Port Charcot

Today, we spent the morning in Port Charcot, a small bay on an island called Booth Island (as an interpreter, I couldn’t help but like its name!), home to a lively colony of gentoo penguins. We have been there before and this particular colony is my favourite so far. The little fellas are constantly hurtling up and down their ‚penguin highway‘ that takes them from their little rocky outcrop a few feet above the beach down to a rock that’s the perfect place to hop into the ocean and back, and watching them waddle, stumble and slide along will inevitably fill your heart with joy and ‚aaawww‘.

It was not the most photogenic Antarctic summer day: Grey clouds hung deep, the air was a chilly one or two degrees centigrade, and wind speeds of up to 40 knots thrashed us with big drops of icy rain. I was posted just above the penguin highway and tasked with handing out walking poles to our guests as they arrived on the landing site.

As I stood there, the wind almost blowing me over, my fingers beginning to feel more like icicles than like actual parts of my body, with my scarf pulled right up over my nose, I marvelled at the beauty of this place. On a little rock just above the beach, the penguins were arguing over the best spot, as a group of Antarctic cormorants swooped in and landed right next to them. A couple of skuas circled the scene, and in the water below, I could see penguins darting around underneath the surface of the crystal clear water. Penguins often swim in small groups, and you can see them porpoising in and out of the water with amazing speed and agility – one of my favourite things to watch since we have been down here. Our ship lay still in the background, surrounded by large, bright blue icebergs. As I glanced across the bay, I spotted a whale blow, followed by the hump and fluke of a humpback whale.

The stark contrast of the white snow and the black volcanic rock, the deep blue of the ocean and the bright blue of the ice, and of the bare and barren landscape and the amazing abundance of life within – the fact that I am here to experience it, in a place that’s as far from civilisation as you could possibly get: No photo or words will ever fully capture how marvellous, how wondrous this place really feels.