The Shackleton "Stroll"

Today was another challenging day of the South Georgia Marathon. This is the term affectionately given to our time here in South Georgia. We may be on vacation but we are definitely not resting!

The morning began early again with a 6:30am wakeup call. Zodiacs were loading at 8:00 but we were a few minutes late because I spent a bit more time using the hair dryer on our wet gloves from yesterday. I made good progress and today we brought spare pairs, didn't use liners on our waterproof gloves which we only used in the Zodias, etc. Of course, the weather was perfect all day, for which everyone was quite grateful.

We landed at Fortuna Bay with its usual complement of fur seals. These were much less aggressive than we had yesterday, but the beach was still littered with them – lots and lots of very young baby fur seals. We then walked up the beach a bit, and hiked up the hill to see a gentoo colony that was "gentoos living on a golf course" - provided the golf could was perched in a very small patch about 700 feet up on a cliff. We got some good views from there, with penguins, mountains and ocean in the background. In addition, there are reindeer on South Georgia Island, and we saw several dozen of those. The reindeer really get around – at one point they were even lounging on the beach with the seals. However, as reindeer are non-endemic species, they are going to be eradicated (ie., killed or relocated) once the rats are eradicated (definitely killed). The reindeer will be addressed after the rats because they chew the grass or something – anyway, it makes it easier to find the rats to have the reindeer around.

After spending some time with the gentoos, we decided to head over to the King penguin colony. However, this meant hiking back down to the beach and past a bunch of fur seals. We don't like having to negotiate our way past a lot of fur seals, so we took the "easy" way by hiking across the cliffs. We then wound up at a site where there were two light-headed sooty mantle albatross nesting near a beautiful waterfall. This is a beautiful bird with a gray head and they are hard to spot. In fact, we'd heard earlier that they were nesting about 600 feet up on a cliff and that it was "500mm" lens photography (a long lens, which we do not have0. So we had decided to skip it. Yet because we were hiking across rather than down, we stumbled across them anyway!

We continued until we got to a good spot to descend and made our way to a "mini" king penguin colony – not the main one. By this time it was at least noon, and we had to be back at the landing by 2pm. So we hung out with the King penguins a bit, and then made our way back to the landing site where lunch – a sandwich each and two of the last few brownies – awaited. We also picked up some Snickers bars for the hike ahead.

Those going on the Shackleton hike were transported by Zodiac to a second landing site where we started the hike. There were a total of 75 people making the walk, advertised as 3.3 miles. We tracked it with the GPS and when all was said and done it was close to that. The walk itself started out on a narrow beach and headed up a fairly steep hill, through some tussock grasses and past – guess what? - more fur seals and some "small" elephant seals. It was amazing they could climb that high! We had sticks to keep them at bay so were fine. Once past the grassy areas, the walk is characterized by lots of chunky rocks from glaciers long ago. The rocks are beautiful shades of brown, orange and rust. The photography wasn't that spectacular on the hike but there were some pretty snow-covered mountains that we shot. About a third of the way into it, we stopped for a chocolate break! The staff had brought chocolate bars to keep everyone's energy up. Yum!

The hike was nice becuae we actually walked across a portion of the interior of the island, so got a chance to see that versus just the shore landings we typically do. Toward the end of the hike, we went down a fairly steep hill – it felt like walking through uncured concrete with large rocks in it at times – on a slope adjacent to where Shackleton and his companions descended via rope down a waterfall. You know what happens next – we went to see the waterfall. We saw one, took some photos, and then learned it wasn't the real Shackleton waterfalls. So of course, that's where we headed next. After spending time there as well, we began the hike back to the landing at Stromness Bay. Toward the end of that walk, we hiked a small hill to see more gentoos – and what was hilarious there was seeing them come in from the ocean quite a distance – maybe half a mile, up and down pretty big hills (for a penguin), across some bodies of water (which they swam through), and up to this nesting site which was nothing terribly special as far as we could tell.

Time by then was growing a bit short, so we finally made our way down and across some boggy areas to the landing site where the fur seals appeared again (they were absent during the rocky Shackleton hike). Stromness Bay was a whaling station in the days when there were whalers and sealers on South Georgia. Now it's dilapidated and full of asbestos so we stayed a good distance away from it. We headed back to the ship for dinner and some desperately needed showers.

The weather today was beautiful – in fact, we were hot more than anything else. We were shedding layers during the hike, applying and reapplying sunscrren, used our sun hats, etc. The weather was spectacular, but clouds were rolling in over the mountain passes behind us as we were loading the zodiacs, and in fact it started to snow a little bit. I believe the air temperature was in the high 30s.

Finally, we pulled anchor and moved into another bay with a small whaling station – maybe Leith Bay – where the resident historian Dag Nevestad actually spent two months working as an archaeologist. But we are now exhausted and awaiting our day tomorrow which should be less strenuous.