10th March 2017, Day 6

The next morning, the clouds were still grey and stretching past the horizon, but at least there was no worry of a blizzard or precipitation. We loaded up, freezing because of the wind and the lack of direct sunshine.

But we were closer than ever to the iceforms on land, enough to make out the many intricate crevasses which caught the light in various shades of white, grey and blue.

Wonder what we might see today?

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 My idea of a dream house, a cabin in the middle of a vast wilderness.

Today, we would be landing on D'Hainaut Island. The red cabin is in fact an emergency refuge for scientists who might find themselves facing down an incoming blizzard. It has supplies enough for a couple of weeks, and is open to anyone but on the promise that anything taken will be replaced for the next stranded group that stumbles in.

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The landing was first this time. I hung out with a bunch of Gentoos right next to shore for a while, knowingly avoiding some ominous features further up the beach, at least for a while.

How cute are penguins, seriously!

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Also spotted some fur seals further up the beach. Since they seemed to be playing with one another, they were distracted enough for us to get a bit closer than usual.

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An unreal landscape.

It's funny that the extreme Northern and Southern parts of our planet seem to have a literal blue filter in the air, that makes everything seem calmer, almost ghostly.

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I hinted earlier about depressing sights further up the beach, and this was it. A whalebone graveyard from the Heroic Age of Antarctic expeditions.

As humans began to venture further across the oceans, the whale must have seemed like a beast right out of myth. And for some reason, that triggers a drive to kill things we fear or don't understand. Some old sailors' logs write that it was hard to sleep at night in open ocean because there were so many whales singing and splashing all around. But within the span of the 19th century, humans had hunted several species of whales to the brink of extinction... now, the seas are silent, and spotting whales feels like a rare event...

Why did we do it? For whale oil, for meat, for whalebone, for bragging rights? Ultimately, it doesn't matter... all that remains is to come to grips with our legacy, a slice of which laid bare in front of me on this beach.

Seeing this triggered something in me, and I'm compelled to speak out for not just whales, but seals, dolphins, elephants, rhinos and the many other beautiful precious fauna that share the planet with us. With great power comes great responsibility, and as the most advanced species on the planet, the onus is on us to safeguard our natural heritage, whose biggest threat is humanity itself. Our unthinking impulses made the dodo extinct among many other species, and is now killing the Barrier Reef among many other ecosystems. But we can change, and change we must!

(FYI, the last photo might give you some scale to picture these creatures. I'm sitting next to a part of a whale skull, and the hole in the center is the blowhole. So this piece of bone spans the width a whale's head, and it was as wide as I'm tall... if I lay prone next to it, it was slightly longer! That's how big whales are.)

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the ice watches

patiently

the agonizingly slow metamorphosis

of flesh to bone

without condemning

without condoning

.

there is no absolute morality;

there is no sin

certainly no worthy recompense

for crimes against the innocent

.

the ice watches

I pay my respects

.

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It was time to go on a boat tour. I made one more quick round around the island, capturing its surreal details in all directions.

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Wondering what we'd get to see on the boats today? Another ice safari perhaps.

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Zipping around on the Zodiac, in awe of the sheer walls of ice all around us, contorting into fantastical caves and crevasses as alluring as they were deadly.

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How very tiny humans are (on the right, on the waterline). How short lived compared to the ice giants of Antarctica. How dramatic we must seem, restlessly searching for, finding, losing, and then resuming the search for meaning, all in the span of centuries while the ice barely budges across a single knoll. Ah human, when will you learn?

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Penguins porpoising past us. With the engine shut off, this is the quiet of nature at its loudest. What beautiful silence.

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Ship for scale. Not many places in the world do you get unbroken views across kilometers on end.

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Mini-bergs were just as fascinating as their gigantic cousins.

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We spotted a crabeater seal dozing off, using a floating iceberg as a hammock of sorts. You can see from the uneven fur that this seal too is undergoing catastrophic molting to regenerate new fur for the winter, which is apparently a tiring process.

