Everyone should have one. I mean a trip to Tierra del Fuego, Falkland Islands, South Georgia, South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. Not only are these parts almost unrecognisably different from "our" subantarctic islands and "our" part of the continent but they are also stunningly beautiful.
Yes I know "ours" are too, but it’s a very different beauty. Where Macquarie, the great green sponge, is all high plateau, vivid greens and gold and a fringing necklace of beaches teeming with seals and penguins, its more or less equivalent in latitude, the Falklands, are low and grassy with sheep farms, and Port Stanley, time-locked into an England of 60 years ago. Or it would seem frozen in the past, were it not for the fact that it must be the equivalent of the elephants’ graveyard, the place where all Land Rovers go to die, but not for a rather long time yet. They may even breed there judging by the numbers. I was almost run down while crossing the main street by a road registered Hagglund, and I guess that’s a sight you don’t see every day. The town is all lovely little cottages with vivid lupin garden beds edged in white painted rocks and sea shells, quaint taverns and substantial old civic buildings and town greens and everywhere you look, derelict ship hulks. Incidentally, the Falklanders are in no doubt about what happened to them back in 1982. They say, unreservedly, that they were invaded by Argentina and liberated by British forces. Remarkably, a number of houses still have hand written posters in their windows welcoming Argentinian visitors to the island but very firmly admonishing them to forsake any notion of territorial claims.		Port Stanley, Falkland Islands Hagglund
I suppose South Georgia is more or less the equivalent of Heard Island, in latitude and distance south of the Antarctic Convergence (Antarctic Polar Front) and is also a high, largely ice-covered land with great glaciers fringing its central plateau. Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem to me to have the brooding menace of Heard, which is a pretty tough place. I’ve always thought that one of the great, and greatly under acclaimed, ANARE endeavours was Bob Dovers and his helpers tramping round Heard to survey and map it, back in 1948.
South Georgia is much richer in vegetation and animal life than Heard and everywhere you walk you trip over history. There are abandoned whaling stations and boats, the grave of "The Boss", Ernest Shackleton, and the memorial his comrades erected to his memory; you can sail into King Haakon Bay where they landed after the epic boat journey from Elephant Island and you can walk to Shackleton Gap where Shackleton and Worsley and Crean came down to Stromness whaling station after struggling across the island. There is Grytvikken with its excellent museum and beautifully restored church in the decaying whaling station, the ruins of Godthul and Stromness and Leith Harbour and scarcely a cove without evidence of the industry of the whalers. It’s a pretty chilling figure but at the height of the industry they were breaking down a great whale every 20 minutes of the working day on the "plan" (flensing deck) at Grytvikken, alone. But before we make any moral judgements we need to remember that at its time it was an honourable pursuit, undertaken by honourable people. We may be thankful that today’s morality and ethics are not yesterday’s but that does not make yesterday’s less valid for their time.		Shackleton's Grave Whalers' Church
Fur Seal	More impressions of South Georgia are lots of falling snow, relatively little wind, although we did see a waterfall being blown back uphill, lush, lush grasses, the most vivid mosses and lichens I have ever seen, reindeer running wild, shags and penguins and albatrosses and petrels and fur seals by the countless thousands gambolling like playful dogs on land and carving the most exquisite fluid shapes in the ocean as they dive and tumble and roll; great fur collared gruff bulls, shiny little black butter-ball pups, exquisitely beautiful gold and sable young females. Hardly any can resist the temptation to rush upon and bellow a challenge at the two legged interlopers. If the bluff doesn’t work it’s all sheepish curiosity and sniffing and nuzzling their visitors.
Next summer Aurora Expeditions plan for six very lucky, and necessarily pretty fit, people to repeat Shackleton, Worsley and Crean’s trek from King Haakon Bay across to Stromness. There might even be a place or two left in that party for the resolute. Main impressions of the South Orkneys are of great masses of icebergs driven up by that massive gyre that makes the Weddell Sea such a doubtful proposition for navigation right up to this time, and spelled doom for Shackleton and almost so for Filchner; lots of coloured bergs, jade green and deep, deep blue.
And at last there is Elephant Island. I could only stare at Cape Valentine in wonder that Shackleton’s people were able to land there at all. With only moderate seas when we were there the swells were hurling spray 15 or so metres up the cliffs. Yet land they did, and,what’s more, stay there for some days before they found the safer haven down the coast at Point Wild where they could make a more or less secure camp. While we were landing at Point Wild in moderately boisterous conditions we managed to swamp our inflatable boat, which made us realise pretty quickly just what handy sorts of seamen the Endurance people must have been to land their heavy, hard, open boats, and get them off again. As we sailed from South Georgia it was all awe at Shackleton as leader and Worsley as navigator and Crean, McNeish, Vincent and Macarty making their astounding 1300 km voyage in the tiny James Caird, a 6 metre open boat with makeshift decking of sledge runners, packing cases and canvas. When on Cape Wild it was all awe at what a man Ernest Wild must have been to have kept functioning the 22 men who lived under two upturned boats there for four months, not knowing of the Caird party’s fate; and awe at the resolution and courage of all of the party who lived with fear and uncertainty for 19 months since their ship was beset and with 10 months of extreme hardship living on the ice after the ship sank. There were amputations of frost bitten toes by the light of sputtering and smokey blubber lamps, meals of stewed seaweed and bones from long dead seals. But there were also Saturday night concerts with original songs and poems composed for the occasions and special toasts in an exotic brew of hot water, ginger, sugar and a dash of methylated spirit. "There were giants abroad in those days"- and their progeny are still about.		Shackleton's Journey The Hut made from overturned boats
Then on we sailed to Deception Island, through the evocatively named Neptunes Bellows to a landing in the perfectly sheltered Whalers’ Bay. From here it’s a short walk to the volcanic ash spit from which Sir Hubert Wilkins took off in December 1928 for his historic flight of over 1000 km on which he penetrated down the spine of Graham Land to 71°20’S. This was the first substantial Antarctic aeroplane flight and the continent’s first media event as Wilkins’ sponsors, the American Hearst press, rushed his radioed reports out to their readers. It was snowing steadily but in absolute calm while we were on Deception Island so the whole landscape had a surreal feeling. My memories are of the mountains rimming the caldera fading in and out of visibility with slight changes in snow fall, the absolute silence and giant snow flakes falling. In a couple of places at the water’s edge people scooped shallow holes in the volcanic ash and gently steaming warm water heated by the still present volcanic activity filled these little makeshift spa-baths.
