The Drake Passage
Our Expedition officially began in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the planet, a place of endings and beginnings. The Andes Mountain Range ends here where it meets the Beagle Channel. The Pan-American Highway, which begins in Alaska and runs throughout the Americas, also terminates here. The Atlantic and Pacific merge to become the Southern Ocean.
We began yesterday exploring the Beagle Channel by catamaran. Offshore islets yielded excellent views of wildlife we will not see in Antarctica, including imperial shags, steamer ducks, upland & kelp geese, Chilean skuas, and South American Sea Lions. We delighted in a special treat as an Andean condor swooped from on high into our view. As we entered the busy port of Ushuaia, the National Geographic Explorer lay quietly tied to the dock, waiting for us to embark and begin our journey south.
Antarctica is often introduced with a series of superlatives like – the highest, driest, windiest and coldest place on earth. Regardless of where you travel from, you must cross the Drake Passage in order to explore the Antarctic Peninsula. This, as our expedition leader Matt Drennan says, is an inflexible fact of geography and nature, and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise. Today the Drake treated us well, with light winds and seas, albatross and petrels in flight, and blue skies with golden light at sunset. Excitement is high as we leave civilization behind, beginning our expedition to the wild spaces of Antarctica, our planet’s most remote and most emotionally stirring wilderness. And so we are off…let the journey begin!
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
- John Steinbeck
Our Expedition officially began in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the planet, a place of endings and beginnings. The Andes Mountain Range ends here where it meets the Beagle Channel. The Pan-American Highway, which begins in Alaska and runs throughout the Americas, also terminates here. The Atlantic and Pacific merge to become the Southern Ocean.
We began yesterday exploring the Beagle Channel by catamaran. Offshore islets yielded excellent views of wildlife we will not see in Antarctica, including imperial shags, steamer ducks, upland & kelp geese, Chilean skuas, and South American Sea Lions. We delighted in a special treat as an Andean condor swooped from on high into our view. As we entered the busy port of Ushuaia, the National Geographic Explorer lay quietly tied to the dock, waiting for us to embark and begin our journey south.
Antarctica is often introduced with a series of superlatives like – the highest, driest, windiest and coldest place on earth. Regardless of where you travel from, you must cross the Drake Passage in order to explore the Antarctic Peninsula. This, as our expedition leader Matt Drennan says, is an inflexible fact of geography and nature, and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise. Today the Drake treated us well, with light winds and seas, albatross and petrels in flight, and blue skies with golden light at sunset. Excitement is high as we leave civilization behind, beginning our expedition to the wild spaces of Antarctica, our planet’s most remote and most emotionally stirring wilderness. And so we are off…let the journey begin!
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
- John Steinbeck
