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To all the best things in life, plus a pile of post and a leaky toilet.

Time to find out what on earth I've been lugging through various airports over the past few days (I can't remember exactly what's in those ridiculously heavy bags but, let's face it, it's probably books) and to discover just how little the kids have missed me!

Thanks for reading my abstruse witterings; it's been nice to be able to share my preposterous adventure with you. I've spent almost a month pottering about in the most incredible places I've ever seen, and on sober reflection I think that I can safely conclude, without fear of doubt or contradiction: "that's enough penguins..."

Mid-Atlantic, just north of the equator

Ten hours out from Santiago, and my journey has one last mighty dose of context to force upon me. From my window I have a perfect view of the horizontal smile of the quarter-crescent moon, and am captivated by its reflections on the wing and, far below, on the surface of the ocean. In the southern hemisphere, of course, the moon and constellations appear upside-down compared with our familiar northern orientation; seeing the moon now on its side, and watching the southern stars recede behind the wing, gives me a sudden and quite disarming sense of the shape of our world, and of the shallowness of the tiny habitat that we're so appallingly bad at sharing.

It's an odd thing for someone with a Wittgensteinian view of language to say (although if you've been reading this blog you'll know that I'm hardly averse to saying odd things) but the view from up here is a beautiful yet merciless reminder that what's out there is what there is, and there isn't anything else.

Having spent the past few weeks considering the work of the Antarctic (and indeed lunar) pioneers - exploring exploration itself, I suppose – I've reached no profound (nor even trivial) conclusions (other than that my photography could do with improvement, and my prose could do with fewer clauses in brackets.) However, I've arrived at a something that appears to be, at least, a procedural restriction. (It also appears to be cribbed shamelessly from set theory and Kurt Godel, but there you go.) We can describe, delineate and eulogise the universe, but all we're doing is measuring ourselves against the bits we've noticed: it remains brutally inflexible and insensitive to our theories and our opinions. Its final, impenetrable defence against our attempts fully to understand it is the unanswerable fact that it INCLUDES us.

I can detect the fingers of M. Gladwell twitching to tear into this obvious piffle (and to accuse me of having become an arch-realist) but such shenanigans will have to wait until I'm back in a eulogised bit of the universe that serves Harvest Pale.

Santiago Airport

Match Report:

In a surprisingly one-sided contest, Excessively Polite Passenger scored an unexpected away win over Excess Baggage Charges. EBC was the form team, coming off the back of a convincing victory over Rude Foreign Businessman, but in fact this worked in EPP's favour. EBC was expecting regular striker Implausible Upgrade Request to figure in EPP's starting line-up, but instead EPP opted for a defensive formation known as the "pretending not to have three carry-on bags by hiding them behind eachother" technique. This enabled the veteran midfielders Ingratiating Smile and Say Please to sneak behind the EBC defence and get the bag on the belt with no obvious signs of hernia or spinal injury. This left newcomer Air Miles Card to combine with that seasoned international Talk About Weather in a sneaky one-two, putting Window Seat Request through to score.

In the closing moments EBC tried to get back in the game with a smart move by Hand Baggage Label, but this was cleared off the line by Already Got One (brought off the bench moments earlier to replace the rather more truthful Haven't Already Got Three.)

This puts EPP through to the next round, a tricky fixture in Madrid against Not Enough Overhead Space.

Ushuaia / Santiago

It's a glorious summer evening in Chile, and the view from the Holiday Inn Santiago Airport is – well, the airport, of course, but in the distance the snowy Andes peaks are blatantly showing off in the low sunlight. Time for a relaxing evening of doing Carnets, editing a few thousand photos, staring in disbelief at my gravity-friendly array of hand baggage, and trying to find something to eat. Being in Chile, a chilli would appear to be favourite; I'm not holding out too much hope for the hotel restaurant, although the menu claims there's "micro brew beer" (which probably means American Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, but it's better than nothing...)

Most of my shipmates are on this evening's flight to Miami, and thence to various bits of North America; there are only two or three others heading for Europe tomorrow, and I think they're in different hotels, so I have a good excuse to be anti-social for a while. My flight to Madrid is tomorrow afternoon, assuming that they don't take one look at my baggage and transfer me to a cargo plane...

It's kind of a wrench having to leave behind the best place in the world – stunning beauty, amazing wildlife, indescribable emptiness – but great to be heading back to the best things in the world – family, friends, Harvest Pale Ale. In a piece of highly fortuitous accidental planning, I'll get back just in time for Mia's Christmas performance and, as an added bonus, the start of the first Test match. Splendid!

South Atlantic

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday: it's sort of accepted practice for the passengers to wear little name badges so that we can remember eachother's names (I keep forgetting to wear mine, of course); it says a lot about Neil Armstrong that he always wears one, despite being the most famous man in the world. I was really hoping that he'd turn out to be a nice chap, and I've not been disappointed: he's quiet, unassuming and very humble about his achievements. I feel very privileged to have met him.

Despite frantically deleting obvious rejects as I go along, I now have roughly 11,000 photos: my hard drive is full, and I'm storing the overspill on CF cards.

Looking back through them this morning, it became grimly apparent that I have 10,997 very average photos and three which are actually quite good, but frankly (given what they're photos of) average will do!

Today was the first stage of the journey home: across from the Falkland Islands to the southern part of Argentina, and then through the Beagle Channel to Ushuaia where we docked at about 10.30. The sea was rather lumpy again – lying down is OK, but moving about the ship was a rather hazardous procedure and frankly I was glad when the uppy-downy stuff was over.

