Antarctic Day-Tripping, or:

How I Got Less Than I^'d Bargained For and Set a New World's Record Kayaking in Antarctica

By Ken McCormick

"This is an exploratory trip extraordinaire," said the brochure, for those seeking “adventure in a unique environment.” The “unique environment” was to be the Gerlache Strait area of Antarctica's thousand-mile-long Palmer Peninsula. The plan was that from Punta Arenas, southernmost city on the South American mainland, we would fly across the Drake Passage to the Chilean base on King George Island, just a little over a hundred miles north of the Antarctic mainland, there to rendezvous with a Chilean “polar research vessel” for the ride down to an abandoned Chilean scientific base at Bahía Paraíso on the peninsula, disembarking for eight days of exploration via kayak, crampon, and cross-country ski before being picked up again by the ship on its way back north.

This would be during January, the Antarctic summer, when the waters would be open enough to travel by kayak, although ice floes and giant bergs on the move would make for what the brochure described as “an interesting route-finding exercise.” A couple of big islands off the peninsula create the Gerlache Strait. Black, jagged mountains so spectacular that in a drawing or painting they might appear to be the products of fantasy rise abruptly from the sea on both sides of the straits. There is abundant wildlife: sea birds, orcas, penguins, minke whales, crabeater seals and the predatory leopard seals. Any part of the terrain not too steep to hold snow is heavily glaciated, and ice cliffs along the water's edge are the norm. In many places, the ice cliffs exceed 100 feet in height.

This sounded good to me. Real good. Good to the tune of 5,400 U.S. dollars, which is what I had agreed to pay the author of the brochure, Cosmic Hippie Expeditions of Vancouver, to take me along to the Gerlache Strait, and this didn't count air fare to Punta Arenas. It was the summer of 1987, before the stock market crash, when any damned fool with a few thousand to invest could make a killing in a financial boom that it seemed would never end.

It still sounded good to me when Cosmic Hippie Expeditions informed me of some itinerary changes and broke the news that due to the new, even better itinerary, it would be necessary to raise the price of the expedition to $7000 per person. Most people with a modicum of good sense would have figured out that something was not quite right with this trip and would have dropped out at this point, but not me. I was too charged up.

It's very difficult to obtain transportation to the Antarctic region if you intend to disembark and stay. Following the lead of the U.S. Government, signatories to the Antarctic Treaty are very reluctant to permit private expeditions to operate in the area. In the past, scientific personnel and equipment have been risked and scientific study programs disrupted by rescue efforts involving private expeditions in trouble. However, the Chilean government, in the apparent hope of developing Antarctic tourism, and in view of the fact that we were to be guided by an experienced and responsible adventure tour operator, had granted permission for us to disembark from a Chilean ship on the Antarctic peninsula.

As a general rule, I think that no matter how rigorous the "adventure vacation" situation, if you have hired someone to arrange it for you, you will always be a tourist - a bewildered, bumbling nobody totally dependent upon your leader. You will be viewed with subtle contempt and taken advantage of. This is the lot of a tourist.

It is much more satisfying to do any trip on your own, but how the heck was I going to persuade some government to let me go kayaking in Antarctica? People with better credentials than mine have been turned down. This might be the only time Cosmic Hippie was going to do this trip: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Would I spend $7000 plus airfare for eight days of kayaking and mountaineering in Antarctica? Would I spend over $1000 per day to do this? Hell, yes! Northern Greenland may be similar in many respects, and so much more accessible, but I was completely in the grip of the mystique of the last continent. Would I mail a check to an outfit with a name like “Cosmic Hippie?^” Hell, yes! Life is short. There’s no time for worrying about trifling details when high adventure is afoot.

Maybe I ought to point out that "Cosmic Hippie Expeditions" isn't the outfitter's real name, although it is close. I may say or imply something uncomplimentary about the folks at Cosmic Hippie in this little narrative, such as that they are a bunch of lying, swindling, incompetent wretches, for instance, and I wouldn^'t want to give them too much firm ground for a lawsuit. As it would develop later, Cosmic Hippie would have me contacted by a Washington, D. C. law firm in the vain hope of shutting me up. It only added fuel to the fire, though. I’m doing a public service by damaging C. H.’s business with my letters and articles.

Cosmic Hippie will deny everything I say here. They'll say I'm twisting things all around. To avoid hassles, I'll just call them "Cosmic Hippie," but before you send money to any outfitter from Vancouver, dear reader, check with me.

By the time I arrived in Punta Arenas in the first week of January, 1988, I had accumulated a few doubts about this trip. It had turned out that only one other person in North America was rich enough, ambitious enough, or foolish enough to lay out $7000 for this trip. So we would be two paying customers and two guides in a couple of two-man kayaks, which was fine with me, because the other paying customer had had a few years' experience in kayaks, and it seemed that a small group ought to be able to really get things done. Our guides were both to be trained naturalists, with special expertise in the Antarctic environment, which would also be a plus.

What I had wanted to know prior to making airline reservations was, would the trip be cancelled due to a lack of interest? Usually a group of five to fifteen customers has to be assembled before a trip becomes profitable for an outfitter providing one or two guides. I had been able to cancel my reservations to Ushuaia, Argentina with no loss of money when our point of assembly was changed to Punta Arenas, Chile, but I just wanted to make sure this time, and flights southward were getting booked solid.

