When the expedition team told us that we were camping tonight, we were quite confused. Happy, because of the nice weather. But we looked in every direction from our ship and there was nowhere that we could camp. There were huge ice ledges and steep slopes: places we couldn’t land and places where we couldn’t sleep. John came back from scouting and told us it would be difficult but manageable, so we packed up and headed out on a Zodiac with Scobie.
He took us to a secluded place, and the entire time all of us (10 on-board) were looking for a place where camping would make sense. Finally, we saw it: a tiny place to land and a trek up to a relatively flat area. Turns out that it’s called Dorian Bay on Wiencke Island.
We landed, hiked up to a flat area, and started stamping the snow to a surface that wouldn’t sink as much when we pitched our tent.
Five of us girls were in the 6-person tent, while everyone else had double tents. We were the first ones to ever use the brand new tent, and we were quite pleased that we were able to do everything ourselves.
We enjoyed the view of Mt. Francais, the highest peak in the Antarctic Peninsular region, with stripes of sun rays across the top.
Some of our friends from the ship gave us a bottle of champagne for the evening, so we placed that in a snow bank right outside our tent. Given the 24-hour daylight here, camping is easy because you’re never working against a time constraint. We probably landed just before 10pm and it took us an hour to get settled (stamp the ground, pitch the tent, lay down mats and sleeping bags), but we weren’t in any rush because we knew we had light all night.
After camp was set up, we had two pieces of excitement: a naked man and a tour boat. Kate joked “Someone must have posted out location on Facebook because we have party crashers.” I thought she meant the penguins, but then I realized there was another tour boat putting down anchor in the bay. Here is that boat:
I imagine they were surprised to see tents dotted along the hill, because we were the first people to camp there. (And, frankly, not many people camp in Antarctica anyway!) Even more surprising, I am sure, was seeing Andy from our group (heretofore called Naked Man Andy) pop out of his tent completely nude – no boots, no hat, no clothes. He was neither drunk nor high, he just figured “Hey, it’s Antarctica.” His mates took some pictures, including a pose with a chunk of ice covering his private parts. It was quite funny, and we were all laughing.
Within a few hours of arrival, we were getting cold so we crawled into our sleeping bags to warm up. After singing (Ice Ice Baby) and chatting a bit, we tried to fall asleep. Over the next few hours, I probably got 30 minutes of sleep: my face was cold, it was light outside and inside our tent, and there were birds pecking at our tent with intrigue. Nonetheless, it was a great experience and I am glad I did it.
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