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| Queue for Zodiacs back to the ship. |
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| Penguin running along the shore on important penguin business. |
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| The penguin has stopped to wonder whether it locked the front door. Fear not, little penguin. You don't even have a house! |
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| Those are people at the top left, not penguins. If they forgot to lock their front doors it's way too late to do anything about it now. |
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| Penguin party. |
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| It's all go on the rocks. |
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| I charged this little idiot $10 for his photo. Joke's on me, penguins don't have any money. |
Like bowling, there are rules in Antarctica. They are however unenforceable from a practical standpoint. They are set out by IAATO - the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. This organisation exists to promote environmentally responsible tourism in Antarctica, a task that rapidly appears contradictory the more you look into it. The most environmentally responsible thing to do is not to go there at all and leave the penguins to get on with their important penguin business on their own. However, given that it's there, and people want to visit it, the next best thing is to do so with minimal impact.
This translates broadly to the old maxim of leaving nothing but footprints, which is fine because any footprints will be quickly erased by the weather. It is also why our clothing was so carefully scrutinised while crossing the Drake Passage. We don't want any stray threads coming loose, particularly as breathable synthetic clothing is favoured.
The biggest impact on logistics of the IAATO regulations is that no more than 100 people can land in a region of the peninsula at any given time. Tour operators liaise with one another to avoid clashing, and Zodiac landings are carefully coordinated. During our induction on board everyone was assigned a group for landings. When your group is called you make your way to the mud room and get changed into your gear. It's then a short walk from the mud room to one of the gangways leading to the Zodiacs.
Typically at this point the crew will be running split landings. There are up to 199 passengers on the Ocean Endeavour, a number which fits almost neatly into two groups of 100. As such, 100 people will land on the peninsula while the other 100 take a Zodiac tour of the area. Then the people on land are collected by Zodiac and the groups gradually swap over. This is a fairly unhurried process. If you're in the last group on land the crew will shoo you along as they pack up but I only felt I hadn't had enough time once, and that was more because I'd perhaps not got my priorities right.
Speaking of equipment, an advance party of expedition crew find a safe landing spot and unload their equipment. The bulk of this is several blue plastic barrels, the contents of which I'm glad to say I never saw. These contained supplies we would need if we became stranded on the peninsula by bad weather. The crew kept a constant eye on the weather and on occasion we did leave in a hurry to avoid it. It could change very rapidly and we got lashed by freezing rain a couple of times on the way back. Amongst the other stuff they brought along were orange markers to show walking routes and boundaries, and ski poles. We were free to wander around the marked-out areas at our own pace but obviously there were regions that were either unsafe or uncertain. The last thing the crew needed was someone falling into a crevasse. Although as an aside, when we left the mud room to board the Zodiacs, someone scanned the bar code on our room keys. A sensible way of counting us, you may think. However I do not recall anyone scanning us on our return. The Zodiac drivers did radio in how many passengers they had when returning to the ship, so I gather someone was keeping tally. Hopefully that means there's not a crevasse out there filling up with frozen tourists.
The ski poles were to aid walking in the snow and ice, which could be tricky. I managed okay without using one, which was just as well because I needed my hands for the collection of cameras I had hanging around my neck. There was definitely a technique to walking through the snow and ice, especially on an incline. I found I could go downhill at a surprising pace by planting my feet heel-first in existing footprints. Uphill was on the other hand a sweat-inducing slog in any conditions, made all the more challenging by the fact you can't sit down and have a rest until you're back on a Zodiac. In those circumstances the side of a boat has never seemed so appealing.
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Bonus selection of digital 3D and 2D shots on Flickr
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