My magical journey through Antarctica, a beautiful oasis where every moment is precious

I was standing on a snow-topped islet in Leith Harbour, on a speck of land smaller than a hockey rink tucked alongside the western rim of the Antarctic Peninsula. The air hung thick with gauzy mist. All around me, my companions were shaking out tents, unfurling subzero-rated sleeping bags and clicking together poles, trying to set up camp before the last of the day’s light disappeared. The expedition ship that had brought us here was now ghostly in the distance, her lights shining like low-slung, fuzzy stars. As the ship’s musician played “Brown Eyed Girl” for the ruby-nosed guests standing in a semi-circle to my right, I took a deep breath and dropped to my knees in the snow, overwhelmed with emotion in the midst of this unlikely vista.

My adventure began three days before that moment, as I waited with an eclectic and robust group of travellers at the docks in Ushuaia, Argentina, a brightly coloured, pit-stop town on the southernmost tip of South America that has earned the nickname the “End of the World.” Some, like myself, were solo adventurers in their 30s, hyped up on caffeine and eager to get moving, but most of the guests were approaching their 60s. The air hummed with energy as we began boarding buses that would ferry us past customs to the ship, like overgrown children nervously departing for camp.

My mother thought I was bonkers when she learned that I had booked a 13-day passage to Antarctica, even though I’d told her countless times that I planned to set foot on every continent. After all, the cost of the journey is prohibitive — the “cheap seats” run you roughly as much as a decent used car — and the risks of crossing The Drake Passage in the footsteps of explorers like Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott are calculated, but real.

But I was drawn to the impenetrable mystery of the unspoiled frozen landscape, so austere that it can’t sustain human life — an allure now coupled with a sense of precarious fragility as record high temperatures and swiftly declining wildlife populations threaten the area’s very existence. So, in November 2019, I listened to the little voice in my head that kept whispering: if you wait, you may not ever get the chance.

The buses deposited us at the end of the long, concrete dock next to our ship where, one by one, we teetered up the slim gangway to an open hatch. I was on edge as I boarded the comfortable-but-cozy 134-passenger cruise vessel to spend just over two days sailing across the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula. I’d heard about the “Drake Shake,” the nom de plume for show-stopping waves that tip ships over nearly sideways and heave passengers so roughly that they’re unable to walk the halls. Luckily, said the crew, the Drake graced us with a sublimely smooth passage: swells only reached four metres on the first day. So, subsisting on a diet of Gravol and ginger tea and a view of nothing but sea and sky, I was reminded that, here especially, perspective is everything.

The first glimpse of the South Shetland Islands snapped me out a reverie I hadn’t realized I was in. I watched from the wind-swept upper deck as we rounded a truncated, dormant volcano, dusted with snow. Deception Island appeared on our starboard side almost unexpectedly. The sight was captivatingly grim — a bleak and monochromatic land mass that I lacked the visual framework to compare or process.

When we officially reached the Antarctic Peninsula the following day, landing in Neko Harbour, I wept behind my sunglasses as I set my rubber-boot-covered feet on the rocky, sloping shore — an unexpected, joyous reaction to the untold beauty of the ice-sheathed mountains in a constricted palette of white, blue, black and grey. The other colours of the rainbow seemed suddenly irrelevant, save for the occasional smattering of green algae or ochre-hued lichen.

Gentoo penguins dotted the pebbled beach and snowy hillside like a healthy dash of black pepper. Though travellers are required to maintain a respectful distance, the curious tuxedoed birds waddled freely, often coming within a few feet if you were patient enough to sit still and wait.

On a plateau nestled on the side of the steep slope, I rested with my tush in the snow. From that elevated vantage point, about a hundred metres above the bay, the ship looked as small as a toy in the water. A gentle snow fell on my face as I sat in silence, flooded with a sense of peace.

Antarctica exists on a scale of its own. Everything is oversized and elegant. The seemingly simple shapes, when studied, are lessons in intricacy. Icebergs that, at a distance, appear to be white masses become a sparkling kaleidoscope of jewel-toned blues when seen from water level as we skirted around them in zodiacs. Every detail is majestic — from the overwhelming height of the mountains and sharply cut cliffs that lined the Lemaire Channel, to the reflection of snowy hills and wispy clouds in mirror-slick waters at Paradise Bay.

I kept waiting to grow tired of it — every time I saw a fresh outcropping of stone, a new colony of penguins, or another glacial edge, I’d think, “That has to be the last one that I’ll get excited about.” Then we’d round another corner and see another block of ice — this time with just a hint of a different hue — and I’d find myself gushing with child-like glee about its beauty. In Antarctica, it seems, every moment feels profound.

The intensity of the landscape was mirrored only by the power of the bond I felt with my fellow travellers — likely, the relationship was correlational; the potency of one amplifying the other. The feeling of situational camaraderie that had begun with the buses grew as we sailed across the Drake; as we ate meals together, toasted our adventures nightly in the Polar Bear Bar, and compared pictures of leopard seals over afternoon coffee, delighting when someone had captured just the right moment. We exchanged grimaces over the stench of guano, and we slid down the side of an icy mountain at Brown Station on our backsides, laughing into the wind.

In this unfamiliar place, I forged the most familiar of friendships with a group of seven other single travellers hailing from disparate parts of the globe — one not unlike the kind formed in university residences or summer rec leagues. By the second day, we shared a battery of inside jokes and moved as a unit.

As we journeyed farther south, we were riding a high — we’d been met with a few days of agreeable weather and that morning promised the same. We sailed through the Lemaire Channel for the better part of the day, reaching Pleneau Bay by the mid-afternoon. The sky was dim and misty, the water remarkably calm and dotted with increasingly-dense patches of broken sea ice. It was early in the season and the ice was just beginning its retreat, so the expedition team was looking to see how far we could travel without getting hemmed in.

The ship anchored in the bay and, 12 at a time, we loaded onto Zodiacs boats to shuttle amongst icebergs and ice floes towards Pleneau Island.

After splashing up to a rocky beach, we tramped through shallow waves to the shore. Then, suddenly, the guides became urgent. The peninsula’s capricious nature, belied in days past by the ever-changing colour of the skies, had struck again. The wind had shifted and the ice floes were compacting, filling in the channel from the north and bearing down on the ship. The captain was pulling up anchor — we had to hightail it back or risk getting trapped.

As we sped toward to the ship, we were whipped by the wind and by the forceful reminder that nature is fickle, that chance often blows away even the best laid plans, and by the lesson I’ve learned many times since that afternoon in a treacherous sea: the future is never guaranteed.