I've spent the past four hours packing, and trying to make my luggage look half as heavy as it actually is; I've somehow managed to acquire enough stuff (OK, I admit it, books) such that my hand baggage weighs more than the check-in weight limit. My check-in baggage weighs more than Switzerland. This could get expensive...

Tomorrow it's a 6.30 start, off the ship and into Ushuaia for a certain amount of pottering about before the charter flight to Santiago in the afternoon; overnight at an airport hotel, Wednesday morning trying to get online and being horrified by excess baggage charges, then an overnight flight to Madrid, connecting flight to Heathrow, and home by Thursday teatime. After three weeks of revisiting the deeds of the great explorers, it seems a little unfair to be able to think in terms of "home by Thursday teatime" rather than "home in nine months, providing we don't get stuck in pack ice and have to spend the winter at 40 below freezing living in an upturned boat and eating lard." Sorry, Sir Ernest...

Falkland Islands: Carcass Island / New Island

You wouldn't know it from the name, but Carcass Island is lovely: lots of wildlife, especially birds of various persuasions (penguins, wildfowl, perching and birds of prey.) The weather (and indeed the landscape) is not dissimilar to the Scottish islands. The cute-ometer was peaking again, as various baby creatures jostled for the attention of the assembled long lenses. I would refer specifically to one unimaginably cute set of chicks, but I've completely failed to find out what they're called. It won't be "duck"; it'll be "Greater Pin-Tailed Brown-Headed Magellanic Aquabeast" or something similarly elaborate.

This afternoon was our last landing: New Island, a private nature reserve, containing vast numbers of rockhopper penguins, black-browed albatrosses (just what we need, more albatrosses) and blue-eyed cormorants. Amongst MANY other things.

Highlight of the day: watching a baby penguin hatch. All together now: "aaaaaaaahhhhhh!"

No hang, on, that wasn't quite right...

Highlight of the day: having dinner with Neil Armstrong. Not quite as cute, but possibly even more memorable.

Falkland Islands: Steeple Jason Island / Saunders Island

Weeks ago, on our first day at sea, I spent two hours trying to get one decent photo of one black-browed albatross. In retrospect, that was not perhaps the wisest use of my time. This morning, on Steeple Jason Island, I spent an hour or so at a vantage point from which I could have pointed the camera randomly in any direction at all and still be 100% certain that it was pointing at an albatross. Or, more likely, a lot of albatrosses. We encountered a surfeit, a superabundance, an embarrassment of albatrosses: 159,000 breeding pairs, according to the last count (and by the time they'd finished counting there were probably half as many again...)

We did in fact see a few other creatures: striated caracaras, upland geese, prions: but it was almost impossible to photograph them because of all the albatrosses in the way.

This afternoon we were at Saunders Island: we landed on a broad, 2-mile long beach which would have been perfect for beach cricket, had it not been for the howling 40-knot sandstorm. In the slip cordon we had gentoo penguins, in the midwicket area there were Magellanic penguins, and at very very very long on (about a mile away) there was a large colony of of rockhopper penguins. Having fought our way through the gritty gusts (which bothered the penguins not a jot) we were pleased to find that the rockhopper penguin is a literal-minded beast: it's a penguin, and it hops on rocks. Jolly good.

Falkland Islands: Stanley

OK, feeling a bit better now... Two days of continual uppy-downy behaviour was more than my feeble constitution is equipped to deal with, I'm afraid.

At noon today we docked at Stanley, and there was much rejoicing from all and sundry because:

1. Stanley doesn't go up and down all the time
   
2. Stanley has shops
   
3. Stanley has pubs
   

We were met at quayside by a fleet of very British buses for a bit of a tour; we stopped to photograph three of the dozens of old ships which have been simply condemned and left to fall apart where they lay in the harbour, then on to see the airport (which is basically a building the size of a small house plus a few sheds), the local neighbourhood minefield, the small but completely excellent museum, the garden of an anti-whaling activist containing whalebone sculptures and his pet reindeer that thinks it's a dog, a garden overrun by garden gnomes, and the memorial to the fallen of the 1982 war.

The atmosphere of Stanley is an odd combination of sombre and grateful remembrance of the Task Force that liberated them, and raving eccentricity in the best British tradition. In fact it's more British than anywhere I've seen in Britain: Union flags abound, all the cars are Land Rovers, every purveyor of food specialises in fish & chips, and there are red phone boxes on street corners.

And there are pubs. Obviously, as the only Englishman on the ship, I was duty-bound to squeeze in a quick pubcrawl: sadly there's no proper beer in the Falklands, so this exercise was more rewarding in a spiritual sense than in a thirst-quenching one (I'd forgotten just how disgusting canned Boddingtons really is), but the final pub score was Englishman 3, Everybody Else 1. Hooray.

Sadly for my bank balance and my hopes of avoiding multiple excess baggage charges, I found a bookshop. I was, I think, by my standards, very restrained...

The injured passenger, by the way, is now in the hospital: it turns out that it's a double pelvic fracture, whereby the bottom part has... Well... Come off. It sounds absolutely dreadful, but apparently he's now in a body cast with enough sedatives and painkillers to seriously inconvenience a rhino.

