Antarctica trip, 15th January to 9th February 2009.

Flying into Buenos Aires, we spent a long weekend touring the sights of the city, eating fine steaks and drinking even finer red wine. A short flight (3 hours!) down to Ushuaia, we visited the Tierro Del Fuego National Park before boarding our ship, Quark Expedition's Akademik Shokalskiy for our expedition round the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Setting sail at 5pm that evening, we arrived in the Falklands two days later, where we visited New Island, Carcass Island and the capital, Stanley. Next, two days of sailing brought us to South Georgia, a truly spectacular place and in retrospect, the finest part of the trip. Here we visited colonies of hundreds of thousands penguins, abandoned whaling stations and walked in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Another two days of sailing across 600 or so nautical miles (these places are pretty far apart) brought us to the South Orkney Islands, where we climbed a glacier. Next we reached Point Wild on Elephant Island, the isolated, extreme location where the majority of Shackleton's men spent four months living on a tiny spit of land waiting for uncertain rescue. Finally, after much travelling, we reached the original aim of the trip - the Antarctic. Our only continent stop was at Neko Harbour, where we incidentally also camped on snow next to a penguin colony! We also visited the sunken caldera of Deception Island, cruised along the Wilhemina Bay past sleeping humpbacks and enjoyed the truly awe-inspiring peaks rising out of the Neumayer and Lemaire channels - a mountaineers chilly paradise! Calling at Palmer Station, the US research base, some people even took a brief dip in the ocean before we sailed for home.

So, here are my photos listed in date and then location order, oldest first:

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