Traveling to the end of the World

Hey guys! Hope life is treating you well!

It’s been a little while since I’ve had the chance to blog, but this week has been an exhausting one. After getting home from our cruise we jumped right back into classes and this week was basically midterms for classes which consisted of an exam, lab reports, presentations, and lots of different assignments. Since we are only here at the center around 1/3 of our time, it means that when we are here its go go go. Though on the flip side when we aren’t here we are out exploring some of the most beautiful places in the world, so there really isn’t much to complain about haha.

We went on a 5 day cruise making our way through the Tierra del Fuego all the way down to the southern most tip of South America, Cape Horn. This was a jam packed week as we went on a different expeditions everyday and also having class lectures on the boat along with the educational PowerPoints the crew provided you with in order for you to better understand the glaciers and history behind the places we were visiting. The week consisted of seeing (both Magellanic and King) penguins, being able to tour a glacier up close, driving by many other ones, and seeing where some of the local communities lived along with where Charles Darwin went to look at animals and life before he continued on to write his book “The Origins of Life”.

Seeing glaciers up close and personal is something you just can’t describe. They creek and groan as ice breaks and falls into the water making it sound like a mini avalanche. Seeing them in a National Geographic magazine is one thing, but seeing them with your own eyes is another. They tower over you making you feel like you don’t belong here. Making you look away and still loose your breath when you look back. Trying to comprehend that these glaciers and ice sheets use to cover the Earth in large amounts, and now they are melting into the oceans.

Though some of my favorite moments were seeing the penguins in their natural habitat just doing their thing, taking baths, and making nests for their future chicks coming in the next month or so. Seeing them at a zoo is much different then taking a zodiac boat up to the shore to just float there quietly and watch them interact with each other and also kind of watch us from the corner of their eyes to make sure something suspicious wasn’t about to happen. They really are goofy creatures as they waddle up the hills with straw and grass in their mouths for the nests they are making occasionally falling right on their face with a plop. I mean if you had your kneecaps up in your stomach area hills wouldn’t be your friend either.

One of our last stops was going to Cape Horn. If you know nothing about this place it is where both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean meet at the tip of South America. Many ships in the last few hundreds of years have gone missing here and have never been found. The waters are rough. The wind is even worse. The air is freezing. And the weather can change on a dime. We experienced this as we were exploring the little island which consisted of a small light house, a monument, and the family that lived there. It was fine at first but in a matter of minutes the wind picked up and the rain started to pour and it was a race against mother nature to get back to the ship. Walking on wet wood with the rain stinging your eyes as it blew sideways is not easy, definitely when the wind speeds reached up to 80 mph almost pushing you off the platform. This is equivalent of a category 1 hurricane in case you were wondering what that feels like. Though just being there at a place so many people disappeared and to realize that it is actually not the end of the world was mind boggling. We were standing on what people used to think was the part of the world that just dropped off into nothingness. Yet here we are admiring the location we were standing at looking off into the rainy weather trying to catch a glimpse of Antarctica (even though that wasn’t possible but was still fun to try).

This was a trip of a lifetime and nothing else I have ever done can compare to this. This is only the beginning as we start to travel even more and more. Starting tomorrow we head off to the most visited national park in Chile called Torres del Paine to go backpacking for 3 days. Here we will see even more glaciers and see how the landscape was created with once existing glaciers and ice sheets. Wildlife is abundant here and the puma population is a very large one, so fingers crossed that we will spot one.

Until then, adventure awaits!

Luke