Home » Antarctica » Back to Reality January 15, 2004

What is this strange darkness that falls upon the land around 5pm? I haven't seen that for weeks. The darkest it gets during the Antarctic summer is like a twilight around midnight for a couple hours, then goes back to being sunny. Only twice did we see the sky get orangey like a sunset, but the sun didn't sink fully below the horizon.

Back to Reality January 15, 2004

Ttrealtravels
2005-12-24 23:37:55

Displayed times (last time: )

What is this strange darkness that falls upon the land around 5pm? I haven't seen that for weeks. The darkest it gets during the Antarctic summer is like a twilight around midnight for a couple hours, then goes back to being sunny. Only twice did we see the sky get orangey like a sunset, but the sun didn't sink fully below the horizon.

In this and so many other ways, it was like being on a different planet. Thomas and I keep asking each other, "Did we really go to Antarctica?" It is so supremely surreal to be back here, home, so far north. Some pundit once commented about how the age of jet travel strips us of the reality of the journey, and I've never felt that as deeply as I do today.

Yesterday at 8am, we left the ship that had taken us through the Southern Ocean. After about 33 hours in transit, we are home with our cats again. The Antarctic cruise was only 10 days, and almost four of those were in the Drake Passage. But it feels like we were there for six weeks or longer. Yet it also feels like we just left.

Everything in between boarding and disembarking from the ship in Ushuaia is a dream, a shared hallucination of glittering icebergs and endlessly amusing penguins. We keep looking at the pictures, as if to pinch ourselves and remind us that it is real. Thank the gods we did remember to take some pictures of us there, otherwise it would look like we just we picked up postcards at a store.

Touched by the Hand of Nature

Whenever I think too hard about Antarctica, I want to cry. That place has moved me, even more so than the River Ganges. Varanasi was deeply spiritual, but it was that way because 400 years of humankind has imbued that spot with their beliefs and traditions. Perhaps there was something else underneath it all that inspired such faith -- I have oft felt that certain nodes in the earth resonate with the human spirit in ways ...