Tonight we're sailing around the north of the islands, heading for a spectacular place called Steeple Jason Island: it's by no means certain that we'll be able to land, as rough seas could prevent it, but if we can get ashore we'll be joining roughly 300,000 black-browed albatrosses, amongst other winged wonders. Time to unleash the long lens again...

Drake Passage

...and this time it's wobbly.

Most of the passengers, who are clearly androids of some sort, are going about their daily business as though the ship wasn't rolling around all over the place. I, being a mere namby-pamby landlubber human being, have spent another horizontal day, trying to remind myself that being on a turbulent sea in a ship is a lot better than being on a turbulent sea not in a ship.

Tomorrow we arrive at Stanley (which I'm reasonably sure was Port Stanley at one stage, but this appears no longer to be the case.) We're only there for a few hours, so I'm trying to figure out a schedule whereby I can sneak off for a pint at some stage. There are several pubs, and as an Englishman it's my duty to go and complain about the weather in at least one of them.

Southern Ocean

We're heading for the Falklands a day earlier than expected: last night we were contacted by another ship in South Georgia, en route to Antarctica. One of their passengers has broken his pelvis, and urgently needs to be evacuated to a hospital, and the nearest one is at Port Stanley; as we're heading there anyway, we're leaving South Georgia a day early to get him there.

This appears to have worked in our favour, as apparently we're running just ahead of a storm. As it stands, we're in force 8 winds, very heavy seas, lots of people (including myself) "not that hungry" and spending the day lying down; if we'd left on schedule, it would have been much worse. I'm trying not to think about it.

Apparently the ship is being followed by a variety of albatross species, including Royal and Wandering (the big ones): photos will have to wait until I can stay vertical for more than a few seconds...

South Georgia: Stromness / Grytviken

For me, this was perhaps the most eagerly awaited day of the whole journey: a Shackleton-tastic pilgrimage (almost) literally in the footsteps of the great man and his fellow serial survivors, Worsley and Crean.

We started near Stromness, the now long-abandoned whaling station into which the three bedgraggled, starving, exhausted men staggered at the end of their unprecedented 36-hour non-stop crossing of South Georgia. I walked / squelched / waded / scrambled a little over a mile up the wide, stony, peat-bog valley, across roaring streams of glacial meltwater (pausing only to pull an American out of a waist-deep bog) to a waterfall. It was the very waterfall down which, on 20^th May 1916, they abseiled, using a too-short tattered rope with no belay. It was the final obstacle in their odyssey, seven months since the Endurance was crushed by the Weddell Sea ice, 1500 miles to the south-west. Walking down to the derelict station, I tried (hopelessly, of course) to imagine what they might have been thinking, preparing themselves for their first contact with the outside world in over a year and a half.

What I'm thinking, preparing myself for my first contact with a decent pint in over three and a half weeks, is that if Sir Ernest's local had served Harvest Pale he might have thought twice about heading south at every opportunity...

But south is where he headed and where he remains: his is one of a few dozen graves in the little cemetery at Grytviken, the best-known of the derelict whaling stations in South Georgia. He died on his ship Quest, moored across the bay, on his way south for yet another Antarctic adventure. It was 5^th January 1922; he was 47 years old. Unlike the other occupants, he's buried with his head towards the south, as it was in life.

We had a little ceremony by the graveside, drinking a toast to The Boss (as just about everybody called him) while Ron, a jazz trumpeter amongst our number, played Brahms' Lullaby (it had been played at his funeral, by one of his men, on a banjo.) I'm afraid the moment was rather lost on the majority. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that when in a graveyard one removes one's hat; sadly in this regard Carlos the Mexican photographer and I were outnumbered by roughly 150 to 2. As I think The Boss would have agreed (once he stopped spinning beneath our feet), "it's raining" is a pretty shoddy excuse for disrespect. The parade of becapped Americans lining up to be photographed leaning on his headstone (meanwhile trampling all over non-famous people's graves) won't have lessened his RPM, I'm sure; thankfully after a short while the herd dispersed, leaving the sodden graveyard empty but for three or four of us with our thoughts and the rain.

The other headstones reveal short, hard lives: whalers who died as young as 19, a few mariners claimed by the pitiless Southern Ocean, and an Argentine soldier killed in the 1982 conflict – his grave dressed with a wreath of poppies placed by the British government representative.

Whose name is Pat: sadly he isn't the postman, but he is the harbourmaster, and also the bod in charge of policing the 200-mile fishery exclusion zone. As he delightedly told me, last time they seized a boat for fishing without a licence, it was uneconomic to sell it for scrap so they got the Falkland Islands garrison to sink it. This task was undertaken with excessive enthusiasm ("you're only supposed to blow the b****y hatches off") such that a photo of bits of ship scattering to the horizon made the cover of the fishing industry trade journal ("Don't mess with the South Georgia Fishery Inspector")!

Moltke Harbour

Low cloud, light rain, boggy moorland: it's like being on the North Yorkshire moors, but with penguins. This morning we landed at Moltke Harbour, to see the remains of the buildings erected by the German expedition of 1882-3. Bits of the framework survive, along with the collapsed dome from the small observatory, but the relentless weather has flattened all but a few reminders that men once wintered here amongst the elephant seals, penguins and near-constant cloud.

The German expedition was here to observe the transit of Venus; a spectacularly optimistic undertaking, given the weather in these parts (precipitation 300+ days per year) – I don't know whether they succeeded, but I think they were more likely to have observed the transit of six months' worth of cloud.

