It isn’t the way to do Antarctica.
From the air, penguins look like poppy seeds. Sea lions, in the words of our naturalist-guide, look like yellow smears. If we’d seen a whale–and we didn’t–it wouldn’t have looked like much of a whale.
On a flyover, no one sets foot on the continent. No one smells the reality of what necessarily occurs when thousands of birds, no matter how cute, concentrate in one place and there’s no place else to go.
From an airplane, the only sounds are the voice of the narrator and the clatter of cameras and the muffled drone of engines.
And yet–it was sensational.
Thirty-three well-traveled civilians paid $1,599 for the privilege of sitting in a jetliner and looking out the windows for an hour at the only continent many of them have never seen.
Expensive? An extravagance? Undeniably. For some of the people on the plane, this flight–an extra-charge shore excursion off Norwegian Cruise Lines’ Norwegian Crown–cost about as much as the entire 14-day luxury cruise that got them close enough to do this.
But sometimes . . .
Dick Burnette, 77, of Houston:
“There’s no use coming this far and–if you have a chance to go see it, well . . .”
Dick Housley, 66, of Calgary.
“Because it’s there. And I plan to get to as many places as I can before I’m toast.”
Purists scoff. And I thought I was a purist when I told our guide, a Chilean veterinarian and Antarctica veteran named Betsy Pincheira, that I had done the continent a few years earlier as a passenger aboard Orient Lines’ Marco Polo.
We made four landings, I told her.
She scoffed.
“You have not,” she said. “You’ve been on a ship.”
Now, we were in a jet. Being fed canapes and Champagne while flying the 600-plus miles from Punta Arenas and over Cape Horn and the Drake Passage to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula . . .
Still, this, even to a scoffing purist like Pincheira, is a rational alternative.
“If you don’t have the time to take a 10-day [expedition] cruise, which is like the minimum–or you don’t have good sea legs to do the crossing of the [sometimes tummy-challenging] Drake Passage–this is an easy, comfortable way that will give you the widest vision of Antarctica,” she said.
“Because you get a glimpse of bases, of the continent, the peninsula, the mountains, the islands, the pack ice, the icebergs.”
But not the penguins.
“Wildlife is a little bit harder,” she conceded, “because of the speed and the altitude that we are. But for me, it’s neat because it gives you a wide variety of vision, of a conception of what Antarctica is all about.”
It is impossible to understand what Antarctica is all about unless you’ve seen it, somehow, some way.
Even when you do the research and watch the documentaries and listen to Pincheira’s pre-flight briefing (complete with maps and pictures), it isn’t what anyone expects, in part because of the unexpected.
“I’ve been going to Antarctica since 1983,” she said between nibbles of smoked salmon as we flew over cloud cover that covered Cape Horn. “Every year, different ways, different reasons–tourism, research, expeditions for different entities.
“I did my honeymoon in Antarctica–my eldest daughter was made in Antarctica–and there have never been two days alike. There have never seen two overflights alike. There’s always a surprise.”
Sometimes the surprise is getting there at all. Because weather toward the bottom of the planet is famously uncooperative, one in five planned flights is either rerouted up over Chile’s scenic splendor (no refunds and, according to Pincheira, no complaints) or is scrubbed altogether (refunds).
Our flight was supposed to fly south over the Passage, which separates the continents, then along the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, over Deception Island’s hot springs (it’s an active volcano) and its enormous penguin colony and on toward the Gerlache Strait.
But no.
At the Punta Arenas airport, where we had gathered and were waiting for liftoff, Betsy Pincheira returned from somewhere with an announcement.
It was the weather. The look on her face was tough to read.
“Fog low, no visibility,” she said. “Deception Island–the volcano island?–nothing.”
The group sagged.
But . . .
“On the other side of the peninsula, what is known as the Weddell Sea is improving–meaning scattered clouds, good visibility.
“That’s where we’re going. So we’re going! All right? Let’s go . . . “
And we went.
It was not a small plane. This Lan Airlines Airbus A319 could seat 144 passengers. With just 33 passengers plus crew, everybody, including the pilots, had a window seat to go along with the canapes and beverages.
What we didn’t have was absolute assurance we’d see anything memorable.
Pincheira, from time to time, would provide teases.
