Goodbye Rio:
Santos, Brazil (pronounced "Sanch"...leave it to the Portuguese influence). Nice little botanical garden with some native critters:
The Pele museum was well air conditioned. Overall, Brazil is a combination of the old, crumbling as flip-flopped locals stroll by, and the new and shiny, all tied together with clutter and graffitti.
On to Montevideo, Uruguay. The Southern Crested Caracara posed for us.
Montevideo and Punta del Este are very livable-looking places, although PdE is expensive. It should be, it looks like Monaco!
A very nice modern art museum:
Also, the Casapueblo compound, the realized dream of a (crazy) artist named Carlos Paez Vilaro.
The Expedition team joined us in Punta del Este, our experts on Antartica, on our way to Stanley. But will we make it to Stanley? Nope. How did the Argentinians find a good enough day to ever invade the place? We couldn't. There went seeing the penguins, again. We headed south and as the day went on, the weather went to shit. Okay, sun is out but we were doing some rocking and rolling!
Came the Captain on the blower to say that we were detouring to Elephant Island, and ice-covered place east of Antarctica.
The island was the desolate refuge of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew in 1916 following the loss of their ship Endurance in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. The crew of 28 reached Cape Valentine on Elephant Island after months spent drifting on ice floes and a harrowing crossing of the open ocean in small lifeboats. After camping at Cape Valentine for two nights, Shackleton and his crew moved 7 miles west to a small, rocky spit at the terminus of a glacier, which offered better protection from rockfalls and from the sea, and which they called Point Wild.
Realizing that there was no chance of passive rescue, Shackleton decided to sail to South Georgia, where he knew there were several whaling stations. Shackleton sailed with Tom Crean, Frank Worsley, Harry "Chippy" McNish, Tim McCarthy, and John Vincent (all of whom were kown troublemakers) on an 800 mile voyage in the lifeboat James Caird beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, and arriving at South Georgia 16 days later. His second-in-command, Frank Wild, was left in charge of the remaining party on Elephant Island, waiting for Shackleton's return with a rescue ship. There was much work for the stranded men. Because the island had no natural shelter, they constructed a shack and wind blocks from their remaining two lifeboats and pieces of canvas tents. Blubber lamps were used for lighting. They hunted for penguins and seals, neither of which were plentiful in autumn or winter. Shackleton had instructed Wild to depart with the remaining crew for Deception Island if he did not return to rescue them by the beginning of summer. After four and a half months, on August 30, 1916, a ship, the tug Yelcho, from Punta Arenas, Chile, with Shackleton on board and commanded by Luis Pardo, arrived and rescued the men.
Imagine.
The Elephant Island story is actually typical of the hardships presented to the earliest explorers in Antarctica. We never saw the island, by the way, because we passed by it at well past midnight.
We went on to visit Maxwell Bay, Half Moon Island with Camara Base, and Deception Island, then forward through Wilhelmina Bay, Paradise Harbour, and the Neumayer Channel, then Dallmann Bay, with lots of humpback and penguins around.
Some of these pictures will look like they were taken in monochrome. No. That's how it looked.
But the sun did finally come out and brave Captain Abhi took us through the narrow passage between Lambda and Omega Islands, home of the Melchoir Base.