We spotted quite a few reindeer: they were introduced to the island by Norwegian whalers in the 19^th century, to remind them of home and to give them something else to kill. At least in this instance it was actually for food; there are no indigenous land animals, unless you count (and you really shouldn't) the rats which arrived with the sealers in the 18^th century.

This afternoon we're heading for Jason Bay, first charted by the Swedish expedition of 1901-4 under Nordenskjold (a name that sounds like it might mean "Northern's Cold" if said in a comedy Swedish accent making him ideally suited to Polar exploration, albeit at the wrong end.) Fur seals permitting, we'll land there: fur seals not permitting, we won't. We're not permitted to move them out of the way: the wildlife has right of way here. It's not a good idea to invade a fur seal's territory: attempting to walk through it will leave you with rather less leg than you started with.

This is probably the wrong time to start wondering whether my camera rucksack really is waterproof. I think the pull-out raincover (which I'd forgotten about until 5 seconds ago) is... Er...

South Georgia: Cooper Bay / Drygalski Fjord

Macaroni Penguin: sounds like it was invented by Delia, looks like it was invented by Dali. This particular beastie has long bright yellow spiky bits where lesser creatures have eyebrows, making it look like a punk Patrick Moore. It nests up in the tussock grass: no plebian beach-dwelling for these dandy aristocrats. They're strictly up-town amphibians.

After yet another morning of photographing implausible wildlife, we cruised into Drygalski Fjord, focal point of an utterly spectacular glacial landscape. Countless high peaks stretching up and back into the white interior; hanging glaciers poised over vertical voids; and the ancient Risting Glacier creeping down to its fractured edge, 50m high and half a mile wide, perpetually crumbling into the end of the fjord. After lunchtime's mixture of horizontal snow, sunshine, wind, fog, sleet and sudden calm, the fjord presented itself clad in sunshine untroubled by anything as namby-pamby as an ozone layer (nose peeling again despite a liberal dose of Factor 50) and it was a good day to own a polarizing filter. That's another 900 photos, then (895 of which suffer from over-use of polarizing filter, of course...)

South Georgia: Gold Harbour / St Andrews Bay

There was a plan to get up at 4.30 for a pre-sunrise landing. It was a silly plan. Thankfully, the weather recognised this and saved us from our ill-conceived self-induced sleep-deprivation: 40-knot winds and 8ft waves don't make for safe beach landings, so the alarm call was delayed until a comparatively civilised 8.00 for breakfast.

The weather in South Georgia changes as quickly as a prop forward when the bar's open: by the time we pootled off down the coast in a Zodiac it was calm with occasional hail; landing at Gold Harbour 30 minutes later it was breezy and cloudy with light snow. After 15 minutes the wind and snow stopped and the sun came out, albeit briefly. Just like Trent Bridge in April.

Cute? I'll tell you what's cute: baby elephant seals. OK, they weigh several hundred kilograms, but they're still cute.

And Oakum Boys are jolly cute too. Who? Well, apparently, many of the chaps who came down here on the early sealing ships had spent time at the pleasure of whichever majesty was around at the time, and had been compelled to wear brown hairy prison garb made of waste fabric and cork shavings: this substance had a name which in its original Old English, Norse or (for all I know) Zulu sounded like "Oakum". On first spotting king penguin chicks, which are the VERY cute brown hairy ones, the aforementioned sealers saw a resemblance, and named them Oakum Boys. Naturalists (being the jovial souls that they are) maintain the tradition.

This afternoon we moved on to St Andrews Bay, and what I can only describe as "that's enough penguins." About a quarter of a million king penguins, in fact; along with vast numbers of elephant seals, fur seals, giant petrels and astonished tourists. At any one time there were about 50 of us ashore, giving us roughly 5000 penguins each. The brown fluffy ones are chicks about 8 months old; they waddle about looking confused, and occasionally one will throw a wobbly and run around in circles squeaking and flapping its flippers. As a tour manager, of course, I'm familiar with this kind of behaviour...

South Georgia: King Haakon Bay

This morning the snowy peaks of South Georgia appeared on the horizon. By late morning we were at the mouth of King Haakon Bay, adjacent to Rosa Cove (where Shackleton and five of his men finally made landfall after their epic journey from Elephant Island.)

After a few days, their boat repaired, they moved to the head of the bay, landing at a place they called Peggotty Bluff - Peggotty being a character in Dickens' "David Copperfield" who, like them and their companions left behind at Elephant Island, lived in an upturned boat. We went ashore there this afternoon, to find greenery (the first we've seen for 10 days) – mosses and lichens, plus a few tiny shrubs. Nothing bigger, though – South Georgia is treeless. On the beach were a few groups of moulting King Penguins, some fur seals, and quite a number of elephant seals (including some pups.) At risk of invoking Mike Gatting again, elephant seals are lumbering beasts which can weigh several tons, spend most of the day doing nothing whatsoever, and are equipped with an unnecessarily elaborate nose. Think "Vogon Constructor Fleet" and you're about there. Fur seals, however, are the ones you need to avoid tripping over (and anyway, tripping over an elephant seal would require a step-ladder) – they are highly aggressive. They're probably a tad peeved about having been hunted almost to extinction.