To get this close to wildlife was a sublime experience, and to see animals that don't instinctively fear humans was eye-opening. Every other animal and bird has learnt to fear us over the centuries, only time knows what we did to them. But maybe one day they will not fear us once more.

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Imagine the lighting inside that ice cave when the sun strikes it just right.

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A beautiful icemass with a distinctive spire in the distance. Zodiac on left for scale. @ttbranson and I had a shared moment of awe here.

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Ice taught me to love wrinkles, souvenirs time leaves in loving memory.

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We spotted our first whales up-close on a Zodiac: two humpback whales sleeping. Sleeping whales are also said to be "logging", which makes sense because they look rather like floating logs, except for the regular geysers from their blowholes (which you can barely make out in this photo).

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A curious humpback in the distance sticking its head out to check out the commotion. Whale watchers call this move "spyhopping". I found it rather playful!

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A couple of degrees above freezing - what barely registers as a temperature fluctuation to a human can be the difference between life and death for an iceform. The amount of ice is declining in the Antarctic Peninsula, disproportionately. Each day we do nothing is another eternity too late for our polar caps.

And yet, earlier this morning (circa June 2017), Donald Trump announced officially that the current US administration will be pulling out of the hard-fought and won Paris Agreement.

Truly astonishing, and terrifying that a species can be its own biggest threat.

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As you can probably tell by the number of photos, I felt as if the day would never end. Truly, the sheer exhilaration of witnessing such exotic beauty made us all feel so alert and alive, that every second somehow felt longer, fuller, and more packed.

Perhaps this is what the Buddhists aspire to when they talk about being mindful. In this sense, travelling (to the end of the world in this case) isn't marvelous because of *what* you see, but because it reminds you *how* to see. Truly, deeply, sincerely, with new eyes and an open mind.

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Truly, nature is the gift that keeps on giving, and Antarctica as the world's largest wilderness has the sights and sounds of nature in oodles.

If you’re still reading at this point and liking what you see, please do share with family and friends who might enjoy this sort of thing too, because my goal is to reach as many people as possible. Antarctica after all belongs to all of us, and how can you be passionate to protect something you know little or nothing about?

(Pictured: a flock of Antarctic terns, arguably one of the most elegant birds on the Peninsula.)

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The sun rays found a break in the clouds, brilliantly lighting up an entire glacier. Perhaps you can make out the speck-silhouette of a bird, and only hazard a guess as to the bigness of the landscape.

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Ultimately, I found myself contemplating what it means to be an individual. Look at all this ice. They're all made of the same thing, at broad stroke by the same natural cycles and processes. But each looks different, has a different colour, personality, carries the variant scars of time proudly. Each iceform lives an eternity, is born, it grows, it experiences the world, and sooner or later it ceases to exist.

Aren't humans the same, really? We are all humans, be it a student in Johannesburg, a Bedouin nomad in the Gulf, a software programmer in the heart of Silicon Valley, or a rich palm oil magnate in Indonesia. We're all the same but we're also different individuals, with different looks, lives, experiences, mindsets, expressions, ideals, heroes...

And in this way, humans are no different from ice, or whales, or penguins, or tigers or chimpanzees.

Think about that. It blows my mind.

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Call me biased but I'm definitely a whale admirer now. For giants that grow up to 18m, they are surprisingly gentle and incredibly graceful in the water. On this day of the expedition, we were lucky to see so many whales in different parts of the bay, and the landscape surrounding them did its part to up the awe.

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And then we got really close to a whale. What an surreal moment to be so close to this gentle giant at home in its icy kingdom.

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Feeding frenzy! Can you make out what the humpback is doing? It sees a swarm of krill and comes up from below, gapes its maw wide open, swallowing the swarm whole, and then filters out the water through its comb-like baleen teeth, so that only the krill are left inside. Fascinating!

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Everywhere we looked, there was life on display, and what a spectacular show it put on.

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Nothing could’ve prepared us for Day 7…