South Georgia

Six months ago if you gave me a map and said to point out South Georgia, I would have been looking somewhere in the region of Russia. Who knew it was actually east of South America? OK, some people know. If you are also geographically challenged, grab yourself an atlas (or google earth) and find out where we actually are.

South Georgia is an unhospitable island sitting in the southern ocean. The Brits like to think they own it and there is even a post office where you can buy UK stamps and post letters that leave the island whenever a ship is heading to England, roughly monthly in summer.

It is also home to the remains of some whaling stations that operated from around 1904 to 1964. The whalers took in the vicinity of 175,000 whales during the operations and consequently it is hard to see whales now. I saw more off Wollongong 3 weeks ago then have been sighted to date on this voyage (27 Nov. 08).

We were able to get off the ship at various beaches and wander around and have close encounters with the wildlife. The rules are you must stay at least 5m away, but sometimes that is not possible.

The King Penguins are very curious and come up to look at us. Some have been only 1-2m away and stood there appraising us, perhaps wondering what the hell these multi coloured giants were doing on their beach. There are loads of different types of penguins, big ones, small ones and in between ones. Different colours too, the Kings have beautiful yellow/orange feathers on their chest and the rockhoppers have a yellow crested hair style. And let’s not mention the 1000s of seals!

The island itself is rugged mountains covered with snow and beaten constantly by the winds that howl in from the west. The southern tip had some huge tabular icebergs floating off the end, and I mean huge they were probably 200m long and 60m high, but that is an uneducated guess. There was one piece of ice that the EL reckons was 30km long and 10km wide. Imagine something about as big as Wollongong floating around the ocean!