It was difficult to say goodbye to the intense beauty that is Antarctica. The last five days have been like a dream. The place is so unique.
Much like a safari, you are dealing with wild animals and unpredictable weather so there is no guarantee what you will see. But unlike a safari, where you can view lion or buck in multiple countries, this is the only place where one can see penguins in such abundance nesting and breeding in their world. I would definitely encourage anyone to put this place on your travel list. If only so that we can create ambassadors to help preserve the Antarctic. I challenge anyone that has seen giant cetaceans or orcas in the wild to still think that whale hunting or keeping killer whales in Sea World is a good idea.
I cannot adequately articulate my feelings about this wonder world, so I’d rather quote from Henry Beston:
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilisation surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of this earth.
Being so close to the magnificent creatures that are whales, really brought this quote to life and made us realise just how small and incomplete we, humans, are.
We hope to see many more animals on our trip; marine iguanas in Galapagos, tigers in India and orangutans in Borneo, and will forever remember that we are the underlings living in a world we don’t understand, sharing with creatures we can only glimpse.
