppingly terrifying at others. There was certainly a genuine near death experience on one narrow, rocky scree mountain pass where the wind (which was howling at 100kph and gusting double that), required crawling on all fours to negotiate. It was an absolute do-or-die moment and the most dangerous part of this entire American adventure. It begs the question of what kind of conditions are actually worthy of track closure here. It is hard to imagine it being worse than that.

Besides being physically thrown around and being beaten to death by flying debris, the wind is capable of other fantastic effects upon you. Even though there are no clouds above you, it can drive so hard across such massive distances that you can still be rained upon if it is occurring anywhere upwind into the horizon. At other times, the gusts of wind can fill your lungs with air even if you don't inhale and you must constantly 'pop' your ears due to the pressure changes on your ear drums. I just never believed wind could do any of these things until Patagonia came along.

Needless to say, trying to sleep in a tent at night is not a comfortable experience either. At least when you are hiking you can duck down where you hear the gusts roaring towards you, but in your tent you are a sitting duck. Your tent has to be pegged down and then covered in rocks for it to stand any hope of survival and many tents never live beyond this place. The wind gusts during the night is like someone kicking your tent in, over and over again, all night. In between the big gusts you just sit there waiting for the next one, as the tent comfortingly whips into your head and body twenty times a second, wondering if changing from your dry clothes into your wet weather gear 'just in case' is a prudent precaution.

If you are planning to visit this place, be ready for one other thing in Patagonia: the number of tourists. Patagonia is relatively simple to fly directly into (if you like flights where the engines scream and the passengers pray during landing attempts), and lies within Chile and Argentina, two of the safest countries of South America. This level of accessibility opens the region up to the unwashed masses more than anywhere on the continent, making it a bucketlist item for people who otherwise normally probably don't give a toss about hiking or nature much in general. The biggest example is probably the famous Torres del Paine hike. The moment you enter Patagonia you are bombarded with phrases like "you have to 'do' Torres del Paine" or "you haven't seen Patagonia until you have seen Torres del Paine". Consequently (and excepting that one tourist who was eaten by a Puma), you can give up any pretense of being alone and personal with nature here on the main tracks, they crawl with people wearing conspicuously brand new hiking boots and equipment. These folk sadly have some lofty expectations and are often complaining how the views aren't quite stacking up to what they were promised off post cards.

Damn you nature and your inconsistency. These people paid good money for those North Face jackets, where is the return on that investment?

The other frustrating reality is that with so many non-hikers hiking a multi-day hike in one of the most wild and sensitive parts of the world, the effects on the environment become evident. There is little or no respect for any facilities or tracks provided, rubbish is left on the ground and at campsites all too often, people contaminate water and only a few years ago some idiots accidentally set fire to almost half of the park, the damage from which is irreversible - the unique and amazing forests have been replaced with burnt out husks and invasive grasses instead.

Despite being a victim of its own fame to a certain extent, Patagonia IS remarkably beautiful with an attraction unquestionably undeniable. It's hard not to be blown away by it all, one way or another. 

The End of the World

Where can I even begin to describe this next part of the journey just undertaken. A trip to a place perhaps more extreme, more isolated, more inhospitable than anywhere on Earth. A place where you can eat and drink the very ground you walk on. The absolute end of the world: Antarctica.

The thought of penning this entry has been somewhat overwhelming. There has been a sensation that no superlatives can suffice, that no ramblings would be effective, that no words would be able to truly convey just how fantastical, how dreamlike this leg of the trip was. Antarctica is the lost continent and, even to this day, only the most committed and wanderlust-infatuated travellers will ever desire to go here or understand the desire to go here.

And certainly only the most foolhardy as the way there is not simple.

You can take a plane if you have bottomless pockets, but for most mortals the only option is via boat and even then the southern polar region may only be visited in between November and March; the hottest months of the southern hemisphere where the temperatures at the edge of Antarctica finally and lazily creep above zero. For the rest of the year the weather is brutally cold and consequently the land is surrounded by a seething and grinding sheet of heavy pack ice that extends far beyond the actual shore. Ships cannot penetrate this barrier and those that try are doomed to become stuck for a long time at the mercy of the ice floes, to which many an early (and absolutely crazy) Antarctic explorer can attest.

Boats can leave from but a very small number of locations. From South America this normally means Ushuaia in Argentina, the southernmost city in the world. A little ex-Argentine penal colony that is now nothing more than a launchpad for tourist activity with a few quirky museums, odd souvenir shops, an insanely windy airport and probably the worst fresh produce you are likely to ever see.

