5 Days In Antarctica; Tips and What to Know

My spectacuar trip to Antarctica

Our first taste of Antarctica wasn’t actually on the continent but at a hotel. I brought my my Canon R5 and some lenses – including a macro lens, a telephoto 100-400mm with a 2x doubler, and a standard 24-104mm zoom.

First we wet to a conference room where we got a safety briefing for what was going to happen on the trip. Here, bags got weighed, and everyone received a jacket (that they could keep!) and boots (boots were sadly not keepers).

Quick side note: no sitting or kneeling on the ground due to bird flu concerns. After that, we learned about the boundries with animals. You’ve got to stay like 15m from birds, penguins, seals, and any marine mammals. We wrapped up the day with a nice dinner with everyone else on the trip, and my mom warned us that this kind of meal wouldn’t be on the boat. Tomarrow, Antartica!

Landing in Antarctica is all about the pilot eyeballing it. You have to have perfect weather, which means a lot of flight changes. When the weather was just right, we scrambled out the door, hopped on buses, and headed to the airport. The planes needed to be light so they could land on the short runway, so weight was limited to 20kg a person 😬.

After a bit of waiting, we finally got on the Antarctica Airways plane. Takeoff was smooth, but landing on a gravel runway was a bit bumpy. After that, a bumpy bus ride took us to a “beach” (which was really just gravel). And by the way, Antarctica doesn’t smell like pristine glacial air, it smells like bird poop. We did some safety drills about falling off the zodiac (trust me, you don’t want that), and then we finally made it to our ship. It’s not a massive Disney cruise boat – more like a medium, multi-hundred person boat. Once we got on, our boots got disinfected, and then we went to the mudroom.

Day three started with a delicious breakfast before we headed to Grahm Passage. We hopped on zodiacs for a cruise and saw a lot of whales. We had a spectacualr lunch while sailing to Portal Point, where we saw more whales, but not as many. At the end of the day, we had a recap briefing, followed by the Captain’s Welcome ( which is really just a speech with tasty drinks in the main lounge). After that there was a penguin talk at 9:15 that I decided to got to. You could also watch talks from your room TV.

We woke up at 7:30 a.m for some pancakes and Nutella. Weather wasn’t great, so there was. no morning zodiac outing. I spent some time playing a massive grand piano they had on board, and I got some compliments! We continued on through the ice, but the bad weather didn’t go away. While I was taking a nap, they announced a whale breaching. At first, I was like, “Eh, it probably happened once, then went away”. But then there was another anouncement saying it was still there! I scrambled out of bed and went up to the top deck. Once it was done, the whale breached over 40 times! I got some great pictures with my big zoom lens. When the bad weather subsded, we finally got on a zodiac cruise. We saw some cool icebergs, but we had to cut it short due to the weather. After a recap, we had a “toast session,” an auction for charity, and a somewhat delayed but tasty dinner. Overall, a pretty awesome day in Antarctica.

Antartica was a once in a lifetime trip, and I am very grateful I got to go.