Nobody at Cosmic Hippie could give me an answer on this. The only person who could say was the president of Cosmic Hippie, Great Leader (not his real name), a self-described "pioneer of contemporary sea kayaking,” and Great Leader was out on the Zambezi River and couldn't come to the phone. ^“After the Zambezi expedition,” his secretary told me, Great Leader was going directly to Irian Jaya and then would be spending some time in the Tonga Islands before returning to Vancouver. "Isn't that fantastic?" Yeah, "fantastic," I thought. He's out having the time of his life and I'm fretting at a desk in Pennsylvania.

I crossed my fingers and made the reservations, and I was later told that Great Leader had decided to personally lead the trip to Antarctica with just two customers even though Cosmic Hippie would lose thousands on this operation. They wanted to make this trip a regular offering in their catalog, and they were going to get there come hell or high water to scout the territory. “Don't worry.”

Lucky me. I was to benefit from C.H.'s financial sacrifice and get to go one-on-one with Great Leader_, himself. I went along with the idea, but something still didn't seem quite right.

After sending in my money, I had gotten a look at Cosmic Hippie Expeditions^' regular catalog. I had paused to reflect upon the appearances of the clients of Cosmic Hippie Expeditions happily participating in the various trips offered by the outfitter. These folks most certainly didn’t have the look of rugged outdoors adventurers. They didn’t appear to be potential explorers of the last continent. I guess the brochure was designed with the thought in mind of not discouraging any out-of-shape grandma who might be willing to plunk down some good money to go paddle a boat from doing so because of any concern that she might not be able to keep up with the others.

Now, I like to think of myself as a hard-ridin,’ rock-climbin,’ bear-bashin’ tough guy. An old salt. Sort of like Popeye the sailor, except with a build like Bluto. That’s how I like to think of myself, even though I might appear to other people to be a pot-bellied, bow-legged little runt. Was I judging these C. H. clients too harshly?

The photos of smiling C.H. clients splashing about in kayaks showed clearly that none of them had the least grasp of the rudiments of paddle technique. I remembered that the Antarctic Kayaking and Mountaineering brochure had announced under the heading, Do You Require Previous Kayaking Experience? “NO you do not require previous experience,” the boats being so seaworthy and “easy to handle” that “all persons adapt very quickly” to the skills required.

Now, wait a minute. This is Antarctica we're talking about, for God's sake, not a trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Sea kayaking is thought by many to be a somewhat dangerous sport even in temperate climates. A couple of kayakers were killed at about this time by a great white shark, but the cause of death in most fatal incidents is not as dramatic. What usually seems to happen is that a steep or breaking wave capsizes the kayak and the victim is unable either to roll upright or to re-enter the boat after exiting underwater. Hypothermia is the usual cause of death, although of course drownings also occur.

Sudden drownings have been documented in which sudden immersion in cold water has apparently resulted in immediate cardiac arrest. Immersion of the head and neck in frigid water may cause severe disorientation. There are many people who can swim in frigid water, but it is not something to be taken lightly.

Weather is always a factor in the Antarctic. It is impossible to forecast weather there for more than a few hours at most. Antarctic weather forms quickly and moves quickly. An 80-knot wind may blow up out of a clear sky in a half hour. Dense fog is not uncommon in summer. Seas of six to eight feet in height are the norm on the Southern Ocean, and even though the seas are usually blocked by the pinnacles of the islands on the outside of the strait, if the weather is blowing from the southwest, the wave heights can be considerable. What makes this weather especially dangerous in the strait is the lack of places to land. The coasts of this area consist mainly of walls of ice at the water's edge. If you were to be caught out in bad weather in a small boat there, you could be in serious trouble.

The KIepper folding kayaks used by Cosmic Hippie Expeditions are great boats - I have one of them, myself - but their chief advantage is that they are so readily air-transportable. Their top speed is about five knots, and that's with maximum physical exertion. Four knots is good speed. It could take some time to move from one possible landing place to another, and the wind could come up in that time. The boats can make headway into a 30-to-35-knot headwind. I’ve paddled into what my windspeed indicator said was a 45-knot wind. But with wind speeds much higher than that, the boat will be moving in the direction the wind is blowing, no matter how hard you paddle. And if the wind is blowing towards a several mile-long ice cliff, you could find yourself between a hard place and a cold swim.

Even Great Leader, himself, would be in trouble in a situation like that, and it might take a far less serious situation to get a person who has no experience at all and no stamina for continuous paddling into serious trouble. Could Great Leader have really been ready to take just anybody who could come up with $7000 out on the Gerlache Strait?

I had read an interview with Great Leader, billed as “one of the pioneers of contemporary sea kayaking” in a boating magazine, and it seemed from the way he talked about them that he thought of his clients as a bunch of pathetic wimps. I have noticed that when I spend time in the wilderness, my ego seems to expand, and here was a guy who spent much of his life in the wilderness. Could it have the same effect on him? Leading groups of vacationers into the wilderness, when you are so much more skilled than they are, so much more fit than they are, when they are so dependent on you, when they know so little and when you are one of the pioneers of contemporary sea kayaking, it must be hard to keep a proper sense of perspective on the rights of your clients. I was going to be living at close quarters with this guy; how was he going to relate to me?