After setting sail from Ushuaia and kissing the last vestiges of a normal day night cycle goodbye, our little ship, the plucky little "Ocean Nova" left the relative calm of the Beagle Channel and crossed around the tip of Cape Horn. From there things escalated fast. This boat trip is perhaps one of the most dangerous on Earth, crossing the infamous Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula. Trailed deftly by numerous diving seabirds (that even for all their amazing aerial grace, still get occasionally dunked into the ocean by pitiless and thundering winds), the boat must pass for two days through the circum-polar currents of the Southern Ocean that swirl continuously around Antarctica like a giant whirlpool. It is impossible to turn the ship into the waves as you will never reach the destination - instead the boat is relentlessly slammed and rolled from side to side in a tumultuous voyage that more or less consigned nearly four fifths of the passengers to their beds and toilets, irrespective of seasickness medication.

If you are able, during this time you are free to move around the boat and beat yourself to death on door handles and walls, eat buffet meals that you may never keep down or go to watch expedition staff give information seminars where occasionally members of the audience will be thrown clean from their chairs or presenters will randomly regurgitate mid Powerpoint slide.

It's all rather exciting at first but a complete lack of meaningful sleep for two nights isn't. At the end of that second night of hell, just when we were all at our wits end, the winds abated and the waves just disappeared. We awoke to an unnerving but absolutely welcome calm and the divine sight of land.

And what land it was ...

There were islands of snow covered mountains all around with small trails of clouds leading from their peaks. They descended down to icy ledges over rocky shores where waves of clear blue water lapped gently. The islands were surrounded by glacial ice bergs, some clear as crystal, others the the deepest cyan, and the sky was of a blue so vivid that it could only be caused by a hole in the ozone layer. And this opening scene was just a glimpse of things to come.

In the following days our boat would navigate further and further south along the Antarctic coastline where the mountains on the continent proper extended even higher and then were lost in the light haze as they melded with the Antarctic Plateau. Amidst peaks and ridges there were massive ice shelves, calving prodigious blocks of ice down into the ocean to form massive new bergs and small tsunamis. The sounds of the Antarctic thaw echoed all around and punctuated the great white silence.

Being one of the first ships of the season we were likely to encounter heavy sea ice remnants from the winter, and that we certainly did. As we passed through the Lemaire Channel the ocean gradually became a mass of icebergs as far as the eye could see. The Ocean Nova pushed her way through the ice pack, parting a small channel very slowly with the odd more-ominous-than-usual thud or two. The air was completely still and the horizon became a mirage of reflections where the ice and clouds became one.

Eventually our ship hit its southern most limit at an area classed as an 'ice berg graveyard'. Here, enormous blocks of ice, too big to flow to the ocean, thaw and topple over one another forming absolutely unbelievable shapes. They push into a dense mess of cliffs, arches, caves and ridges with massive forces behind them as more ice crashes into the area from the continent. Ernest Shackleton sums up travel through the ice well in his excellent book 'South':

"The ice moves majestically, irresistibly. Human effort is not futile, but one fights against the giant forces of nature with humility."

You would think in the world's highest, driest, coldest, darkest continent that life would never be able to thrive at all. But indeed it does.

Humans have established but a few small science stations on Antarctica but wherever mankind builds, another inhabitant quickly assumes tenancy: Penguins, the undisputed bosses of these lands. There are penguin colonies everywhere, especially in the nooks and crannies of human structures, and you will hear and smell them long before you see them. These little funny birds exude personality and they will just happily waddle past right in front of you while looking at you as if to say 'you are a rather odd looking penguin'.

There are many kinds of penguins to be easily seen, Gentoo's, Chin Strap's, Adelie's. But all of them have one thing in common at this time of year, their quest for pebbles. It is one of the most hilarious spectacles of nature to see these birds attempting to build their nests with the finite amount of pebbles available until the snow fully melts. This leads to a never ending cycle of communal rock pilfering from others' nests. It's all done in a rather sneaky but gentlemanly way that results in no net gain or loss to each nest overall. Apparently one scientist performed an experiment once where a pile of red 'marked' rocks was left next to a colony. The rocks were uniformly distributed throughout the entire colony within two days and several of the key marker rocks with radio tags indicated that each rock moved from one next to another at least twice a day. The male seems to do most of the rock work but every now and then returns empty beaked, at which point he will just pretend to put a rock down anyway which the female will look around and wonder where he just put it while he seems to look around nonchalantly as if whistling. It's overly cute and captivating to watch and to think this dance goes on every summer.

