We're Making Mythical the Mundane Today

Voyage 5 – December 20 through January 7

What a weird and wonderful place I am in. I’ve spent the past three weeks sailing to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island, the Antarctic Peninsula, and back to Ushuaia. I have hung out with sheep that were hanging out with penguins, I have weathered my first storm at sea and I have tiptoed past angry and lethargic seals to get to Ernest Shackleton’s grave. I have watched hundreds of penguins mill around a white sand beach. I’ve seen the beauty of our surroundings bring tears to the eyes of a grown man. I’ve hung out with seal pups in the rain. As I’ve mentioned before, my existence down here is a mixture of ordinary with a dash of bizarre, but this cruise is different. This cruise I feel as though I’ve fallen through the looking glass.

On December 22nd I sat on a green rolling hill above a white sand beach on Saunders Island, in the Falklands, where penguins roamed with sheep on sloping green hills. Out in the water about nine black and white dolphins spent the afternoon flirting with our zodiaks and over yonder Vladimir, one of our zodiak drivers was swimming in the ocean. I, on the other hand, was appropriately bundled up for a windy sub-arctic spring day. It dawned on me at this moment how fitting this unlikely scene was. Just like the sheep hanging out with penguins, I was hanging out on an Antarctic white sand beach on the Falkland Islands. It was Christmastime, and somehow summer solstice had just happened.

Christmas Eve was the night of my first storm at sea. In technical terms it was a nine of the Beaufort Scale. Winds were 55-60 knots, waves were six meters, and the ship was swaying twenty to twenty five degrees. In human terms I can only attempt to describe the scene on the ship: My job was to right tables that had slid across the library and pick up broken miscellaneous things that would fly when we would hit waves. It wasn’t long before the decision was made to take all unsecured furniture and stack it in the gym where it had less of a chance to fly around and hurt people. It was during this process a particularly massive wave hit the ship, causing it to sway a full thirty degrees. It was all I could do to just hold on where I was standing, listen to the sounds of crashing all around, and hope that nothing important was being destroyed. Now, I’ve never been in an earthquake, but I can only imagine that after this wave struck I have a relatively accurate idea of what one must feel like. In this monster wave a fridge fell over, a range came completely out of the wall in the galley, one hundred caprese salads flew off the buffet table and onto the floor in the dining room, and a woman broke a rib. Dinner service was canceled and we delivered meals to passengers in their cabins. An additional obstacle in our night was that the storm caused an oil spill in the galley, making our trips down to pick up meals an exercise in waiting for the ship to tilt the right direction so we could skate from point A to point B, because taking a proper step was no longer possible. Lastly, although our expedition leader strongly urged passengers to stay safely in their cabins, many decided that this night was the perfect time to get trashed, so I was busy serving customers throughout all of this. Needless to say, this Christmas Eve left me exhausted.

Christmas Day this year meant a series of things. A staff party and gift exchange. The closest thing to a night off I will get in one hundred and twenty two days. A new blue toque: I’m told that with this toque on I am stylish in Europe. A rare starry night sky. So many Christmas cookies followed by a Christmas cookie stomach ache. Christmas carols in my bar. Watching the relative youngins’ dance to Lady GaGa while I sat and talked about the good old days with the ship’s historian. No snow, no turkey, no month-long inundation with All Things Christmas. In fact, it was only a few days before the 25th when it dawned on me that ‘tis the season.

Then, as Christmas passed us by we reached the remote, sub-Antarctic menagerie of South Georgia Island. South Georgia Island is a place where King Penguins congregate by the thousands, fur seals take over old whaling stations, reindeer hang out with elephant seals, and deep green grass climbs rolling hills. It was, about a century ago, the heart of the whaling industry. It lies in the middle of the Southern Ocean, two and a half days’ sail from the Falkland Islands. It is an unassuming on a map but stunningly beautiful in real life.

