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Cold, flat, monotonous – and fascinating
The Antarctic still haunts me. It was so near, I could almost feel it.
I was tempted to take an official ship’s excursion – a flight from Ushuaia to the Antarctic mainland, weather permitting, at the price of about a week’s trip anywhere else. But the flight to the Torres del Paine on the same day was obviously ten times more value, in life terms as well as money. Anyway, who wants merely to fly in a jet plane over the edge of a continent where Scott and Amundsen walked?
The ship we were on, Ms Amsterdam, was there recently, and would be visiting the Antarctic again the followiing Christmas on its way from Cape Town back to Valparaiso.
Strangely, a very detailed video of its previous voyage across the Weddell Sea to Grahamland and the Antarctic Ice indicated that there was little to see under cruise-line circumstances. Most Amsterdam passengers, who overflowed even the standing-room space in one of the ship’s theatres to see the ‘preview’ of the ship’s next Antarctic voyage walked out in disappointment after 30 minutes of a 90-minute video. The filmed scenery, interesting at first, became monotonous. Passenger activity in the rubber boats or on the ice appeared strictly limited – and about as interesting as the second lap of a walk around the ship’s main deck. Certainly the “preview” failed to compare with the passengers’ home movies or memories of the glaciers looming over Chilean Fjords.
Of course, unless global warming is working at full-pitch, glacier-watching isn’t that spectacular either. When you’ve seen five, face to face, you don’t yearn to see another fifty. As Mark Twain once famously observed, if you take a ride on a moving glacier, you’ll find that its speed is not only disappointing, it is undetectable. But they do fall rather well, and world headlines proclaimed that glacier-calving, with its crashes and splashes, was hugely spectacular in Patagonia during our visit.
So why am I nagged with regrets about not setting foot on the flat, cold road to the South Pole?
Why should anyone want to visit Antarctica just because it is there?
In my case, it is not because it is the only continent I have not stepped on. It’s because. . . well, if you happen to be the least interested in its fascination, have a look at ‘Superlatives in Antarctica’
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