The trip to Antarctica that I ended up going on with Quark Expeditions was from January 4th until the 14th of 2024. Back in July of 2023 when I was first looking into making a reservation, there were next to no spots left on the boat – the male triple rooms were all booked solid and there was only one spot in a male double room left, which of course I’d be sharing with a random roommate. Before I ultimately decided to take the spot in that double, I tried to save a few thousand dollars by weaseling my way into a female triple. Here’s how the conversation went with one of Quark’s sales representatives…
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The journey down to Antarctica started with a flight on New Year’s Eve from Chicago to Miami, and one from Miami to Buenos Aires which arrived sometime before noon on New Year’s Day. I spent a few days chillin there in Argentina’s capital before meeting up with the rest of the Quark group at a Buenos Aires hotel on January 4th. On the morning of the 5th, we took a flight down to the city of Ushuaia where we boarded a boat called the Ultramarine and set sail towards Antarctica that very afternoon.
A Glimpse of The White Continent
Here we are in Ushuaia, Argentina, beginning to board the Ultramarine. At the time of this tour, this boat was only a few years old. It’s 420 feet long, can fit around 200 passengers on board and needs about 140 staff and crew for the operation to run optimally. It was built at a shipyard in Croatia, is registered in the Marshall Islands, and had a heavily Filipino/Indonesian crew on board that’d been hired not directly by Quark, but by some third party company that Quark contracted to fill those sailor, hotel and galley positions. That was the crew – they were the ones mostly working in the background to make this trip possible. The staff was a team of about 25-30 people that were hired directly by Quark and consisted mostly of folks – with a few exceptions – from the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and western Europe. They were the ones we had the most face time with, the ones running the activities, and the ones giving us instructions on how to do stuff and presentations about all that we’d been seeing.
This is the aforementioned 2-man room I ended up staying in. Pretty nice. Was a bit concerned before the trip that my roommate might be some sort of butt-raping psychotic who’d take advantage of me while I slept, but got lucky and was paired with a cool dude from Switzerland that was about my age. Worked out well.
Here’s what the Balena restaurant looked like, the place where I ate most of my meals. Breakfast and lunch were served buffet style, but for dinner there were waiters that’d come around and take your order and other guys going table to table pouring out glasses of wine and stuff like that. There was another smaller restaurant on the 7th floor called Bistro 487 that had a bit more of a café sorta feel that I liked to go to for breakfast, but preferred lunch and dinner in Balena.
I’d never seen or heard of romanesco before going on this trip, but consumed it quite a bit while on the Ultramarine. Wish I’d known about this stuff back when I was into psychedelic drugs. Probably could’ve stared at it for hours on end, just twirling pieces of it in front of my face and never getting bored.
Frog bread in Balena restaurant
Towards the beginning of the cruise, as we were amidst the 2-day crossing of the Drake Passage from South America down to Antarctica, this is what it was like when we first started seeing icebergs. Everybody would run out onto the deck and try to get a photo of ‘em. By the end of the trip, however, we’d all gotten so used to seeing the bergs that nobody gave a shit anymore.
The bridge, the room from where the ship is commanded. At the time I visited the bridge the captain wasn’t around, but my roommate went back and bullshitted with the guy for a bit. He was a middle-aged dude with a potbelly from one of the Balkan countries. My roommate reported back to me that the captain doesn’t like the Ultramarine, he thinks a stupid boat. And in addition to that, he thinks Antarctica is very boring compared to the Arctic.
These smaller boats called zodiacs are what were used for our shore landings and excursions. This is the room on the Ultramarine from where they’re unloaded and then loaded back into after usage.
The usual load on all excursions – ten passengers and one Quark staff member operating the zodiac
Driving away from the Ultramarine on my very first zodiac cruise, which took place in Cierva Cove
Icebergs have different names based on how big they are. For example, a “bergy bit” is an iceberg that is one to five meters tall above the surface of the sea and also between 5 and 15 meters in length. Then after that is a small berg, a medium berg and a large berg. Even smaller than a “bergy bit” is what’s known as a “growler.” Before going on this cruise, I’d known the word “growler” to be British slang meaning “vagina.” I mentioned this fact to a fellow passenger and he told me he’d also heard of growlers being a container that beer is consumed out of or stored in. So, now I guess I know three growlers.
Other zodiac buzzing past a chode-shaped iceberg
Glacial ice is sometimes blue because all the air bubbles in the ice have been squeezed out over time and some scientific shit happens with the absorption of light and yeah…blue ice – there ya go
Penguin colony in Cierva Cove. You can smell ‘em from a mile away. Dat penguin poopoo stanks
There’s a seal there taking a nap on this piece of ice. The Quark staff explained to us how good seals have it here in the Antarctic. They eat all the krill and penguins that they want then take long-ass naps wherever they feel like it and no one ever fucks with ‘em. In the Arctic, however, it’s totally different. Seals there don’t have the luxury of being this lazy. They have to be constantly on edge because they’re often preyed on by polar bears.