Much more ominous had been my telephone conversation with chief Antarctic naturalist and assistant guide for this trip, Bill (not his real name), in early December just before I left for South America. He said there might be a problem of scheduling with the ship.

“A problem?” I asked.

He didn't know exactly what it was, he said, but he'd heard something to that effect. Whatever happened, they^’d work something out for me, of that he was certain. "Don^’t worry."

Adventures in Patagonia

Bill had given me the address of the International Adventurers, Inc. (not their real name, but close) headquarters and “radio communications centre” in Punta Arenas. They were to co-ordinate our transportation to the southernmost continent and handle our arrangements in Punta Arenas.

At the airport's baggage claim area, I spotted a woman wearing a “Cosmic Hippie Expeditions” sweat shirt. It turned out she was with International Adventurers. “Get your bags, and I'll run you into town,” she said; “you're in good hands.”

^“Lucky break,” I thought.

I collected my luggage. I was carrying separate sets of gear for Peruvian cloud forest hiking and Antarctic kayaking, so my bags were stuffed to the maximum point of still squeaking by the airline baggage regulations without going overweight. Fortunately, most airlines will fly skis, poles, and ski boots free, so I had the heavy ski boots in an extra bag. I used my mountain pack as carry-on, and I wore an all-pockets jacket jammed almost to the bursting point with camera lenses, film, medical kit, extra bits of clothing, spare toilet paper (always a good idea in Latin America), paperbacks, etc. With two cameras around my neck and festooned with showy carabiners, I must have looked like an overloaded Eskimo waddling through the airport looking for the woman from International Adventurers. Finally, I saw a man who I had seen speaking with her. He told me she had gone back to town.

Nonplussed, I took the Los Navegantes hotel limo to town and checked in, splitting the cost of a room with a Sobek Expeditions guide who as it turned out was supposed to head to Antarctica with us on our “polar research vessel,” the Rio Baker. I learned from him that the ship was still in port undergoing repairs or maintenance, and might not get to King George Island in time for us to meet it on schedule.

The next morning, I rang up International Adventurers, Inc. to find out where and when to meet my guides and the other customer. They didn't know what I was talking about. I was told to try again in a couple of hours and ask for Janet; she might know.

A couple of hours later, Janet was still out, and later, she had been in and had gone out again. When I got Janet on the phone, she didn't know what I was talking about, either. She suggested I try Carol. Carol wasn't in, but I could try later.

Could I leave a message, I asked, so if I missed Carol, she could leave a message for me as to when and where we were to meet? “Well, yes, I suppose so."

It turned out that the radio communications centre had never struck upon the idea of a blackboard or bulletin board message center, because all messages were transmitted verbally. I did miss Carol, but she had given the message to Janet. Unfortunately Janet had then also gone out without giving the message to whoever it was who was now on the phone. All this time, I was experiencing a mounting sense of concern about our transportation arrangements.

That night, I reached Carol, who told me that Bill would check in to Los Navegantes at 9:30 or 10:00 that night. Carol said she had been back and forth to the airport and on the radio all day. The Adventurers, she said, had a team deep in the Antarctic right now setting up a base and caching supplies for an X-ski expedition to the pole the next year. ^“Isn't that fantastic?”

I had checked into a much cheaper hotel than the Navegantes just down the street from it. I left a message at the desk for Bill to join me if possible at Macho’s Bar (its real name) a couple of blocks away. Bill didn't get in until after midnight. My message must have been too strongly worded, because he felt compelled to come looking for me. By the time he walked into Macho’s Bar, I had left, the rest of the clientele had had time to get a few drinks under their belts, and the festivities were in full swing. Bill, it turned out, is a vegetarian, non-drinker, and all-around gentleperson, and was quite appalled at the scene in the macho bar. Some of the first words out of his mouth when we met the next day alluded to what a horrible, horrible place I had chosen to spend my time in. We were off to-a bad start even before we had met. Things went downhill from there.

Late the next morning, Bill came by my hotel with John, the other paying customer. I was to get a few things together for a few days of hiking in Chile's Torres del Paine national park. This Patagonian hiking excursion was one of the new, improved features of the higher-priced itinerary. The old itinerary had had us spending the time in Antarctica, instead.

Now, for $7000 not counting airfare, I'm perfectly capable of making my own way to Torres del Paine for some hiking. For $7000, I'd much prefer to spend my time in the Antarctic.

Due to the ship's steaming schedule, it would not be possible for us to

spend more than two weeks, counting travel time from and to Punta Arenas, in the Antarctic. For $7000, two weeks doesn't sound like very much, so Cosmic Hippie threw in a few days of hiking as a bonus, since we were so close to the torres anyway. Or so I was told. I figured that maybe they wanted to get us into a wilderness situation to assess our physical and mental capabilities be-fore plunking us down in the rigors of the continent of ice. This all made sense, and I was happy enough to go along with it at the time.