It was quite eerie walking in the footsteps of the great Shackleton, Worsley and Crean; from this point they surveyed the surrounding mountains and set off on their extraordinary 20-mile crossing of the totally uncharted mountain range to get to the whaling station at Stromness – totally unequipped, exhausted and with no kind of guidance (other than Frank Worsley's uncanny sense of direction), they achieved in 36 hours what highly-equipped teams of mountaineers routinely fail to do today.

Along the beach, I found a small piece of driftwood: obviously part of a ship, and therefore obviously part of a ship that went down somewhere in these remote and frigid waters. I was immediately and vividly reminded of a day when I was on a beach with my father, 40-odd years ago: we found a button from a sailor's jacket, washed up on the tide. Dad had been a sailor, a long time ago. We sat there with our thoughts and eachother. We never spoke about it, but we shared what it meant. The sea kept its secret.

The weather today was good by South Georgia standards: i.e. it didn't rain OR snow. Diamond-clear streams run down from the fractured edges of glaciers, cutting through the mossy, peaty banks of tussock grass to the stony beach. Antarctic terns and giant petrels nest in the sparse vegetation; going too close to a tern's nest is a bad idea, as they are accomplished dive-bombers (a direct hit on a camera lens is not uncommon.)

Inland from the beach we found a pair of South Georgia Pintails, alias the Vampire Duck: it's the only carnivorous duck, feeding (when it feels so inclined) on seal blood (a by-product of giant petrels' total lack of table manners.) We also encountered one of the aforementioned giant petrels having its lunch, and I'd really rather not go into the details: suffice it to say that Count Duckula was lurking...

The Scotia Sea

I spent a while up on the bridge last night, chatting with the captain and inspecting the mighty array of gadgetry at his disposal. Although three separate radars are used to check for icebergs, the most trusted and essential ice-detection device is still an organic one: an experienced person with a good pair of binoculars. The most dangerous bergs are the smallest ones, as the radar can't isolate them from surrounding waves.

Today we're continuing our journey to South Georgia. For us it's a 2-day cruise on a stabilised expedition ship, in calm weather; for Shackleton and five of his men it was 17 days through gales in a 22-foot open lifeboat. They only saw the sun, and could thereby check their position, four times during their entire voyage – the rest of the time they steered by dead reckoning, a feat of navigation utterly beyond comprehension. It's a little like finding your way around a golf course blindfold by memorising the map and counting your steps to figure out where you are, but with 50-knot winds, cold, thirst and starvation to contend with. And if you don't arrive on the 18^th green, 28 people will die. Pressure, anyone? The navigator's name was Frank Worsley, and it's worth looking him up: a genuine hero.

We've had another whale encounter: several fin whales appeared alongside, bringing the photographic hordes rushing on deck. Fin whales don't do as much "whale stuff" as humpbacks (breaching the tail etc.) – you only really see the blowhole and the back, but there's an awful lot of whale down there. It's the second-biggest species – up to 27m long - and very fast. I feel a particular kinship with the fin whale, as it's the only cetacean that eats anchovies...

Elephant Island

Apparently Elephant Island is out there somewhere, but the weather has finally read the script: a combination of snow, wind, fog and pack ice prevents us from getting anywhere near it. It isn't possible to land there anyway – that's Shackleton's department – so we've turned northeast and begun the crossing to South Georgia, about 1000 miles distant.

There has been some excitement today, though: I was loitering on the foredeck, photographing the grey wall of weather behind which Elephant Island was lurking, when two humpback whales appeared just ahead of the ship. They hardly breached the surface, their backs appearing just for a moment to blow and then dive, and only once did one of them clear its tail, but they came right up beside the ship so that we could get a real sense of how ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS they are. It's amazing how something so bulky can be so agile; they move as though in slow-motion. I was going to try to find a proper simile, but now I've got the phrase "a sort of maritime Mike Gatting" stuck in my head so I may as well give up.

The sea is decidedly lumpy today: the crew have discreetly (and possibly slightly sarcastically) distributed sick-bag dispensers all over the ship, so I'm going to hide in my cabin and start editing the 5,970 photos I've taken so far...

Erebus & Terror Gulf

Another uncharacteristically calm, bright and sunny day in the Weddell Sea: the ship was still wedged in the fast ice, so this morning we all wandered off across the frozen surface of Erebus and Terror Gulf, between James Ross Island and Vega Island on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Several Crabeater Seals (which don't eat crabs) were lazing on the ice by the ship, and occasional squadrons of Adelie penguins (which don't eat in a deli) strolled nonchalantly past while I messed about unconvincingly with tripods and wide-angle lenses.

By lunchtime we were back aboard: the ship reversed out of the ice, rammed into it again for fun and video purposes, and then turned north. The planned route is back up the coast of the peninsula, through Iceberg Alley (again), to Elephant Island. When I went below deck for lunch it was sunny, still and not particularly cold. When I went out again 20 minutes later, in response to another Emperor penguin sighting, it was snowing, blowing a gale and VERY cold. This place is Michael Fish's worst nightmare...

There was indeed an Emperor on an ice floe, with an Adelie standing nearby to give a handy size comparison. Adelies are about 60cm high; Emperors are three times bigger, huge great things that look like elephant seals in penguin costumes. The captain did another grand job of sneaking up on it so we got some reasonable photos, blizzard conditions notwithstanding.

The sea this evening is decidedly hilly, and strewn with growlers (very small icebergs) so the National Geographic team have been regaling us with tales of shipwreck and disaster. Nice...

