My first footsteps on Terra Antarctic this season were taken on Barrientos, one of the tiny Aitcho islands, part of the South Shetlands, still one hundred miles off the continent. (It was just twenty miles from here, on King George Island, that we dropped – and then picked up – our kayaks two years ago.) Those first steps each austral summer are always fantastic, memorable, a reminder of why I keep coming back year after year. The sky this morning is grey-green, the sun striving hard to burn through; the smell of the penguin colonies as powerful as ever. A recent snowstorm had buried many of the penguin nests, which have now been mostly unburied by their inhabitants. While the South Shetlands are not the most prolific wildlife spots in Antarctica, within a ten-minute walk I see three species of penguin (Gentoo, Chinstrap and a stand-alone, way-out-of-his-way King) and three different kinds of seal (Weddell, Elephant and Leopard).
Bailey Head, Deception Island, Antarctica
The tall King – visible from the shore standing on the crest of a small hill, silhouetted – stands out distinctly because he is literally five times the size of the other birds. What he is doing here is a mystery; at some point he obviously made a wrong turn somewhere because his home is most likely South Georgia, 660 miles to the east. Apparently he’s been here for a couple seasons, so though he looks out of place, towering above the other penguins, he’s obviously decided to stay put. There are rumors he may have tried to breed while here, though unsuccessfully.
The afternoon’s walk is at one of my favorite stops, Deception Island. Landing on the beach at Bailey Head, with its steep and fast fall-off, is always a challenge. The reward? Somewhere between 120,000-160,000 breeding Chinstraps (even the penguin experts among us have a hard time counting them all). Walk off the black sand beach, beneath a heavily snow-capped volcano, and a wide valley opens up exposing a mile-long line of marching penguins, three, four, five abreast, making their way back and forth from the sea and up a gently-sloping, five-hundred-foot tall hill. Those coming from the cold Southern Ocean, stomachs swollen from several hours of fishing, many can barely stand or waddle. Those heading the other direction, towards the sea, are easily identifiable by their filthy stomachs, streaked in mud and guano from a long day spent nurturing a pair of eggs (chicks are coming within the next couple weeks).
From a seat on a chunk of ice atop the hill I watch the comings and goings for an hour. Below, on either side of the steep hill, plays out the whole lasciviousness of life: Flirtation. Sex. Birth. Loving. Feuding. Friendship. Feeding. Youth. Middle age. Impairment. Death.
What surprises most on their first visit to a colony – after they get used to the guano-tinged smell that will linger in their nose hairs for a couple weeks, even after they’ve left Antarctica – is the reality that everything in a penguin’s life takes place in this one place. Especially real is the dying. Skeletal remains in every form litter the black sand, from seashore to the top of the hill. Black-and-white wings attached to a Skua-cleaned skeleton; a solitary, perfectly intact foot; blood-filled bodies, just beginning to be pecked by scavengers; long, thin vertebrae. Elegiac, each is both art and a reminder that life often ends not far from where it began.
By eight p.m. a warmish breeze has blown up, the sun come … and gone, now hidden by clouds. In this season of course, it never gets completely dark – sunrise tomorrow is expected at 02:33.
Bailey Head, Deception Island, Antarctica
Someone emailed a very good question the other day, regarding my own carbon footprint, especially when traveling to such remote places as Antarctica. It’s both a legitimate question and one we should all ponder.
I’ve tried to work out my own carbon footprint online a couple times in the past, but as soon as I start to respond to Question 2 – “How often do you fly?” – the computer starts blinking red and smoking. Flying is a sizable contributor to CO2 in the atmosphere; I do it constantly and around the world. My only rationale is that by bringing back-stories from the places I fly to, and sharing them — especially with classrooms – I’m a bit absolved, though not completely. An option would be to stay home; I guess … one I will continue to ponder.
I traveled a couple years ago in the high Arctic with Richard Branson, who – as an airline company owner – knows a few things about the environmental impact of flying. His company, he explained, was experimenting with less-polluting fuels. As for his own personal carbon footprint, when it came to all the flying he does he rationalized … as all of us frequent fliers do. He was off the next month, for example, to South Africa, to meet with Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and another nine peacemakers. “We could all walk there, I guess,” he said. “But I don’t think we’d get much accomplished. It doesn’t mean we don’t think about, or realize, the environmental impact of our actions.”
I’m out of the loop news-wise; has anyone published a story about the carbon contributions of the thousands who have gathered for eleven days in Copenhagen to debate the future of climate change?
On Tuesday, September 29, in Washington D.C., National Geographic will be screening our award-winning, new, big, fun, informative, high-def film – TERRA ANTARCTICA, Rediscovering the Seventh Continent.
This National Geographic-sponsored exploration is a one-of-a-kind look at Antarctica from a unique perspective – sea level.
For six weeks we explored the Antarctic Peninsula by sea kayak, sailboat, foot and small plane, observing the fast changing evolution of this most remote place. Impacted by climate change – temperatures have warmed along the Peninsula faster than anywhere on the planet during the past 50 years – this part of Antarctica is also experiencing a boom in tourism and nations fighting over who owns what as its ice slowly disappears.
Given my interest in and commitment to exploring the world’s ocean and bringing back stories from it we couldn’t ask for a better honor than to be regarded as the film “that most effectively raises awareness and increases understanding about environmental and sustainability issues facing the oceans and its inhabitants.” That is exactly our goal.
