Antarctica, Deception Island
Day 4, landing 2; Whaler's Bay
As we landed on the beach at Whaler's Bay we were able to watch the morning's returning hikers sledging down the last steep hill to join us. The general consensus was that the hike had been well worth while, although a little more than most people had bargained for from Rolf's breezy description of the night before! Rolf, of course, was in fine form and accepted his take-away breakfast, neatly packaged by Arjen in a sick bag, before carrying on with his guiding duties. By contrast, the last stragglers returning gratefully an hour or two later from their epic hike had to be poured into a zodiac and went straight back to bed.
As the name suggests, Whaler's Bay is littered with decayed whaler's boats and barrels. There is also a collection of buildings too unsafe to enter and a group of wonderfully acoustic abandoned war-time fuel tanks. Solitary gentoo and chinstrap penguins posed for pictures on the volcanic beach; it's geothermally heated and too warm for them to breed here - even the krill floating in the shallows were boiled pink.
Kneeling down to peer through the rotted side of a small wooden boat, I thought of Shackleton's Endurance rescue mission where he piloted a similar vessel across the open ocean to South Georgia. Six men spent seventeen days at sea in such cramped conditions that below the covered deck there was just enough room for one man at a time to crawl painfully across the pebble ballast floor (and the lack of space was probably the least of their hardships). On this beach, like a pristine open-air Antarctic museum, I felt suddenly much closer to the enormous history of the continent; I could almost glimpse what those men had experienced.
We had plenty of time to explore the beach. Kor, a rather eccentric Dutchman, and his partner Roosje, produced their bikes with a flourish and proceeded to pedal a rather halting kilometre over the soft ground and around the penguins in order to officially claim their trip's goal - to have cycled on all seven continents.
The rest of us looked on through clouds of steam and lay back to enjoy the hot sand, blazing sun and other-worldly landscape. Some people even stripped down to swimsuits and had a dip first in the hot water pool dug from the beach, then in the sea (1 °C). I idly considered a paddle, but the thought of rolling up my waterproof trousers and removing rubber boots and three pairs of socks was just too much effort.