Weddell Sea / Brown Bluff

During the night we rounded the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula then headed south-east, into the Weddell Sea.

At 9.30 there was, as Ralph the National Geographic photo boffin put it, a photography emergency: tabular icebergs stretching in all directions, flat-topped floating giants with sheer cliff edges, some the size of football pitches, some as big as towns. The sea was flat calm and the sky sunny: as the ship zigzagged between the walls of ice, there was much clicking of shutters and saying of "wow".

By 1pm we'd anchored just off Brown Bluff, a volcanic beach beneath snowy slopes leading to a towering cliff face at the northeastern edge of the Antarctic mainland. On the slopes were gentoo and Adelie penguin nesting sites, the two separate groups occupying the same physical space like a seabird Jerusalem. I was ashore for four hours, watching the nesting pairs and capturing the marvellous cacophony on an audio recorder.

This evening we continued south until we hit fast ice (thin but unpassable ice bound to the shore): the captain ran the ship into it (a not very subtle way of parking for the night) and tomorrow the weather will dictate what we can do

One last piece of excitement this evening: the ship having stopped, Ian the bird bloke looked out along the edge of the ice (there are penguins and seals hauled out all along the ice edge for miles in each direction) and – using some sort of ornithological super-power – spotted an Emperor penguin over a kilometre away from the ship. We didn't expect to see Emperors, we're at the far northern extremity of their range. Even with the absurd abundance of long lenses on the ship it was impossible to get a good photo at this distance, but just seeing the thing through binoculars was a treat.

Port Lockroy / Neko Harbour

Last night we got as far as 65 degrees 45.25 south, before the ice became too thick for the ship's ice-strengthened hull to penetrate. We turned north at about 10pm, and half-a-dozen of us spent another few hours on deck photographing icebergs in the evening sunlight.

Another rather snowy early-morning landing today, to visit a gentoo penguin breeding colony, followed by a Zodiac cruise around an iceberg graveyard – a natural harbour where bergs the size of 15-storey office blocks (with their lower 12 floors underwater) float in, get stuck, and melt (over a period of many years.)

Back aboard for lunch, during which a short trundle between bays brought us to Port Lockroy, a former British military monitoring station and now a museum under the control of the British Antarctic Heritage Trust. About the size (and appearance) of a cricket pavilion, the station is maintained as it would have been in the early 60's (complete with Marmite jars.) I duly spent much of the afternoon explaining Marmite to sceptical Americans, my patriotic fervour fuelled by the sight of the Union Flag flying over the station (and the presence in the museum of a selection of items that would have sustained Splendid British Chaps during their 2-year tours of duty down here: Bovril, HP Sauce, and – of course – Spam...)

I had dinner with Dennis, National Geographic's splendidly eccentric diver / sealife expert; we talked of plankton and Jethro Tull, and many life forms in between. Top chap.

At 9pm we had an unexpected bonus – a landing at Neko Harbour, on the mainland of the Antarctic continent. While most of the guests and crew busied themselves with body-sledging down a huge slope above the inlet, a few of us photography bores trudged up the hill (in knee-deep snow) to be rewarded with a view of speech-disabling beauty. Even by the standards of this incredible place, the wide and silent vista of mountains, icebergs, snow, sea and sky, dotted with penguins, petrels and terns, displayed a staggering grandeur beyond anything that words (or lenses) can relate. No, really.

It's now 1am, and we're heading for the Weddell Sea, on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Tomorrow's events will depend on ice and weather conditions, but whatever they are they'll probably start early. The general idea seems to be to cram in as much exciting experience as possible every day, which is marvellous, although a bit of sleep might come in handyzzzzz.......

Further South

Incredibly, today managed to surpass even the previous amazing few days for, er, amazingness. On deck at 7am for the desperately photogenic passage southwards through the Lemaire Channel: seven miles long, one mile wide, it separates Booth Island from the mainland of Antarctica. That'll be another 300 photos, then.

The ship anchored at the southern end of the Channel; following a quick breakfast we took to the boats – kayaks, in fact, for an hour or two of paddling about between (very small) icebergs. Then we landed and explored the penguin colonies on Booth Island: gentoo, chinstrap and Adelie penguins sharing a neighbourhood. The French explorer Charcot wintered here in 1909, and the remains of his huts are still here.

Back to the ship for lunch, and then we headed south. There's ice as far as the eye can see (which, in the ultra-clear air, is a very long way indeed) – all sizes, from huge icebergs (miles wide) down to the stuff that would go jolly nicely in a G&T (albeit a rather salty one.) The ship is ice-strengthened, and can barge straight through a lot of it. I spent the afternoon on deck photographing icebergs – most white, some mottled, some a vivid blue - and the increasingly surreal icy seascape with its backdrop of glacier-covered mountains along all horizons.

The day's highlight arrived at about 5pm: a crabeater seal was spotted on an ice floe a mile ahead, and one of the naturalists reckoned he'd seen a large fin nearby. The ship sneaked (as much as a walloping great ship CAN sneak) up to the ice floe – despite that part of the channel being uncharted (eek) – and we had a good look at the seal, but no other creatures appeared. The seal gave us a nonchalant shrug and slid into the sea; we turned south again but, within minutes, a family of Killer Whales breached right in front of us. There were seven or eight of them, and over the next hour they repeatedly disappeared and reappeared (at one point passing under the ship) and we all gave thanks for long lenses and big memory cards.