On this particular zodiac cruise, I was in the boat with a Quark team member named Jimmy. When he’s not down in Antarctica, Jimmy is a professional whale watcher based in Vancouver, Canada. And just before going out on this particular excursion, Jimmy had been up on the top deck of the Ultramarine scanning our surroundings with his binoculars when he spotted this here pod of humpback whales. So, first thing we did upon getting in the zodiac was head in that direction. We then spent the next 45 minutes hanging out, watching these guys dive around for krill and spout big bursts of water out their blowholes.
In high school, I remember the phrase “spotting a whale tail” used to describe when the sides of a girl’s thong had been riding up and out the top of her low-cut pants. That was always a cool sight to behold, but this…this is the real deal. Apparently you can go to this website called happywhale.com and upload your photos of these tails and there are experts on there that identify exactly which whale you have a photo of (because like human fingerprints, the patterns on whale tails are unique) and then they can track the migration of ‘em based on the geotagging of your photo as well as that of everyone else who’s captured that particular whale on camera in different places…or some shit like that.
Walking up a big hill at a place called Portal Point, with the Ultramarine seen on the water in the background
Me and my roommate Andreas. Andreas was actually on a different Antarctic cruise the year beforehand that was interrupted when one of the zodiac boats was out in some choppy water, hit a rogue wave and then flipped over – an event which led to the death of two older male passengers. Quark said to Andreas we could either refund you your money or you could come on another cruise with us for free. He chose the latter. And here we are.
Some chinstraps kickin it at a place called Penguin Island
Preaching to all his penguin brothers and sisters. Also, if you look closely, a lot of the surrounding penguins on the ground have little penguin chicks resting at their feet. Oh yeah…and all that red stuff everywhere is penguin shit.
Singing their favorite Seal song in unison – “Kiss from a Rose”
The guy with the Donald Trump haircut is not the same species as all the chinstrap penguins that surround him in this here colony. He’s a macaroni penguin that showed up here and decided to settle down. He’s an outsider and he’s not accepted. He regularly gets picked on by all the chinstraps and no one wants to mate with him, yet he continues to stick around.
To prevent spreading diseases like avian flu from one area of Antarctica to another, the first thing we did upon getting back to the Ultramarine after a zodiac landing was put our feet in these here boot-washing machines
And then after using the boot-washing machine, we all stepped into this tub full of disinfectant shit before we changed out of our boots and back into our casual boat clothes
Zodiac landing at Mikkelsen Harbor
Gentoo penguins incubating the eggs inside their stone nests
While we were here in this water with all sorts of ice chunks floating around, I couldn’t help but wonder how many separate air chambers there are inside these zodiac boats that keep ‘em afloat. Because, I mean, some of those pieces of ice looked pretty sharp and I was concerned about them capsizing us. So I asked the Quark team member who’d been driving our boat. It was that same guy, Jimmy, who’d been driving me the day we saw the whales. He said there are five different chambers, but that he’s never seen one popped by a piece of ice. The only time he’s ever seen ‘em popped, he said, was when seals come up and bite holes in ‘em.
It was discussed what the likelihood was of us being able to drive the zodiac into the middle of that hollowed-out iceberg without the thing collapsing on us, but for obvious reasons that notion didn’t go beyond the realm of the hypothetical.
Ice that looks like flames
Some dude taking the polar plunge. The Quark team member right behind the jumper on the staircase there has the dude attached to a rope via a harness that’s secured around his waist in case they gotta pull him back in. And then over there on the zodiac is a professional photographer taking action shots of everyone as they take that leap of faith. Because of the salt in it, unlike freshwater which freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, seawater freezes at around 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit. So, I don’t know exactly how cold this seawater was with chunks of ice floating around in it, but it was pretty dang cold. Shockingly refreshing. My skin felt tingly and warm for like twenty minutes after having completed my plunge.
Me, taking the plunge
One of the two helicopters belonging to the Ultramarine coming back to land on the top deck after taking passengers for some “flightseeing” around Charcot Bay
Just a little sample of what I saw out the helicopter windows. For more views from not just the helicopter but from this whole trip to Antarctica, be sure to check out the video below
The last night on the cruise they had an auction. The two top-selling items were, firstly, the Antarctica flag that was on the bow of the Ultramarine since the beginning of the trip. It was tattered by the savage winds of the Drake Passage, but still sold for $800USD. And then this map that you’re seeing here that was made by one of the Quark staff members ended up going for $6100USD. All proceeds were supposedly going to organizations that work towards the preservation of Antarctica.