“We are approaching Antarctica now. We’ll tell you when we get there . . . “
Later:
“OK, folks, stop eating, stop drinking–welcome to Antarctica!”
Sort of. We were over the South Shetland Islands and King George Island, which are every bit as much Antarctica as Newfoundland is Canada–but, well, to purists . . .
Later:
“We are over the continent. We are over the Antarctic Peninsula.”
We were over clouds.
Later:
“We are crossing over the Peninsula and we are going over towards the Weddell Sea . . . “
Clouds.
And finally:
“OK, folks, here we are. This–is Antarctica!”
It took 90 minutes. And there were no clouds.
And it sure was Antarctica. Oh, my . . .
Now, this is where I’m supposed to describe what we saw out the windows. It won’t be good enough, but here goes:
Icebergs. Islands. Black mountains poking out of snow. Sheer cliffs. At least one glacier. One big, snow-free island that Pincheira vividly and accurately described as looking like the product of a bowel movement. An Argentine research base. Remnants of pack ice capable of trapping ships and men for months, ice breaking up because of what passes for summer heat down here.
Some poppy seeds. A few yellow smears.
And right now you’re thinking, They paid $1,600 for one hour of that?
What words can’t possibly convey–and trust me, better writers than me have tried their best–is the scale of what’s out there, the history of danger and of unintended, terrifying isolation, the absolutely breathtaking beauty of the one continent that, in Pincheira’s words, “we haven’t made a mess of.”
They also can’t describe how low we were, even with the help of numbers.
“About a thousand, 1,500 feet,” the pilot said afterward. Meaning, at times, we were eye-level with Antarctica.
Gene Fisher, 78, of Dickinson, N.D.: “I didn’t think he’d fly that low.”
Sheila Fisher, 65, Gene’s wife: “Or that slow. That made me a little nervous.”
Housley, the Calgarian: “The cameras were going pretty steady there, eh?”
Nobody was cheated; the pilot made sure both sides of the plane saw everything. A single hour never flew by so quickly . . .
“I’ve been doing these flights for 10 years, and I’ve never seen somebody disappointed after having done it,” Pincheira said. “Because the scenery is just too overwhelming. And to be able to see the grandeur of it . . .
“From above, you get to see how majestic and how grand and how big it is–which you lose sight of when you’re on ground level . . . “
Unless you see nothing.
Once, she said, there was a blind passenger on one of these flights. At these prices.
Baffled? So was Pincheira.
“I asked myself before the trip–`Well, is it something where they want to say they’ve been there? Been-there, done-that, check mark kind of thing?’
“And then when we got back, that passenger told me, `You know, it was exactly as if I had seen it, just by hearing it–by hearing about it, by hearing the enthusiasm or the descriptions or the reactions of other passengers.
“`It was as if I were seeing it with my own eyes.'”
We were seeing it with our own eyes. There would be one last attempt, on the way back, to see Deception Island. There were reports of breaks in those clouds, Pincheira said–and that would have been the surprise of this flight–but the breaks had all but closed up when we got there.
I wanted to tell the others what I’d seen there years earlier. I wanted them to hear about it, to hear the enthusiasm . . .
. . . but as it was, we all had seen great things.
Robert Gittens, 40, of Calgary: “It makes you wonder. It makes you think. You see it and you sit here and think, `OK, how do you relate this now to someone?’ You can’t explain it.”
“It’s indescribable,” said Burnette, the Texan. “It’s just amazing.”
Some wanted more.
“I would’ve liked to spend a week here, to tell you the truth,” said Housley, who has trekked Nepal and other places, “but reality and what you get is two different things in this kind of climate. You take what you get and you enjoy it.”
And then there was Irving Kantrowitz, a New Yorker, now retired in Boca Raton, Fla.
He is 90.
Before the flight: “How many more chances am I going to get?”
After the flight: “It’s lovely, and I got the drift of it. But it’s one thing flying over a place . . . like flying over New York. Can you see New York? Can you feel New York?
“I think what I’m going to do, I’m going to fly down next year with my grandson and then do a landing. I’d like to be able to say this 90-odd-year-old man can walk on Antarctica.”
To some, there’s always another chance . . . and never a reason to settle for poppy seeds.
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asolomon@tribune.com
