South American Adventure: Christmas headed to Antarctica!

Everyone - we've been warned that internet is super spotty going forward so apologies if you dont hear from us again for a while....

What an adventure this trip has been! Never in a million years would I have thought we’d see so many penguins. We spent Christmas day on an island headed to Antarctica named South Georgia Island (check it out on Google Maps), where there literally are hundreds of thousands of real life living and breathing penguins. It is insane. Not to mention the thousands of different breeds of seals and other flying birds everywhere.

A quick aside – we have seen all sorts of whales while on the ship. Within the first few days we saw a few Minke whales, fin whales, a humpback, and a Southern Right whale (this is a super rare sighting – a guide who has been coming to Antarctica for 25 years has only seen two, ever!). The captain is really stoked about whales too, so he’ll follow them whenever we see ‘em…it’s pretty cool.

Humpback Whale

Southern Right Whale

Southern Right Whale next to the ship

Anyway, we made five stops on South Georgia Island over the last three days, and they were all full of wildlife. One of the best things about the trip so far is how close you can get to the animals here – you basically can walk right up to them and say “hello”! It’s like going to the Galapagos Islands, except there is snow everywhere.

On Christmas Eve day, we stopped at two places - Salisbury Plain and Southern Right Cove. So the way it generally works on this ship is that we do expeditions by getting on to 10-person zodiacs that motor to the beach, where we disembark to see all sorts of wildlife. Because of this crazy way of getting to the islands, we have these huge waterproof boots, pants, and jackets that we have to wear for every excursion (I’m sure you see the people in the red jackets in the pictures).

A view of the beach

So Salisbury Plain was our first real outing from the ship. We hopped onto the zodiacs and zipped over to the beach – there was a bit of a swell, so the landing was a little hairy. As soon as we got to the beach we were greeted with a combination of penguins playing in the surf, baby fur seals, and the VERY aggressive dominant male fur seals. A bit more needs to be mentioned about these adult male fur seals. They are a huge nuisance down here and will basically attack anyone (seal, penguin, or person) who steps anywhere near the “territory” that they have claimed. They are super fast and will scream and chase you down if you are close by, so you have to yell and act really big so they won’t attack!

The Three Amigos

Later that day we did a zodiac tour of a place called Southern Right Cove, a bit further south. This beach was littered with thousands of fur seals, especially the pups. There was a huge waterfall coming down from one of the glaciers here…the other crazy thing to see here was an adult fur seal that had just gone to battle – he was bloody all over.