Later, however, after becoming acquainted with Cosmic Hippie's modus operandi, I think I have come to understand why this excursion was really added on. We would not be able to drop out of the trip immediately on learning that we wouldn’t be able to receive the trip we had paid for once we were out in the boondocks. Besides, if we did drop out, C.H. would have delivered a part of the trip already, and so could still claim expenses for such things as flying the guides and boats to Patagonia, and so break even at least.

Bill told me we were going to travel light on the Patagonian hiking. He was only taking a bag about the size of a shoeshine kit, and John wasn't carrying much more. Don't bring a sleeping bag, he said. We would sleep in hostels, he said. John and Bill both stopped and stared aghast as I emerged from the hotel with my day pack and plopped it in the hatch of our rented Fiat sedan. You see, I don't believe in traveling light. Exchanging a look of silent consternation at this defiant unwillingness to get with the program, John and Bill seemed to have decided already that their third team member was a real dope. “Uh, I've got a few things here we might all use: medical kit, that sort of thing,” I said lamely.

On the way out of town, I asked Bill what the story was on the Rio Baker. At first, he acted as though he didn't know what I meant, but as I explained that the ship was still in port, he replied, “Oh, that!” The last time out, he said, the ship had run into some problems, and they thought they ought to do some repairs before heading to the Antarctic. It was nip and tuck, but they still hoped to have things squared away in time for our voyage, although there could be some slight delay.

If we couldn't make connections by way of the ship, I asked, would it be possible to fly, not just to King George Island, but all the way? Well, that would probably not work out, he said, because the all-important airfield at King George Island was about to be closed down while the runway was resurfaced, and that would take some time. He'd bring it up with Great Leader to see if it was a possibility. They'd work something out. "Don't worry."

Great Leader was still in Santiago. It seemed that the baggage hadn't arrived, and Great Leader was making sure everything eventually made it to Punta Arenas.

John had taken all this news with remarkable equanimity, but I was thoroughly alarmed. Didn't any of the baggage make it to Santiago? I wanted to know. The boats didn't make it, said Bill, but there was plenty of time to have two more boats shipped from Vancouver if the first two didn't arrive soon.

“How about the tents?” I asked.

A long silence followed, and then, “Everything else we need is in Punta Arenas.” Later, I asked what make and model tents we would be using, and Bill wouldn't answer the question. He just gave me a supremely exasperated look. This questioning wasn't getting me anything but a sinking feeling, and it was putting Bill in a very bad humor, so I put it out of the way for the time being.

We were driving north through the Patagonian countryside. The terrain was open and grassy with rolling hills. Temperatures were probably in the 50-to-65 degree Fahrenheit range most of the day, but strong winds and a damp atmosphere made it seem cooler. The roads were gravel to dirt with rocks the size of softballs. Bill was driving like a maniac, cutting corners and drifting slightly on curves. We completely shredded one tire and punctured another just ever so slightly so that we had a very slow leak in it.

We stopped for an excellent lunch at Estancia Rio Penitente, a big old ranch house built out in the middle of nowhere by an expatriate Englishman back in the 1890's. Now serving meals and renting rooms to infrequent patrons_, the house is atmospheric with heavy, varnished woodwork and high ceilings. Bill broke the news to us there that our $7000 each didn't cover meals.

I looked over my traveling companions. John was in his late 30's or early 40's, about six feet tall and well-built, wearing a dignified, orderly beard. He was always composed and rather reserved, always proper and polite. Late in our voyage, I was to see him become really angry. Then, although his face got quite red, his expression hardly changed.

Bill was tall and thin with long very blond hair and too-small wire-rimmed glasses. He sported a few days' growth of blond stubble on his face. He had come directly to South America from a kayak trip off Baja California, and it looked as though he was still wearing the same clothes he had worn on that trip, a lightweight cotton plaid shirt and baggy cotton pants. However long it had been, he had been traveling light for so long that his clothes were well-encrusted with dirt and body secretions. Which brings me to Bill's most notable feature: his odor. This was not ordinary body odor such as the readily-identifiable smell of runaway arm-pit bacteria; this was a dense effluvium that could flood a large room within a matter of minutes. In the confines of our little car, it was enough to literally leave a bad taste in my mouth.

It wasn't that Bill never washed himself - he did shower on a few occasions in Patagonia - but his clothes were so saturated with whatever noxious substance was exuding this vapor that he smelled almost as bad right after showering as he did by the end of the day. He was carrying a clean shirt with him, but he was saving it for a special occasion. Early on in our acquaintance, I offered to loan him my razor and some shaving cream, and he took offense at that, so I just let the issue go after that.

At lunch at the estancia, it seemed to me that when our hostess first entered the dining room, she was looking around wondering, “where's that smell coming from?” I felt self-conscious at our table, and I sat there trying to somehow look clean.

The Torres are spectacular -even for the Andes - mountain spires surrounded by sparsely-wooded hills. Now that the guanacos, wild cousins of the llama, are protected, they are plentiful, and we saw lots of them along the road. They'd move off when we got out of the car, and we never saw any of them when we were traveling on foot. As we approached the mountains, we were showered out of a clear sky by spray blown off a lake a half-mile away and about a hundred feet in elevation below us. As we watched, williwaws, high winds deflected downwards by the almost -vertical mountains, churned huge clouuds of spray from the lake.