Spent a couple great days on Rangiroa, one of my favorite stopping-off points in Polynesia, in part because of the fun, small adventures we had here exactly seven years ago, with kayaks. I know it was seven years ago because I can remember sitting in the linoleum-floored great room of Pensione Glorine, watching grainy black-and-white images of the WTC towers crashing down, one year after.
Photo, Pete McBride
A lot has changed since, though the lagoon here stays much the same: Huge. Fifty miles by twenty miles. Then we paddled across it, around it, camping on its sand motus, convening with hermit crabs, luxuriating by simply laying back in the sand and watching the frigates soar on the thermals above. My travel partners then have remained so; Pete McBride and John Armstrong were with me in Antarctica last year, Alex Nicks and I have made several films together since, sadly Willie Williams – who looked after our logistics and always knew exactly where we were on the map – is somewhere soaring on thermals of his own, hopefully with a view of his own special paradise.
Every time I come to Rangiroa I look for my friend Ugo, a local guide and raconteur; usually without luck, since he’s often out exploring the far corners of the big lagoon. Today I’m lucky and find him pulling his wooden boat, the Oviri, up to the cement dock. I first met Ugo in 2001, a very unsettling meeting since while I waited on the sand beach for him – with his wife – Ugo had gone missing. For twenty-four hours no one knew where he was, other than he had taken two fishermen out in his boat.
When he finally showed up, he blamed it on a recalcitrant engine … and big winds. “When I finally got the engine to start, the winds were so strong we couldn’t even try to come back. So I tipped the boat on its side on the shore, used it for protection, and we stayed that way all night. It was nothing!”
Then, and several times since, Ugo has taken me to his secret garden, so to speak. Here’s how I wrote it then:
“C’mon friends, follow me, c’mon, meet my pets,” Ugo shouts, tossing another chunk of bloody bonito into the quintessentially-cobalt South Pacific. “The heads, that’s what they like best.” A gentle big-man, smelling of gasoline and sun block, his solid, sun-browned body quakes with excitement as he dips his hands repeatedly into the white plastic bucket of fish-parts resting on the back of his 40-foot cutter “Oviri” – Tahitian for “Wild” – bobbing in rough seas.
With each handful of chum come more carcharinus melanopterus – black-tip sharks – two dozen, three dozen, 50, 100, 200, so thick it’s impossible to count them, to separate them, for all their swarming and churning just below the surface. With hands like catcher’s mitts Ugo pulls off his clear plastic sandals, replaces them with swim fins, and reaches for his mask and snorkel.
“They’re waiting for us,” he shouts as he jumps smack into the midst of the swarm. He is so positive – so convincing that there is nothing to worry about, being inches from the snapping choppers of eight-foot long, 400-pound sharks even as he continues to toss them bloody fish parts, despite that he’s missing part of a thumb for having gotten “lazy” during one such feeding – that I follow. When I open my eyes, four-feet below the sun-sparkled surface, there are literally hundreds of big sharks circling. Me.
“Look, down there,” shouts Ugo when we surface. “Lemons! Big ones! WELCOME, MY FRIEND, TO SHARK CITY!”
Ugo is a true man of the sea. He has three boats and a simple beachside house on the lagoon of Rangiroa, the world’s second-largest coral reef atoll and the best known of the 78-atoll Tuamotu chain north of Tahiti. His father was a local hotelier. Ugo, 36, speaks good surfer’s English because half his life ago his father handed him a check for $30,000 and a plane ticket to San Francisco. “Go to UC-Berkeley, get an education, learn English,” was his directive. He followed orders . . . but only halfway. Days after arriving in the U.S. he discovered Half Moon Bay, bought a board and made surfer friends. Two years into his scam – complete with phonied “reports” from school – the gig was up. His punishment? Live, and live off the sea, on this beautiful spit of coral-and-sand-and-rubble here in the dead center of the South Pacific.
“Not so bad,” Ugo laughs. From the back of the “Oviri” Ugo continues to play. Baiting a 50-pound baby black-tip with a fish head tied to a plasticized line he pulls it, thrashing, into the air. The struggle lasts 30 seconds before the shark opens its mouth – wide, exposing a long line of fine, sharp teeth – lets go and swims off.
Flicking pieces of bait off his forehead with a giant finger, Ugo grins, his smile as wide as the shark’s mouth. “This, my friends, is paradise! No?”
Today, Ugo reports the sharks are growing in number. “And now I have a lemon shark nearly as big as my boat! We should go see it! Now!!!”
One thing that most amazes me about the ten years since we brought our kayaks to the Bering Sea is the incredible technological advances all around. Then we photographed all on film, a sizable task for Barry Tessman in a cold, windswept place. The video we shot was standard definition tape and the cameras we brought (I checked both – a pocket-sized Sony S-10 and Sony 150 – out of the equipment library at National Geographic, which I’ll bet no longer exists) were even then antiquated. I did very fun dispatches from the Islands of Four Mountains, but the only technology I had for communicating with National Geographic’s then-rudimentary website was by satellite phone. Over the course of five weeks I probably called in ten times and my spoken-word dispatches were transcribed and put up as audio. We had no capacity for sending photos from the field.
Running waters on Kagamil, photo by Barry Tessman
By comparison, when we went to Antarctica with kayaks last year, all of our photographic images were digital, as was the video (two, big high definition cameras on that job … and since last year we’ve moved completely to shooting on digital cards, no more videotape …). Our ability to communicate with the web is now at a high level from anywhere on the world, using a combination of small digital cameras, computers, PDAs and our own satellite communication device (BGAN).
Despite that those first dispatches from the field were less-than-sophisticated … they were and are still fun. I went back and listened to them last night.
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