5 Continents Down!
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 16:01 | by Alistair BaillieI have made it finally to Ushuaia, for those who like me had never heard of the place, its basically the furthest south, reasonably sized, piece of civilisation on the South American continent and homeport for most of the smaller Antarctica cruise and expedition vessels.
Since my last enter, a long time ago, I have crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, sailed down the coast to Uruguay, up the river Plate to Buenos Aires, across to the Falkland Islands, then South Georgia and finally down south to Antarctica.
Antarctica for those of you who have never been is very cold, its also quite pretty, with lots of ice bergs and glaciers everywhere and it certainly was interesting dodging in and out of all the ice bergs and other pieces of floating ice.
Getting back to the title, I have now visited 5 of the 7 continents of the world, namely; Europe, North America, South America, Africa and the latest Antarctica, with me having gone ashore at Paradise Bay to climb up a big hill, take some photos and slide back down it.
The weather in Antarctica itself is reasonably good, the seas are nice and calm, even if it is snowing and blowing a gale – the crossing from Antarctica to South America however is a totally different story, with last night being very interesting rolling and pitching over to 23 degrees during my watch and even more randomly throughout the early hours of the morning.
I am also leaving Minerva in 10 days, to fly home just before Christmas so I will post some photos some time after that.