Every year for the last few years, a big snow-melt lake on top of the Patagonian icecap on the Chilean-Argentine border had melted a channel to a breakout into the headwaters of one of the rivers flowing through the park, and the resulting flood was right on schedule this year. Lago Pehoe in the park was flowing over the road so as to make it impassible, and the river was a raging torrent that we couldn't get across to hike into the mountains.

We rolled into the park on a soft tire and no spare at nightfall. Due to the impassibility of the road, Hostería Pehoe, one of two hostels in the park, was filled to capacity. The competing hostel suffered from being inaccessible at the time. It turned out that Cosmic Hippie Expeditions had not bothered with such minor details as making reservations. Since it was rainy and windy and we had no camping gear, it looked as though we were going to spend a cold cramped night in our little car, but then the proprietress of the hostería, a large middle-aged lady in tight black leather pants, finally offered to let us sleep on the floor of a building which was under construction, but which would at least keep the rain and wind off us.

Bill was effusive in his thanks, saying in broken Spanish things like "Ohhh... you're so kind!" I saw him put on this thank-you display several times on the trip, as we later would run out of gas, run out of money, etc. He would lower his head shyly to one side, looking over the top of his glasses at the person to whom the praise was directed and say things like "Ohhh... Perfecto! Magnífico! Gracias! Gracias!" He'd kind of swivel from side to side the whole while, and I thought if he had been standing in the road, he would have drawn half-circles in the dust with his toe to complete the picture of a shy little boy.

The lady in the black leather pants looked bemused. The next morning, she handed us a bill for fifteen bucks for the use of the facilities. I spoke with her later, and she had been humoring Bill listening to his broken Spanish as well as letting him think he was getting a free place to sleep; her English was quite good.

During the night in the building under construction, I had amused myself before dozing off by doing some arithmetic in my head: the trip was 19 days long, and I had paid $7000 for it. So, let's see... 7000 divided by 19 works out to a few cents more than $368 per day I was paying to sleep on a concrete floor.

After a restful night on the floor, Bill hitched a ride on a truck to the park's one telephone to check on the progress of our Antarctic arrangements while John and I went hiking in the hills on the other side of Lago Pehoe from the torres. C. H. had not bothered with such trifling details as obtaining topographic maps of the area, so we were relying on a farcical little map we had obtained at the park gate. The map did show the correct shapes of the numerous lakes and ponds, which from any high place in the open terrain told us where we were, so it was really good enough.

The map rather optimistically showed a trail where we were hiking, but if it actually was there, we couldn't find it. It was really a quite enjoyable day, although I’d have to question whether it was worth $368. John and I walked to Lago Verde where we were supposed to rendezvous with our Cosmic Hippie guide, who would follow the trail from the park headquarters to the lake. He never showed up.

We went looking for him, following the trail to the park headquarters which was marked as being ^“under construction.” What this apparently meant was that the park service had hung strips of bright surveyor's tape from various trees, and hikers were gradually wearing a trail as they walked from tree to tree.

The ^“trail” passed through some beautiful woods and meadows by mountain ponds. We had a good time, but I was a little concerned about Bill. We had had a couple of very brief showers that day. Towards nightfall, it really started to rain. We walked the last few miles back to Hostería Pehoe in a downpour. I had brought a rain suit and gaiters in my day pack. John had brought a waterproof parka, but his boots, socks, and heavy woolen pants were soaked.

That night, I was at the bar at the hostería tossing back a few pisco sours with some tourists from the Goddard Spaceflight Center while John was sitting by the fire in a miasma of steaming wool contemplating the disadvantages of traveling light when Bill finally walked in.

“Bill, you rascal,” I cried ebulliently, “We thought we'd have to send out a search party.”

“I've got to speak with you guys,” he said.

“Uh, oh,” I thought.

Bill told us he had had to be by the telephone in contact with the “radio communications center” all day long.

I figured this was understandable if he had been dealing with my old friends Janet and Carol.

The upshot of the situation was that the Rio Baker was still in port, so it would not be possible for us to take the trip we had purchased. Great Leader was trying through intensive negotiations to arrange for us the opportunity to do some sort of scaled-back Antarctic trip, but we wouldn't know what our options were on that score for several days. We could scrap the whole Antarctic idea and go on a kayak trip on some big lakes in Argentina. If John and I were going to give up and go home at this point, we would of course receive a refund.

“A full refund?” I wanted to know.

“Well, maybe,” said Bill. Great Leader was very generous in such situations, and felt bad that due to circumstances beyond the control of Cosmic Hippie Expeditions, they were unable to deliver what we had planned on. But probably, they would have to cover some of their expenses out of what we had paid them, and just give us a partial refund.

Would they charge us for Bill and Great Leader’s airfare and freight charges on the boats? I asked. This was for Great Leader to decide, I was told. How about the time we spent in Patagonia, I wanted to know, would we be charged at a rate of $368 per day while we waited to find out if Great Leader was going to be able to arrange transportation to Antarctica? That hardly seemed reasonable, said Bill. Cosmic Hippie was a thoroughly professional outfit who had built an impeccable reputation over the years, and they certainly didn't want any bad feelings about this trip. Still, it was up to Great Leader.

