Garden Diary: Antarctica I

Monday, January 16, 2017

Antarctica I

1-16-17 SANTIAGO, CHILE: We arrived here on our way to Antarctica after flights from Newark to Houston and then from Houston to Santiago, Chile. We arrived at the same time as about three other flights, all big planes, and there were massive lines to go through passport control, customs, check-in for our next flight, and security screening. The joys of flying.

Santiago is quite a bit below the equator, about the same Latitude as Atlanta in the U.S. and about the same Longitude as New York, but two hours earlier on the clock. One hour might be for DST, but I don’t understand the other extra hour. It’s summer here and people in the airport are in shorts and tees.

Our third flight is to Punta Arenas, which is almost at the tip of South America on the Strait of Magellan. We overnight there before flying on to King George Island, which is just off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and where we meet our ship.

1-16-17 PUNTA ARENAS, CHILE: We got here at 7 PM with full sun, dusk was at 11 PM. It’s ‘July’ here but people are walking around in parkas, and there is a brisk wind blowing in off the Strait of Magellan. We checked in with One Ocean, our tour managers, had dinner and did a quick tour of the town after the organizational meeting.

Tomorrow we fly again, a charter flight, to King George Island in Antarctica where we board the ship. It’s the same ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, on which we did the Spitsbergen trip two summers ago. It’s a Russian icebreaker designed for scientific expeditions.

We are staying at the Hotel Rey Don Felipe. Did I mention Valerie is on the trip also? She brings a unique perspective and different vision to the adventure.

This first entry for this trip may be the last for a while. I did put up two pix today, but they went up very slowly. The ship WiFi is quite limited. I will probably do what I have done before—tell the stories afterwards.