Paradise Harbor and Cuverville Island
Inspiration sometimes comes in the final hours. Today was no exception as our excursions to Paradise Harbour and Cuverville Island were brought into stark relief by National Geographic writer, photographer and historian Kim Heacox this evening after dinner. While I write this from the warm confines of a state-of-the-art ship, with a full stomach and limitless ink I was being reminded, moments ago by Kim, of Robert Falcon Scott as he muscled his final words onto the pages of a tattered journal atop the polar plateau, hours from death, 100 years ago. The sentiments that spread from his frost-bitten fingers to those pages were enough to captivate the world and catapult a second place finisher to the South Pole to heroic status and facilitate the type of adventures we partook in today.
Here we are, 100 years since Scott’s last journal entry, traveling to the same inhospitable continent that took his life. The draw of the age of exploration lives on and we commemorate it not only in story but in travel. Traveling east from our evening anchorage we awoke in Paradise Harbour, surrounded by glaciers and at the doorstep of one of the few human structures in the Antarctic, Argentine station Brown.
Geared up for a day on the water we took to kayaks and zodiacs as a means to explore the coastline and scenery in an aptly named location. Surrounded by peaks of the continent proper we zigzagged through floating glacial remains, rafts of penguins and the season’s most curious baleen whale, a young Minke. Bobbing from boat to boat this 20-foot krill eater took great interest in our presence, giving equal time to each of the five zodiacs which drifted nearby. With reluctance we returned to National Geographic Explorer’s doorstep to find zodiacs and towels awaiting our insertion into the very waters that keep us afloat. Willing participants flung caution to the wind, and skin to the sea, as December’s second polar plunge took place in the calm waters of Paradise Harbour.
From Paradise a short transit west, then north, placed us on the southeastern shores of Cuverville Island and into the cacophony of the peninsula’s largest gentoo penguin colony. While zodiacs circled the island, hikers communed with birds and scenery as a mere two-hundred-foot elevation gain afforded a view worthy any Antarctic explorer. While overlooking the silvery glow of sun across 100 tons of floating ice, it’s hard not to venture 100 years back to that time Kim spoke about this evening. When entries such as this were done in -40 Celsius temperatures under stressful conditions, yet still inspire travelers like us to approach this land with that much more appreciation.