The penguin mating process is also a spot of solid entertainment. When partners greet one another they typically do a little bow and a yawn at the same time. If the male is feeling something in his plums he will let her know by giving her a light paddling on her back with his flipper, followed by a neck massage by vibrating his head. If she will oblige him she then lies down belly first on the ground, which is typically covered in penguin shit. He will then proceed to get on her back and stomp around, giving her a more intense back massage. After a little flurry of tail to tail action he will get off, have a stretch and then begin his quest for pebbles. It is largely due to this process that you can tell the males and the females apart: the females have shit all up their stomach and back.

Beside the penguins sleep the odd seal or two, which have been known to rest for days at a time after long fishing trips. Every now and then you will see a seal sleeping on an ice sheet in the water but this is not without its risks. We saw many killer whales scouting the ice fields, performing a technique know as 'spyhopping' where they will poke their heads out perpendicular to the water to look for said resting seals. The killer whales will then sometimes attempt to bump them off the ice and have been known on occasion to 'rush the ice' and create a wave that washes the seal off. It's a good life being an apex predator.

Arguably the biggest 'wow' moment with a whale however was in a zodiac landing boat, when two Minke whales went directly underneath the boat only a metre or two below us. We could see them so clearly through those crystal blue waters and it will be one of those moments in life permanently etched into the mind's eye.

Perhaps even more incredibly, there is also vegetation here that has adapted to produce anti-freeze like chemicals and expel water rapidly to avoid freezing and the rocks are covered with all manner of lichen that break the sea of white and blue with oranges, reds and yellows. As C. Schroeter wrote so eloquently:

“It is a marvelous chapter of life, the fight that these little organisms wage against the formidable power of the high mountains, allowing us to find their colorful crusts even on the highest rocks. With bright colors, they paint the dead rock and rise up as the first and last sentries of life, awakening our passionate interest.”

Antarctica is not all ice. Unbelievably, there is fire too. Antarctica has volcanoes and our ship navigated into the crater of an active one and supposedly one of the safest harbours here: Deception Island. It is a truly odd sight to see steam coming from geologically active waters in this part of the world and it makes you realise that even under all that ice, Antarctica has a lot more to see that cannot be reached.

It would not have been a true Antarctic experience however without a blizzard and the final day delivered a somewhat epic one. Crystals of ice were hurled at us like little razor blades, slicing into any exposed piece of skin painfully, curtailing our landing times somewhat and giving a small taste of why winter here isn't very nice. The blizzard grew into a full storm within a few hours of having to leave for home again meaning that if the voyage down through the Drake was not adventurous enough, the voyage back most certainly was going to be. That return trip is one to which all boat trips will now be compared. The ship was battered endlessly by 12 metre swells which means the boat was essentially rising up and down a height equivalent to a three or four story building every wave. The ship was being covered in water and spray which, due to the freezing 100 kph winds, was solidifying on every surface. This was adding significantly to the weight of the boat. For each centimetre of ice we gained a tonne in weight, causing the boat to plunge even more into the waves. At one point the safety railing across the bough of the ship, weakened by so much ice covering it, was completely bent in and destroyed by a massive wave that slammed across the boat.

Needless to say the upper deck was closed for visits.

It was a hell of a ride, but fulfilling too, in some masochistic way. We were all told that this storm wasn't a big one either, there were far worse. So much so they confine all passengers to quarters, give you straps for your bed and throw sandwiches to you like a prison inmate. In this storm, we were apparently listing "only" 15 to 20 degrees. Our fearless Panamanian captain said to me quite confidently "This ship can handle 30 degrees, no problem. I have been in this before. The Ocean Nova is a little ship, she does not fall over, she surfs like professional surfer.". I could only admire the simplicity of his English as I was hanging on to what ever things I could in the bridge that didn't look important to our chances of survival.

Ever since I was a child I have dreamed of coming to this place. I remember in school there was always a game where you would spin a globe of the world and then plant your finger on a random location and that would be where you have to 'go one day'. I could always guarantee to people that I knew where I was going and I wound be able to pinpoint it every time, after which I would drag the spinning globe to a halt with my finger on the bottom in Antarctica. Antarctica is Australia's last minute Gondwana buddy, only separating at the very last stages of super continent break up and it would have been called Australia had the name not already been taken! To come here is a child hood dream now realised and no less diminished by being so, it will always be an amazing and wondrous terra incognita.