Paula's Antarctic Blog: Day 12 ANTARTICA AT LAST!!

What a day we had today. It is light until after 11:00pm and sunrise is around 3:00am, so I'm never quite sure when I wake up if it's the middle of the night or not until I check the clock. This morning I woke up and glanced out the window and saw icebergs right off our veranda! I checked the clock and it was 6:00am, so I woke Rick up and we spent the next 2 hours taking pictures as the ship made it's way to Brown Bluff. After our usual zodiac ride and once ashore, we hiked up our first glacier with a 500 ft elevation!!! It was slippery in spots where the snow cover had melted off, so we were glad we had brought hiking poles with us. I honestly did not think I would make it all the way to the top, but was so proud of myself when I did. From the top we could see the entire bay and glacier. The hike down was just as challenging as it had been going up, but we finally made it to the bottom with only 1 little slip.

After that fun experience, we hiked along the rocky beach to the Adeli Penguin rookery. Adeli's are quite comical little guys that seem to run everywhere they go instead of walking and like to travel in packs. If one goes toward the water.....a gang follows. It was too funny. We saw lots of babies all brown and fuzzy plus a few Gentoo Penguins nesting with their 2-3 wk old babies. You cannot imagine the smell in these rookeries. We are all beginning to think we will never get the smell out of our noses. Too bad the pictures aren't scratch and sniff...stinky!!!!!!

Antarctic Sound is a parking lot for giant icebergs. As you will see in the pictures, they are just glorious, whether giant, large or small. And the color of blue is more beautiful than the pictures show.

In the afternoon we traveled through the Sound to another cove, that is the sight of the second largest Adeli Rookery. We did zodiac cruises around the cove to see the rookery, observe the Adeli's and see the ice formations. As with Chin Straps, Adeli's surface like dolphins while swimming and are capable of jumping quite high distances to reach the floating ice sheets where they will sit for a while. As we were watching a group of swimming Adeli's one mistook our zodiac for a rock and came flying into it landing at our feet!! I don't know who was more surprised...us or the penguin! Our guide told us to stay quiet and calm and the Adeli did the same as he looked around at us trying to figure out what had just happened to him. He finally hopped up on the wooden seat in the front of the zodiac and stood there until our guide manuvered him to the small iceberg where he proceeded to walk onto the edge of the zodiac and then jump onto the berg! It was the funniest thing we've ever seen and we became quite the point of conversation at our "end of day" briefing. What an experience.

We were not allowed to go ashore in this particular area because of research that is being done there with the Esperanza Station. You'll see from the picture what the station looks like.

This day was voted one of the best of the trip and so fun to share it with new friends.
I probably won't get the pictures downloaded until tomorrow to attach to this because we have over 500 to sift through...just from today.

Time to take some Aleve for my aching legs and get some sleep. Another adventure tomorrow.

Enjoy the pics.....Rick and Paula

PS. Our internet service has been sketchy because of the mountains...so I am running a day behind. We had so many great pics from our arrival in Antarctica, that I am going to divide them into categories. These are our glacier hike. More will follow in following blogs. It is right now 11:17pm on Thurs., Jan. 16 and it is still light...barely sunset. Sunrise is at 3:30am!!!!! Crazy..right now it is 33 degrees..brrrrr and Rick is out on our veranda taking more pictures!