Postcard from Port Lockroy

The weather! The weather! It’s snowing now, fat white flakes, but I am red from the sun in spite of my 30SPF sun block. This morning we went through the second — or maybe the third — floating sculpture garden, there are two headed horses and the Black Hole Sun and some of them are huge, floating islands. We visited Port Lockroy today, the place was choked with penguins, just choked with them, so much so that we weren’t allowed to go, well, almost anywhere, the big fat chicks own the place. They plopped down on their bellies in the middle of the concrete sidewalk (all 300 feet of it). One of the guides told me to give the little guy some room, so I walked around him — he was two feet away, I suppose, and as soon as I’d cleared penguin obstacle number one, there was penguin obstacle number two, heading right for me, bellowing for his supper.

You wouldn’t believe the smell, it is ripe, Port Lockroy being the smelliest concentration of penguins so far. The chicks are filthy, just filthy, from lying on their bellies in the guano and mud — it’s because they can’t swim until they have their grown up feathers. The penguins that are molting — getting their winter coats — can’t swim either, not until the new feathers are all in, so they’re sort of crabby, they can’t eat until they can swim and they can’t swim until… you guessed it, they have to have their new coats. There’s a lot of noise, the little ones saying “FEED ME! FEED ME!” and their parents shouting “HERSCHEL, IT’S TIME FOR YOUR VIOLIN LESSON!” Every now and then there’s a big skua (a very large brown gull) who bungees in thinking he’s going to get fresh penguin for dinner, and the parents hate that, they just hate it, so there’s more noise.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle on one of the zodiacs today — a Dutch guy said something I did not hear and then, the Taiwanese woman just lost it with him and said, in surprisingly excellent English “You do not need to talk so rudely about us.” See, there’s been a bit of a, uh, style difference with the Taiwanese group — I found one of them smoking on the beach, and another one pushed me out of the way, physically pushed me, which is not a good move when you’re on the zodiac. I’m not surprised the Dutch guy was impatient, most of the travelers are a little impatient with them. I’m not sure they’re getting the best information, though, they seem a bit disconnected and this must be quite difficult as our daily operations are in English and French.

There are a lot of last minute travelers here — they made it all the way to Ushuaia and booked a screaming deal on this trip, paying about half the standard fare a day or two before sailing. That means, to you and me, 3200 dollars instead of 6000 or so. Most of them are excited and joyful to be here, but I overheard someone at Port Lockroy say. “This is mass tourism, there’s nothing special about this.” I was stunned, It has taken us four days at sea to get here, and prior that we traveled the spine of the planet, and it is ANTARCTICA. Nothing special, he said, while we were standing in this remote place surrounded by fat squawking penguin chicks. I was on deck fairly early this morning and we passed through miles of “brash ice”– bits of glacier broken off and floating in the sea. After watching this for an hour or so, I realized that I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open, gawping. So, yeah, nothing special. Mass tourism. Uh, okay.

I sat on the beach with a big fat penguin for a while, he seemed blissfully unconcerned that I was there, so I sang him Little Grass Shack and he got up and looked at me for a bit. He stood up on his short little legs and I sang some more and he preened and fussed and opened his mouth and let out the crazy noise that penguins make. Their mouths are bright orange all the way inside and out — that bright beak color goes right down inside them so it’s like you can see the sound they’re making while they make it, it’s a bright orange sound. I also wandered around on the beach weaving in-between chunks of ice that were knee high or shoulder high, around the point they got to be even bigger.

It’s all so otherworldly. Sometimes I will look out the window of the ship — it is all very flat seas now — or down the back of the zodiac, or I will stand on the rocks overlooking hundreds, absolutely hundreds of penguins and I will think, “GOOD LORD, I AM IN ANTARCTICA! HOW ON EARTH DID THIS HAPPEN! I am often amazed by things, I think about Angkor Wat or Kealakekua Bay or Ayers Rock or Ruby Beach and I am amazed by those places, but to be in Antarctica, it is the last place, the very last place. It feels like nowhere else. It is an amazement export continent.

There is a delightful German girl here, Krista, she’s 20 something or so. We were standing on the deck after coming in from today’s visits. She said to me, “It is all so wonderful, I hope I will remember it.” “How could you forget this,” I think, “how could you ever forget this?”