Random Bits, Antarctic November 2023

As I try to finish up with stuff from the Antarctic trip, I have a bunch of little random things that I wanted to share with you. They are in no particular order. Some of them are marked for specific people as when I travel some of my shadow travelers (people not able to travel but accompany me in spirit) have requested I look for specific things from them.

Going to the Antarctic was amazing, but in a world of amazing
this trip was something special.
We had unprecedented good luck, good weather, good seas.
We had a small, sturdy ship and a captain with adventure in his heart and a twinkle in his eye.
This wasn't the itinerary we signed up for.
It was so much more.

Other animals and plants:

Other than the whales, sea lions, and penguins, we saw very little other animals. And almost no plants.

The skua was one of the few birds we saw.

This was the only feather I saw on our hikes.

This tiny mollusk was shown to us by one of our naturalists
It attaches to a whale, up off the coast of South America.
Then it traveled all of the way down here to get
washed up on shore.

These patches of lichen smaller than a dollar bill
are centuries old.
Things grow slowly in the cold.

A rare patch of "grass"

Human contact:

The very few human things we saw were mostly about whaling.

This was on our first shore walk.
Touching is absolutely forbidden,
yet people wanted to go up and sit on it.
Our expedition team was fierce.

Deception Island.
A seal hunting site from 1818
then whaling station till 1931
Those huge tanks were for the rendered blubber.

Over that ridge there was a live steam vent.

To see the bits of whale bone in the gravel
was deeply saddening.

It is hard to express in photos
how very big everything is.

There is water, and ice, and some exposed rock.

Comments

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