Could I speak with Great Leader about this on the telephone? I asked. Why would I want to do that? countered Bill. These decisions couldn't be made until Great Leader had returned to Vancouver and taken stock of the situation. Since Great Leader was apparently the one who was going to decide everything, I insisted on asking him. Bill said he'd try to put me in touch with Great Leader.

We had rented a room for two at Hosteria Pehoe for the night. Bill had put on an abbreviated version of his "Ohh... Perfecto!" display when the lady in the black leather pants had agreed to cram a third cot into the room instead of charge him fifteen or twenty bucks for a second room. Late that night, when Bill crawled into the bathroom to be sick ("Sorry, guys, I must have picked up -something in Mexico"), I took the opportunity to climb over his cot and go out the door for a walk in the dark and a breath of fresh air.

It was becoming increasingly clear that I had been had. Cosmic Hippie had $7000 of my money, and was going to decide for itself how much, if any, of it to return to me. I had foolishly paid a large amount of money to an outfit on the other end of the continent from my home, and in a foreign country to boot, and if I wasn't satisfied with what they deigned to return to me, I'd have one heck of a time collecting the balance.

The Patagonian kayaking trip we were being offered had been advertised by C.H., but had been cancelled due to a lack of interest. Neither John nor I would be interested in the trip at the exorbitant price at which the trip had been advertised. Besides, we had come all the way down here filled with visions of the continent of ice. The only thing to do was to wait and see what kind of Antarctic trip Great Leader would offer us.

The next morning we were to call Great Leader. Bill came up to me outside the lodge and said that the tire with the slow leak was so low that he was afraid I'd add enough weight to the car to flatten it. I'd have to wait at Lago Pehoe while he and John went and called Great Leader. "Okay," I said. Okay?! I was trying so hard to get along that I was actually willing to let this affront pass for about forty-five seconds.

Then I took off after Bill, catching him just as he was preparing to get in the car. As he saw me walking up, he said "I thought I told you to wait at the lodge."

“That tire doesn't look all that bad,” I said, “besides, each of you two guys weighs at least thirty pounds more than me. I really want to come along.”

“Well, you'll just have to wait.” With that, he got in the car, and they drove off, John at the wheel. I looked after them bitterly.

I never did get to speak with Great Leader, and I have not spoken with him to this day. Despite my persistent requests, or perhaps because of them, Bill went to remarkable lengths to keep me away from the phone when Great Leader was supposedly on the line. I guess the high point of his monkeyshines was the time he jumped into the car and sped off back to the town we had just passed, leaving John and I standing bewildered at an immigration/customs post on the Chilean-Argentine border.

It might have appeared to the officials on duty that he had gotten cold feet at the last minute about some sort of contraband in the car, and had gone back to unload it, but they took no notice. This was a dusty little backwater of a lonely outpost, and the guys on duty were a couple of delightful misfits. The immigration officer spoke with a pronounced lisp which to judge from the twinkle in his eye and the swish of his hips, was not an effort to speak Castillian. The customs officer reeked of liquor at about one in the afternoon, and had such poor eyesight that he had to almost touch his nose to his customs form in order to find the blanks to be filled in. Bill didn't come back from his phone call for a half hour at least, and the poor guy still didn't have his form entirely filled out.

Back at Torres del Paine, after one more day of desultory sight-seeing, Bill had suggested that since we had some extra days to kill we ought to head over to Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier and try some hiking in that area. Bill's agenda hadn't included much hiking at all other than the one day John and I went out on our own, so Argentina sounded like a nice change of pace. We spent a day rambling the pampas looking for gas, running out of gas, and being rescued by some hospitable gauchos. ("Ohh... Perfecto!")

It turned out Bill had two big, beautiful topographic maps of the area around the Moreno glacier. The guy was carrying a toothbrush, a pocket knife, a pile jacket, a short-sleeve shirt, and the clothes on his back, and these two big maps rolled up in a big tube. He hadn't had any maps of the area we were supposed to have hiked in, but he had just happened to bring these along, even though it supposedly hadn't been planned that we would go anywhere near Argentina. What good luck that he had just happened to bring these two maps along! They would come in handy.

The next day we were walking up the side of a mountain that rises a few thousand feet above the glacier and Lago Argentino. Bill set a pace that John and I couldn't match. His long legs easily strode over the short, heavy brush that I was laboriously wading through on the lower slopes. He slowed up enough for me to keep up with him, but John was falling farther and farther behind. John was definitely in better-than-average shape, but Bill and I had both been doing a lot of climbing over the previous months, and he hadn't.

We never made it above the tree line. After taking a short break in a little copse, I met Bill on his way down the mountain. He had left John resting on a ledge below us, enjoying the view of the glacier and lake. Bill suggested I climb on up to a ledge a hundred feet or so above us, and then come back to the car. This would make a total up and back time of three or four hours. Was this our whole Patagonian hiking excursion? I wondered.

Yep, it was. In a week of swanning about Patagonia, the paying customers had gone on one day hike near the torres and spent less than four hours on a mountainside in Argentina. The rest had been a sort of lame sightseeing excursion with lots of “free time” in town for the tourists while the guide went around fruitlessly trying to get a Cosmic Hippie Expeditions check cashed, wrapped and mailed some mysterious parcels, donned his fresh shirt and went off to visit a friend, and so on.

