Reel 4 - Boarding the ship

Looking down Avenue San Martin, the main shopping street.

A tired robot takes a break from the tourists on Av. San Martin.

A metal prisoner and his metal dog friend hang out at the Maritime Museum.

Looking back towards the mountains.

Diorama of escaping prisoners on Av. San Martin.

Looking into the bay from Av. San Martin. The ship in the background is the Ocean Endeavour, our home for the next fortnight, although I didn't realise this when I took the photo.

The harbour where the Ocean Endeavour was waiting for us.

Our instructions for joining the ship were very clear. This didn't stop me worrying about them, so we had checked out the car park that would be the meeting place earlier so there would be no last-minute panicking. When we arrived properly, albeit still somewhat early, we found plenty of other tourists milling around, waiting for coaches to take them to their ships. While we waited we looked across the bay to the long jetty where several huge cruise ships were moored. There was the enormous Hurtigruten ice-breaker that our plane-mate would be crewing. It was a slickly designed affair, with flashes of red trim and portholes all the way up to heaven. We identified our ship by the operator Intrepid's name painted on its side. It was an altogether less flashy and conspicuously smaller affair. Unwittingly I had photographed it earlier while wandering around town. I wouldn't realise this until I had the film developed.

We bumped into people we had met at the hotel the previous evening and we all rubbed along together in the collegial fashion that would be the template for the voyage's social interaction. The time came and we boarded a coach which took us on the short drive through to the jetty's gate, and from there alongside our ship.

Boarding was a fairly rapid process, accelerated by the arrival of some drizzly weather. We were ushered from the coach onto a series of gangways leading to the ship's reception, which perhaps unsurprisingly is much like suddenly being inside a mid-range hotel. At reception we exchanged our passports for room keys. I'm not used to surrendering my passport for longer than it takes to get through border control, so this felt a little odd. The only other time I've encountered it was when visiting the Swiss parliament building in Bern. They were Swiss and they had machine guns, so who was I to argue? Practical considerations aside, I appreciate the symbolism of giving up my passport before going to the only continent with no formal national borders. Plus, the room key card would be much more useful for the duration of the trip and there could be no nagging worry as I fell asleep that somewhere, out there in the Antarctic night, a penguin was nibbling on my passport.

After that, we are free to go to our cabin. This was a moment I had anticipated with some trepidation. It's fair to say that neither of us would have chosen to share a cabin given infinite money. But we were not given infinite money and so seeing the size of the space we would be trying not to start a fight in had a lot riding on it. In my mind and from the single photo I'd seen online, I had imagined the single beds would be almost touching. So it was of great relief that my brain's catastrophising had in this instance done me a favour. The cabin was fine. It wasn't huge by any means, but the two beds were separated by a large chest of drawers.

The cabin was of course not somewhere where two people would want to hang out together for any length of time, but as a functional space it served well enough. Having decided to go for the cheapest cabin, ours was on the lowest passenger deck (deck four) and in the centre of the ship. There was reasoning behind this beyond keeping costs down. Primarily, it's nearest to the centre of mass of the ship. We would spend the next two days traversing the Drake Passage, one of the most notoriously rough seas in the world. We had applied some behind-the-ear seasickness patches for the journey, but everything would help. Although I've never been seasick before, I felt it best not to get cocky. I suspect that everyone has a particular frequency of pitch and yaw that can get them if it's relentless enough. I will come back to the patches later. For now I'll just say that they did their job.

Being so low and central meant we also had no porthole. This wasn't any loss. If something was worth seeing, it was worth making the short trip up to the deck for. Besides, it's unlikely we would have seen much apart from seawater sloshing against it. Worse than that, some other passengers had booked cabins with portholes only to find their view blocked by lifeboats. Cheap is the way to go. There are plenty of other places to be when you're not sleeping, namely the Antarctic continent, which we will get to soon enough.

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Bonus selection of digital 3D and 2D shots on Flickr