We're now continuing southwards – we're already further south than any expedition ship has been this season, and we're going to see how far we can get before the ice becomes impassable. The ideal goal would be to cross the Antarctic Circle, but in this part of the continent the pack ice usually extends too far north to allow it; the likelihood is that we'll encounter pack ice somewhere in the Grandidier Channel this evening, at which point we'll have a celebratory snifter and turn back.

Capping the day's extraordinary events, I can now call my autobiography "Neil Armstrong Borrowed My Binoculars."

Dorian Bay / Palmer Station

Another early start – as the ship's meteorologist put it, this morning's weather was very Antarcticy: grey, well below freezing, windy, horizontal snow. Landing at Damory Point, next to a well-kept British refuge hut (and a rubbish Argentinian one), a Gentoo penguin colony had read the script and obediently did penguiny things for the photographic benefit of sundry blue-parka-clad folk. I had a brief crisis of conscience regarding the morals of recording penguins in the act of making more penguins, and sort of mumbled a rather pathetic "don't mind me" in a vaguely British way. They didn't raise any obvious objection.

Back to the ship for lunch, while we pootled 30 miles around the corner to a completely different climatic zone: an excursion to Palmer Station (a permanently-manned/womaned US research base) took place on a flat calm sea with nary a cloud in the sky. Palmer is regarded as the Bahamas of the US Antarctic posting, as it isn't McMurdo (huge and cold) or South Pole (very very very cold.) The staff seemed suitably pleased with their lot, and very welcoming: they're only allowed 12 ship-visits per year, so they were pleased to see us (especially as many dollars were spent in their suspiciously well-stocked gift shop...)

From Palmer we nipped across the bay to an Adelie penguin colony at Torgersen Island. The now-familiar monochrome tomfoolery was enlivened by the presence of several HUGE elephant seals, slobbing out on the snow waiting for a tourist to mistake them for a rock. Sadly for YouTube, that didn't happen, but apparently when it does it can get messy.

Today's photo count: 924. Most of which are identical images of not-quite-in-focus (or not-quite-in-shot) penguins (plus three perfectly-in-focus shots of my own feet, suggesting that I need thinner gloves...)

Back on the ship, we were joined by the crew of Palmer Station for a talk by Neil Armstrong (he compared the voyages of Cook and Apollo, paying tribute to the Brits who explored without a clear destination.) I had a brief chat with Neil after his talk, then went on deck to photograph the sunset. It's 11pm: in the northwestern sky, bands of gold, mauve and red cloud; to the northeast, a thin crescent moon. Oo-er...

 

Deception Island 2

Well.

That was a bit of a day. The ship anchored off Bailey Head, on the east of Deception Island, at 10.30am; by 11am the first Zodiacs were heading for shore. Bailey Head is the HQ of rather a lot of chinstrap penguins: an estimated 80,000 at the moment. Most of them were at home today. I had two hours ashore, landing on a black volcanic beach and hiking up across the ice to a ridge overlooking the colony. How many photos? Er, about 800. Photogenic little folk, chinstrap penguins.

And they make rather a lot of noise, which is how they recognise eachother: they can't tell eachother by sight, because they all look very, well, penguiny.

Even from the ship, they were an impressive sight, porpoising through the water in groups of 20 or so, but close-up they're just wonderful. We're not supposed to get closer to them than 15 feet, but the penguins don't know that – they just wander up, cast a quizzical glance ("yes? Can I help you?") and then wander off again like small monochrome Charlie Chaplins.

Back on board for a quick lunch and a frantic photo-upload session, and then we sailed through Neptune's Bellows (a rather narrow passage between sheer cliffs) into the flooded caldera of the volcano (which is what Deception Island is: not an island but a volcano. Deceptive...) The shoreline was inaccessible, being guarded by up to a mile of ice, so the ship had to stop – by ramming the aforesaid ice and burying itself a few hundred yards into it. Better go for a stroll, then...

Down came the steps, and out poured the ship's population onto the ice: utterly bizarre, and a tad nippy underfoot. I gather that a Russian icebreaker has been stuck in pack ice in the Weddell Sea (about 100 miles away) for 10 days now, so they're probably getting a bit bored of it, but our assembled company had a splendid time taking the obligatory "look at me, I'm pulling the ship" photos and not jumping up and down (just in case.)

Before leaving Deception Island, we pulled into Whaler's Bay so that three lunatics could swim (wallow) in the thermal-vent-heated (to about 3 degrees above freezing) water, one partial lunatic (me) could stand on the windy foredeck and take too many photos of the abandoned whaling station, and everybody else (i.e. the sensible ones) could huddle in the lounge with hot drinks and say "wow" to eachother. A lot.

As if all that wasn't surreal enough, in a few minutes it's "Captain's Cocktail Hour." I think that means for everyone, not just the captain.

We're now heading south again, with a view to arriving somewhere else incredible in the morning...

Deception Island

On deck at 7.30am for the first sight of land to the south – Desolation Island, in the South Shetland islands. Light snow, dozens of giant petrels following the ship, and an abundance of long lenses with shivering parka-clad owners wishing they'd brought three pairs of gloves.

We've just passed an iceberg with a few dozen penguins at its base, and are sailing around the north of Deception Island towards Bailey Head (home to 100,000 pairs of chinstrap penguins). Sea conditions permitting, we'll be going ashore in a few hours – I hope my military-grade uber-wellies really are waterproof...