I came down off the mountain and hurried back to our little car. The way I had been getting along with my two companions, it would not have surprised me terribly if they had driven off without me. On the mountain, when John had fallen behind well out of' earshot, I had been surprised when Bill had turned to me conspiratorially and had made a derogatory remark about John. More than derogatory, really. Contemptuous.

The two of them had seemed to me like buddies, and I could imagine the kind of thing Bill was probably saying about me when I was out of earshot, because I was very much the odd man out on this trio. Maybe it was like some kids' game, and now that John couldn't keep up, he was “it.”

John and Bill had early on formed the opinion that they had been stuck with a hopelessly-addled boob for a traveling companion. Any utterance I dared to venture was received as painfully, offensively foolish, and served to confirm their opinion. I kept my mouth shut a lot, which was good because by the night after the mountain-climb, they were barely speaking to me, either.

Throughout the trip, there was hostility in the air, hostility almost as palpable as Bill’s odor, but it was only very rarely manifested overtly. This manifestation would occur any time I would press bill for details about our Antarctic travel arrangements, Antarctic camping gear, and Antarctic “exploration.” Bill didn’t like my questions.

I hadn’t read up at all on the local flora and fauna, and had thought my “trained naturalist” was going to fill me in on the details. Whenever I’d ask Bill an elementary question, he’d grimace a little at the corners of the mouth and look away for a second, looking for all the world like what he was thinking was something along the lines of “Oh, brother! I can’t believe how dumb this guy is” before answering. This had a way of discouraging questions.

I have usually had the good fortune to have pleasant traveling companions on trips. Even if the people wouldn’t be expected to get along all that well at home, during their vacation travels they are sharing what is supposed to be a pleasant or interesting experience. On vacations, you’re supposed to have fun, for Pete’s sake. This clique of two that Bill and John had formed was a pretty unusual and altogether unpleasant travel experience for me.

An interpersonal relations vignette: what few traffic signs there were on the winding gravel roads along the Chilean/Argentine border mostly all said "Keep to the Right." Bill seemed to think, however, that it would shorten our journey considerably to cut blind curves on the mountainous roads on the inside. We rarely met cars coming the other way, so this usually didn't create problems.

It made me a little nervous to be in the wrong lane on a blind curve, though, since he was also driving at high speed. I dropped a couple of hints to this effect, but he ignored the hints. Once, there was a car coming the other way on the other side of the curve, and he had to swerve to avoid it, with our car fish-tailing in the gravel and the other car's horn sounding a continuous blast. I thought he would surely take it easy after that, because if the other car had been another second farther along in its journey, we would have either had a head-on collision or plunged off a very long, very steep hill on our side of the road to avoid the other car. But Bill kept going like nothing could faze him.

Finally, I felt that I would have to make another one of my painfully, offensively foolish suggestions, and I told him that he was really making me nervous by cutting those blind curves. He shot me a look in the rear-view mirror and then gave John, who was in the front passenger seat a wry smile that said, “Isn’t this guy a pain in the ass?^” He continued to drive the same way. John sat there the whole time with a cross between a complacent smile and a nervous smile. I was sure I had seen John “jam on the brakes” with his right leg a few times, but he said nothing. I let it pass.

The day we were going to leave the town of El Calafate, gateway to the Argentine tourist mecca of the Perito Moreno glacier, to return to Punta Arenas, Bill received word that Great Leader had managed to arrange an Antarctic trip for us. I wasn't sure whether I was glad or sorry that I'd have to spend another two weeks with John and Bill.

Bill didn't have complete details on the itinerary, and he couldn't even promise us that we^’d be able to get in any kayaking at all, but he didn’t rule out a couple of days of kayaking and/or exploration. Since we wouldn't receive the air transportation to King George Island, and we'd only be buying a berth on one voyage down and back of the Rio Baker instead of on the two voyages that would have allowed us over a week's stay at the straits, Cosmic Hippie's expenses would be far less, so we would receive a refund, said Bill.

How much of a refund?

Bill couldn’t say, because negotiations on the price of transport on this Chilean “polar research vessel” were continuing, but he could say, somewhat expansively, that the refund would be at least $2000.

Would that be 2000 American dollars or 2000 Canadian dollars? I asked.

Two thousand Canadian dollars, Bill said a little less expansively.

Two thousand Canadian dollars was at that time equivalent to about 1600 American dollars, and it seemed that since Cosmic Hippie's transportation expenses had just been cut by about two-thirds, this wasn’t a very generous refund on a deposit of 7000 American dollars. I knew enough about Cosmic Hippie by now to have confidence that they would give us the absolute minimum refund, so $2000 Canadian is what I would have expected to receive, and the trip would end up costing me $5400, as originally advertised.

This was a naive belief, because after the trip had ended, Cosmic Hippie short-changed me on the refund, sending me $1750 Canadian. When I called their office and told them that I had been promised a minimum of a $2,000 refund, their reply was that it was funny how your imagination can play tricks on you. I had written their behavior off as a bad experience to that point, but this is when I went on the warpath.

