Straight from the bed to the Zodiac
January 15, 2005 | 08:30

Cuverville Island

Dear Journal,

Straight from the bed to the Zodiac; squinting and awakening, I made my way around a small peninsula to Cuverville Island. Penguins uniformly littered the beach and the welcoming waft of sweet-smelling guano graced our nostrils. We were given the chance to take our first hike and I had been chopping at the bit to get out and explore some of the highlands. I slowly retraced the few steps that had iced over before our arrival and made our way up the steep, icy slopes in a snake-like motion traversing the bank of snow that covered the entire island. The view at the summit was breathtaking. The green and deep blue colors of the endless ice that surrounded us were inexplicably piercing. We named the spot Mount Eckerd and claimed our third colony in Antarctica (not official, yet).

The most exciting part of the trip followed the brief rest, making of snow angels and a sightseeing jaunt at the summit: the way down! I looked down the fifty some degree slope and with a running start, landed flat on my butt and took off. The ascent took nearly thirty minutes, but I decided to cut that by about twenty seven minutes and in three slides was back at the bottom. It was such a rush to be sliding down a snow bank at a high degree of incline and breakneck speed! Craig, Tom and I decided that three minutes wasn’t enough and made our way back up a steeper part of the lower flank of the hill. After three times climbing halfway to the summit and increasing our speed on the way down each time, we decided to call it quits. A bit of a work out, some high speed antics and a lot of snow: it doesn’t get any better than that.

Una Hamburguesa Con Queso
January 9, 2005 | 09:30

Drake Passage

Dear Journal,

From the chaos of a nine-hour flight emerged our first dose of Argentina over una hamburguesa con queso y Coke in la Plaza de San Martin deep in the heart of Buenos Aires. This was all after a brief city tour including Casa Rosario. The highlight of Buenos Aires was looking through the markets set up along the Cathedral de San Martin which is accompanied by a beautiful, yet morbid, graveyard with crypts and mausoleums decorating the walkways crowded with tributes to the past heroes of Argentina. All this excitement was in transit between the Aeropuerta Internacional and the Aeropuerta Domestic to catch our flight to the southernmost city in the world… Ushuaia.

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