Drake Lake

The Drake Passage, south of Cape Horn, is generally reckoned to be the wildest, stormiest, most seasick-inducing stretch of water on the planet.

Today, however, it's about as rough as a small puddle in a light breeze. This condition is known to the crew as "Drake Lake", and to the rest of us as "thank **** for that." Apparently we've sneaked between two storm systems, thus avoiding the anticipated/dreaded 30-foot waves etc. Jolly good.

Much of today has been taken up with assorted briefings: how to get into a Zodiac without capsizing it, how to avoid a seabird projectile-vomit attack, how to tell a Southern Giant Petrel from a Northern Giant Petrel (hint: don't even try...) A great deal of incompetent photography has occurred: this morning I took about 300 photos of a Black-Browed Albatross and, having edited them down to remove the ones which were out of focus, grotesquely overexposed or just that bit too blurred, I'm left with one perfectly-in-focus photograph of three-quarters of a Black-Browed Albatross. You'll have to take my word for it that it's a Black-Browed Albatross, because the brows are generally found on the head, which is in the quarter that didn't quite make the cut...

Still sailing due south, we've just crossed the Antarctic Convergence, where the waters of the Southern Ocean meet the Circumpolar Current and the sea temperature drops from 5 degrees to sub-zero in the space of 30 miles. The air temperature has dropped accordingly from "a tad parky" to "brrrrrrr" and by dawn there may be icebergs on the horizon. We're heading for Deception Island in the South Shetlands, with a view to landfall in the morning. Assuming it's still there, of course: it's an active volcano.

Ushuaia

It's a ship. It's definitely not a boat. It's a BIG ship.

That was a rather long day, but full of good stuff:

1. Charter flight from Santiago (Chile) to Ushuaia (Argentina): more great views of the Andes.
   
2. Short tour of Tierra del Fuego National Park.
   
3. Lunch on a catamaran, cruising along the Beagle Channel.
   
4. Photographed seals, cormorants, mountainous bits of Patagonia.
   
5. Entered asynchronous orbit around Neil Armstrong. Sent probe to the surface, establishing basic contact, but have yet to attempt a landing.
   
6. Realised that cheesy Apollo 11 metaphor may be tricky to sustain for three weeks, but we'll see how we go...
   

Time for a snifter and a proper night's sleep. Tomorrow: crossing the Drake Passage, where the Atlantic and Pacific meet (and not on good terms) – apparently it can be "a bit wild." We'll see...

5.30am

...is not a civilised time to be up. Charter flight to Ushuaia today, then on to the ship. Eek – flight called – got to run (again...)

Madrid to Santiago

Frankly I’d rather be asleep, but circumstances (in the corporeal form of a jovial Chilean gentleman who WILL NOT SHUT UP) are not on my side.

It’s almost dawn, central Brazil lurking vaguely beneath the thin clouds below. Senor Jovial is lurking vaguely in the aisle, having found a Spanish-speaking victim in the row behind. He’s been talking, amiably but loudly, from the moment (10 hours ago) that we boarded; on the ground he’s probably the kind of lovely bloke who is the life and soul of the tapas bar and for all I know he’s declaiming a very interesting overview of Pre-Columbian history. In current circumstances, however (he’s surrounded by an Airbus 340 full of people who wish they were asleep) I’m stricken with a highly uncharacteristic but unmistakable urge to punch him. I suspect, however, that this is not so much to do with his activity as an agent of sleep-deprivation, and more a function of his uncanny resemblance to Diego Maradona.

Remarkable. In the 10 seconds since I finished typing that sentence he has sat down, said a polite “good morning” to me, stopped talking and is now engrossed in a word-search puzzle book. If he’s been reading this over my shoulder, the putative punch may be coming the other way, but I suspect that his English is as absent as his Spanish has hitherto been omnipresent.

Two hours later, and the Andes are just plain showing off between all visible horizons. Snow on the peaks, greeny-grey elsewhere; all mottled by a fast-passing camouflage pattern, courtesy of high fractured cloud cover.

After half an hour of “that’s enough Andes”, we’re descending over Chilean territory – possibly the silliest shape of any country (2500 miles long, 100 miles wide)- the glide-slope weaving between hills and glacial valleys with vineyards tucked like orderly armpit-hair (what?) into their upper extremities. Then suddenly it’s a wide-open plain, and the wheels are down, and who’s that idiot who hasn’t turned off all electrical devices and stowed his bag under the seat in front of him?...

On the ground: so, having spent the past week grumbling that Chilean import restrictions dictated that I couldn’t bring a big jar of Marmite with me, it turns out that the ground-handling company whose vans are sarcastically driving about the tarmac while I reclaim Too Much Hand Baggage from all corners of the plane is called La Marmite. Hmm...

Heathrow

Aha - so THAT's how BT OpenZone works... About to board flight to Madrid, and thence to Santiago, The Man With Too Much Hand Luggage has overcome a small technological hurdle, just in time to switch off and run for the gate. Terminal 3: no real ale. Boo.....

Aaargh eek panic etc...

The eve of departure: having had four months to get ready for this trip, I now find that I'm leaving in 17 hours, and have yet to do the following:
1. Pack
2. Arrange for someone to run my business while I'm messing about with penguins
3. Learn to use the mountain of gadgetry that I haven't packed (or indeed paid for) yet
4. Panic (I'll do that in 16 hours...)
I bet Shackleton was SLIGHTLY more organised...