Those sneaky penguins

The regulations also require keeping at least 5 meters distance from any wildlife, but that rule is a lot harder to follow. You might be waiting patiently for a couple of penguins to cross the path ahead of you, and not realize that there's another one coming up behind you.

View from the ship

This is the landing area at Heko Harbor, taken from the ship. One of the zodiacs is heading back to the beach, and if you zoom in, you can see the line of red jackets heading up the mountain to a viewing spot.

The Antarctic tourist regulations allow a maximum of 100 people ashore at one time; since there were 200 passengers on the ship, we were divided into six groups for zodiac boarding, and three groups at a time would be on shore. After an hour or ninety minutes, the first three groups would return to the ship and the other three groups would go ashore. (Which groups went first rotated every day.)

Since my group was going ashore later, I got to watch the first group from the ship.

I did not climb up that mountain by the way--much too steep and slippery. It would have taken all of the limited time on shore just to get my ass safely up to the top lookout and back down again, and I preferred staying closer to the beach where I could enjoy the glacier views and watch the penguins.

Gentoo love

I really did keep saying to myself, “You know, you don't have to take a picture of every penguin you see.” (Or mountain. Or iceberg. Or whale.) But did I listen?

These two were worth capturing, though. The penguin on the left had offered the penguin on the right a pebble. This is like a diamond ring in Penguinland, and all of us watching (from the mandated distance, of course) were crushed on the penguin's behalf when the pebble was refused. The rejected suitor dropped the pebble and waddled away, and the other penguin promptly dug around in the snow and retrieved it. Hey, you don't want to let a perfectly good pebble go to waste!

Neko Harbor

Yes, I probably should finish going through and posting pictures from South Georgia before jumping to Antarctica, but honestly with hundreds of pictures still to go through and school starting again next week, I'm finding it hard to be methodical. (And not sure that there's any real need to post pictures in the order I took them, anyway.) So I saw a picture I really liked from Neko Harbor and next thing I knew I was looking for more of them.

So here's a colony of gentoos, with a nice glacier as a backdrop.

A change in the weather is known to be extreme

(When I typed this Dylan quote as the title of the post, it occurred to me that I might have already used it. So I checked—I've already used it for three different posts, including one about Antarctica in 2018. But there are more than 5000 posts on this blog, so I think I'm allowed to repeat myself.)

It had been sunny and (reasonably) warm in Fortuna Bay in the morning, but by the time we got into the zodiacs in Prince Olav Harbour after lunch it was chilly and overcast. After about an hour, the mists rolled in over the mountains, looking like a backdrop in a movie where something very bad is about to happen and the wind started to pick up. And by the time we got back to the ship there was a thick fog and heavy swells and the zodiacs were bouncing around like giant rubber ping pong balls.

Natural and unnatural

Tussac grass and some yellow lichen in Prince Olav Harbour. South Georgia has 200 species of lichens, several types of grasses, and birds, but no mammals other than seals. After a long campaign, rodents brought by sailors were finally eradicated in 2018 after more than 200 years (one of the reasons for the stringent inspections before we could land there.) There also used to be herds of reindeer, which were introduced by Norwegian whalers, but they were so destructive to the native grasses and plants that they also had to be killed.

There are still some foreign plants that were brought by settlers, but most of what you'll see on the island is native—plus, of course, the detritus left by humans, like those giant rusty “flowers” in the picture on the right.

More ruins

Some of the ruined buildings on the bluffs overlooking the bay.

Prince Olav Harbour

A view from farther out in the bay, showing the wreckage strewn along the beach and the gloomy mountains overhead.

Even weirder, still beautiful

There are abandoned whaling stations all over South Georgia, but the most extensive ruins we saw were in Prince Olav Harbour. I liked the juxtaposition of the wrecked, rusting, tanks and buildings and machinery, and the crowds of seals that have now claimed the beaches as their own.

More seals on the beach

Seals in Elsehul Bay.

I kept singing the Taylor Swift song Snow on the Beach when I was in South Georgia, but substituting “seals” for “snow.”

“Weird but fucking beautiful” definitely still applies.

Miami Beach buildings

Some of the buildings I saw walking around near the hotel and the botanical gardens.

Miami is famous for its art deco architecture, but I didn't make it to the section of South Beach with most of the best-known buildings. Most of what I saw were buildings like the one on the top left—bungalows surrounded by palm trees. But you can see the art deco influence in the geometric shapes and colors in many of the other buildings.

Sunday bird blogging

I'm sure everyone expected a penguin, but I actually did see a new bird in Miami Beach.

It's not a terrific picture, but I loved the way these white ibises were moving in lockstep across the conveniently churned-up soil in a vacant lot.