Old water boat.	And all about were abandoned water boats, and the vast machinery and the buildings of the whaling station, some merely decaying, some pushed askew, some overthrown by the most recent volcanic eruption and following mud slide of 1969. The Falklands Islands Dependency Survey (later British Antarctic Survey) used to service their Peninsula stations from an aerodrome here and their hangar still stands with its reminders of the difficulties of Antarctic aviation; broken and crumpled wing and tail sections, various skis and engine components and an old engineless Otter fuselage parked outside and looking very forlorn. It’s hard in such places not to have the words of Shelley’s Ozymandias filling one’s mind.
Each summer the old British station Port Lockroy is occupied by a couple of volunteers who keep it in a state of repair and operate a Post Office. The station is much as it was when the last expeditioners walked out and is one of the high emotional experiences for people on the voyage. There is a powerful feeling of being involved with the reality of the old Antarctic experience - there are the expeditioners’ working and eating and sleeping quarters, their clothing and food and equipment. I saw here people with tears of emotion in their eyes at their gratitude at being able to feel so intimately involved with what they very strongly see as part of our collective past. There is a loud and clear message to we Australians in this to respect and preserve our Antarctic history. After all it is quite as proud and quite as interesting and quite as significant a window in time as is anyone elses. And if we do not preserve something of it for ourselves and our descendants they will not be able to stand before it with tears of emotion in their eyes. And we will have short-changed them.
Lemaire Channel must have caused more open-mouthed amazement at its beauty and generated more photographs than just about any other place in Antarctica. And rightly so. This stunning kilometre wide channel between kilometre high rock cliffs rising practically vertically on each side and reflecting in the generally glassy smooth dark water and the sun setting beyond its open end are truly exquisite sights. But this time we saw it in more sombre form with the cloud base down to below the tops of the cliffs and flurries of snow and the sea partially ice filled. Looking down the Channel it seemed impossibly narrow for our little ship to pass through. Looking at the towering cliffs collared around by great hanging glaciers and disappearing into the cloud it could easily have been imagined as the entrance to a mysterious world. Awesome, almost ominous, rather than beautiful in these conditions.		Lemaire Channel
Eroded Berg near Vernadsky Station	And then we broke out into Penola Strait and on to the Argentine Islands and Vernadsky station, formerly the British station Faraday, and the warm hearted hospitality of its Ukrainian occupants. Just around the corner is where Rymill's British Graham Land Expedition of 1935/37 spent their first winter. The sea around Vernadsky was choked with bergs from a low shelf somewhere which had eroded into structures rather like columned buildings - great legs supporting a heavy ice roof and the spaces between the legs filled with exquisite blue light. I had always thought of leopard seals as being rather uncommon creatures but I’m sure I saw more in half a day near Vernadsky than I would ever have seen in a year in East Antarctica. As they were quite unconcerned at our presence we were able to lie quietly alongside their floes and get a good close look at them, with their beautiful lithe bodies but really pretty ordinary heads.
From here it was time to turn for home via a visit to the unoccupied Argentinian station Almirante Brown which we reached late in the evening. It is easy to see why the area was named Paradise Harbour, with its great glacier hung cliffs surrounding a mirror calm bay. Behind the station is a steep, largely deep, soft snow-covered hill several hundred feet high, absolutely ideal for sliding down in great clouds of trailing snow. Just across the harbour Water Boat Point was visible and I fretted at not being able to visit it. That highly eccentric pair who were the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition of 1921 and who spent the year there living alone in an abandoned water boat have always held rather a special appeal to me. And then in the very early hours of the morning we poked the Zodiacs around the corner into the fjord-like Skontorp Cove with its surrounding hanging glaciers and rock cliffs and switched off the engines and sat in near dark and almost palpable silence, broken from time to time by the reports, like canon shots in the silence, of splitting ice, sometimes followed by the roar and crash as it fell into the sea. It remained only to make a slight diversion westwards as we crossed Drake Passage so that we came up on Cape Horn to its west and then rounded it on our way to the Beagle Channel and in to "Fin del Mundo", the "End of the World", Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, for a few days before flying home.
A special bonus was to meet up again with Jenny Scott, that beaut knockabout ANARE type, after many years. She was doing a sterling job as lecturer and jack of all trades on the ship and, not content with her couple of months or so of that, was off with Sally Poncet to do another couple of months work for the British Government on rarely visited bird colonies on South Georgia, to provide baselines for determining the impact of tourist activity on animal populations.  I still feel a greater connection, affection would not be the right term, with the vastly more robust and harsher East Antarctica, with its mountains swept bare of snow, its hard plateau neve and its chiselled sastrugi and its everlasting winds but this part of the world has much going for it. There is much more diverse animal life, there is much more, and more diverse, vegetation, you virtually trip over history, which is not of our own making, at every turn, it is warmer and gentler, it is probably "prettier", but it is not, to me, as stirring.
One thing, however, is unreservedly better. It is MUCH better to spend two days in a quick nip across Drake Passage than a fortnight slogging down to Mawson.

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