In February 2024 I went to Antarctica. This was not a trip undertaken on a whim. It had been booked a year and a half earlier, and planned in a dreamily abstract way for much longer than that. It's one of those bucket list destinations that had sat alongside winning the lottery in my imagined possibilities. I didn't think I could ever justify the expense. But then, suddenly I could.
During that long strange part of COVID that felt like we were all in an interzone, when we were under lockdown and it was hard to recall it being any other way, my mum died. I won't go into the specifics here because this blog isn't about that, and she was so much more than her death. However I did inherit some money. Not a life-changing amount, but it opened the door on my imagined possibilities. It meant that I could for the first time seriously consider going to Antarctica.
It didn't take me long to go from consideration to fixation. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I would have to be crazy not to take it. My inheritance was split with my sister and she had also harboured a desire to travel to Antarctica. I think if she had gone without me I would have been unbearably jealous, and I was sure she would feel the same way if the roles were reversed. Also it would be a fitting commemoration of our mother if we went together. That, and the cost of a cabin on my own would be ruinously expensive.
We settled on a two-week cruise down the Antarctic Peninsula to cross the Antarctic Circle at 66°S. This last detail was not to be, for reasons I will go into as the journey progresses. We booked the cruise through a travel agency like it was the 1990s. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, we wanted to be able to go through the itinerary in person. Secondly, because the cruise embarked in Argentina we wanted to see some of South America, and we wanted the whole thing to be wrapped up in a package for peace of mind. I'm usually happy to book my holidays ad-hoc, but there was too much money riding on this one to be cavalier about arrangements.
I don't want to get bogged down in the details of the itinerary itself as there will be plenty of time for that later. The brief summary is this: Buenos Aires; Ushuaia; Antarctica; Buenos Aires again; Iguazu Falls; Rio de Janeiro. All together the trip would last a month and encompass a wide range of conditions that made packing very challenging, not least because of 15Kg hold baggage limits on the internal Argentinian flights.
Let's get on to the photography. The conceit of this blog is to showcase the stereo photographs I took using my View-Master Personal 35mm camera. For the uninitiated, this uses ordinary 35mm slide film to shoot stereo photos which can then be turned into View-Master reels compatible with those viewers that surely everyone recalls from their childhood. No children's toy, the camera dates back to the 1950s and is a marvellous piece of engineering. For those already familiar, I used Fuji Velvia colour reversal film, mostly ASA 50 but there were a few rolls of ASA 100 in there. They're hard to get hold of at any speed these days.
There is some artifice in this blog. I started it as a by-product of scanning the reels. I wanted to scan them for a couple of reasons. Firstly it's always nice to have digital copies to share. However the main reason is that I found metering in Antarctica difficult - it's often an incredibly high-contrast subject, and despite bracketing whenever I could, there were some shots I felt would benefit from adjustment in Lightroom.
The View-Master Personal camera, being a View-Master product, produced photos that were ultimately mounted on reels, each holding seven views. I had initially planned on presenting each reel as a blog entry, but the journey didn't neatly subdivide into sets of seven photos so I've aimed for seven but sometimes it is more and sometimes less. There were 38 reels in total, and although the way they're presented here drifts in and out of sync with them, it has also ended up being 38 parts.
The final artifice is perhaps not really artifice at all, and that's that everything written here was written months after returning from the trip. I had considered keeping some sort of journal at the time, but I'd just finished the first draft of my latest book and was very much in holiday mode. When I was actually there, the experience itself was at times exhausting. The expeditionary parts of the Antarctic Peninsula were physically demanding and as an experience it was quite overwhelming. I was mindful to drink it all in and be as close to the moment as I could be. As feverish as I could be with my cameras* I didn't want my memory of the journey to be one step removed by either a viewfinder or a notebook and pen. So it is now, after I have supposedly set those memories, that I rake over them through the lens of a 70-year-old camera and present them to you like a travelogue. The physical travelling has been done. All I can relate to you is some version of the stories I've been telling people about the holiday since I got back from it. Sometimes I'm embarrassed to talk about it, knowing that it was a decadent expense, and at those times it can feel ridiculous that I even entertained the idea of going. I understand it was a privilege. I loved almost every minute of it and hope that you can get a sense of the experience from these photographs.
* I also took a variety of digital cameras, none of which would be regarded as serious by any modern standard, but all of which fulfilled their roles pleasingly. If you're interested, you can see the 2D ones HERE and the 3D ones HERE. There are a lot more of them than will be in this blog.
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