On December 28th we sailed to a place called Grytvicken, on South Georgia Island. I’ve never imagined there could be a place in the world quite like this. A Norwegian whaler named Carl Larsen first discovered the site. The first time he sailed into the bay he found it absolutely teeming with whales. It wasn’t long before the site became the most industrious whaling station in the world, exporting whale products to England that were to become everything from fuel for streetlamps to make up, perfume and corsets. There was a time when a whopping nine hundred and twenty people called this place home and a walk on the beach would have been a walk from whale carcass to whale carcass.

Grytvicken is nestled on three sides by mountains and on one by a narrow bay. A solitary gravel path weaves past a church, a whalers’ cemetery, a museum, shipwrecks, and rusted remnants of whaling machinery. Elephant seals and King penguins have since taken over and pepper the landscape.

Ernest Shackleton is buried here and during our visits to Grytvicken we do a toast of rum at his grave. The path up to the whalers’ cemetary is a scene straight out of a Tolkien novel. I walked the short path up a fairly steep grassy hill, rutted with small pools of water that reflected sunshine. Lying out in the sun by the dozen were elephant and fur seals, so numerous that I had to weave a careful path around them. Some of the seals took no concern of my presence, but others would hiss and grunt and gnash their teeth if I came too close; it was honestly scary. Some of them would even start at me, as if to attack. It was almost as if they had made themselves the de facto gatekeepers of the whalers’ cemetery.

The place is unreal. If there was a spot in the world the deserved to be called mythical, Grytvicken is it.

I spent my New Years Eve at sea. During the day we sailed through an ice field. There was no wind and the sun shone brilliantly. There was nary a cloud in the sky. The scenery was so stunning that a passenger came up to me with tears in his eyes and ordered a glass of champagne. The landscape brought to mind a quote by a man named Frank Worsley who sailed a little ship called the Endurance through these same waters some ninety years ago:

“Many of the tabular bergs appear like huge warehouses and grain elevators, but more look like the creations of some brilliant architect when suffering from delerium…”

At midnight we toasted with champagne at the top of the ship. We were somewhere off the coast of Coronation Island and the sea was as still as a lake.

The New Years’ party was raucous. One man slept with a glass of champagne in his hand at the end of the night, another drunkenly made out with two different girls within a half hour on the dance floor, and a trio of Dutch passengers did this dancing, yelping, drum circle thing in the smoking area of the ship. One of them was even dancing up the wall somehow.

At one in the morning the Russians put on their annual play. It is a tradition here that every New Year after midnight, in the Russian crew mess, just for themselves and ship staff, they will put on a show. Apparently this year’s production was an homage to a series of Russian fairy tales, but to me it seemed more like a Christmas/Slavic Alice in Wonderland. It featured a man wearing a log cabin throughout the play, a knight in shining armour, a few witches, and a heroine that would intermittently lip sync Russian pop music. Our assistant hotel manager had a cameo as what I could only guess was an eccentric billionaire. He appeared onstage dressed all in white, in a wheelchair, and wearing sunglasses with red and green blinking lights on them. He asked for a glass of water, died, and end scene. Then, to culminate, a juggling penguin, a reindeer, and the cottage all came out and danced to a techno version of jingle bells.
It was bizarre, albeit jolly way to usher in 2010.

Finally, at four in the morning, when the party was over and almost everybody was in bed, I had a moment to myself. I sat at the very top of the stairs on the very top of the ship and watched the lazy curving wake left by the Lyubov Orlova in the sunrise-lit bluish orangey sea as it sailed through those beautiful madhouse icebergs.

There is a Czech superstition that maintains that a person’s year will reflect the qualities of the New Year’s Eve that proceeds it, and why not? If there is a grain of truth to this belief…well, I don’t know what to think.

Right now we’re sailing back up the Beagle Channel towards Ushuaia and I’m suffering from a bit of the mid-season blues. I’ve got two months behind me; enough to be sick of what I’m sick of, and two months ahead of me; enough time for it all to seem like it will never end. Wonderland is an exhausting place but that’s okay, life at sea was never supposed to be easy.