Only after I had gone to extraordinary lengths out of sheer spite did they send me an additional check for $250 along with a letter about what a spiteful madman I was and what a big favor they were doing me. This gracious condescension did not serve to end my publication of unfavorable letters and articles about Cosmic Hippie Expeditions, and to this day, I remain a thorn in the side of Great Leader and his merry band.

But to return to Argentina: Bill’s offer of the minimal refund was just enough to keep me from dropping out of this misbegotten expedition. I had come all this way to kayak in Antarctica, and I wasn't about to head home with my tail between my legs, so I reluctantly said, "Okay, I'm in."

Anchors Aweigh

I walked out the pier in Punta Arenas in search of the Rio Baker. There were a couple of big freighters there; neither of them looked like a “polar research vessel.” I saw a yellow mast and a couple of booms jutting above the end of the pier. I walked out and looked down. My imagination had been awash in meteorological instruments, Nansen bottles, and core samples as I had envisioned life aboard a “polar research vessel.” This fantasy now went “pop” and vanished forever into the etherial realm as I finally gazed upon the Rio Baker.

This little ship was something more along the lines of the African Queen than what I had pictured upon reading the words “polar research vessel.” As a matter of fact, it was not a “polar research vessel” and never had been; it was a coastal freighter that International Adventurers, Inc. had chartered for this voyage. It had bits of the engine in the oil sump and oil in the bilge. The weathered lifeboats looked as though they might have been the very same ones used by Shackleton’s crew in their desperate voyage to the South Shetlands in 1916. The Rio Baker had never been to the Antarctic, and of the crew, only the First Mate had been. The only "research" the ship was engaged in was on the question of whether or not Antarctic tourism could be profitable. Apparently the author of the Cosmic Hippie brochure had termed it a “polar research vessel” because that so much better than “seedy little coastal freighter.”

Mercifully, there was no way to get three people into one of the Rio Baker’s cabins, so I wouldn't be bunking with John and Bill any more. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be bunking with Great Leader, either, because Great Leader had dropped out of the Gerlache Strait expedition and flown to the International Adventurers' Antarctic base camp in the Ellsworth Highland to work caching supplies for the X-ski expedition to the pole. To his credit, when Bill broke this news to me, he did not ask me if I thought it was “fantastic.”

I would have thought it was fantastic if Cosmic Hippie had flown me to Antarctica. I would have gladly cached all the supplies International Adventurers had cared to send down there. Bill had looked at me like I was crazy when I had suggested this; he said it would have been far too expensive to fly down there. I guess it would have been, too. I guess I had been aroused to unrealistic expectations when I had read in the brochure about all the things C. H. had been going to do in exchange for $7000: the air transport to the Antarctic, the berths on two voyages of the “polar research vessel” instead of just one voyage, the two guides instead of just one guide. It seemed as though this trip had been transformed from what was to have been a financial sacrifice for Cosmic Hippie Expeditions into a profitable operation.

I was really annoyed at this development. I had not completely given up on the idea of maybe just a little two-day kayak trip on the strait, and now we had three men in two two-man boats, which was going to be a real mismatch no matter how we sorted it out. Besides, hadn't I paid Great Leader's air fare to Punta Arenas, where he was supposed to be working for me, and not for International Adventurers, Inc?

Well, what the hell, we were finally getting under way. The "Spirit of Adventure" film crew swaggered aboard. They were four free-lance journalists who on one of several previous Antarctic expeditions had seen from a distance a mountain they had wanted to climb, and had convinced the head of the production company supplying programs for “Mutual of Omaha’s Spirit of Adventure" to pay them to make a film of themselves climbing the mountain skin diving in the frigid waters of the Gerlache Strait, flying a gyrocopter in Antarctica, and just generally having a high old time exploring the frozen continent.

They were accompanied by race car driver and sports commentator Sam Posey and Assistant to the Producer Katherine Love. On the pier in front of the Rio Baker, Love suddenly realized she had left her passport behind and was saying she had to go back and get it while the Rio Baker’s Capitán Soto was protesting loudly in broken English that there was no time - we had to get under way. She was getting visibly flustered as the film crew showered her with derisive teasing: “Make up your mind, Katherine!”

“Get aboard, Katherine!”

“Stay here, Katherine!”

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. These guys were incredibly obnoxious. What had Love done to have earned this? Was she some kind of evil monster? As it would turn out, no; her only crime was in being normal, and a very successful sort of normal.

After she had rushed off in a state of great agitation to get her passport, the four film-makers went below and began to ridicule the immigration officer’s sunglasses right to his face.

It had seemed to me that John and bill and I were three egos in various states of over-inflation, but these four were on a whole other plane. Of course, if I had done half of what this crew had done in their lives, I would probably be equally insufferable. According to them, and at least much of this must be true, they had been to Afghanistan at least a dozen times, accompanying the mujahedin on raids and filming the fighting, creating such critically acclaimed TV specials as CBS’s “The Battle for Khost” and the Discovery Channel’s “The Secret War.” I recalled having seen a bit of film they had shot, in which they were filming a view from a hillside of a small fort run by Soviet officers, and a tank or BMP had come out and fired its main gun at them.

They said they had filmed the British Transglobe expedition, film crew member Beverly Johnson in the process becoming the first woman to reach both poles overland, or in the case of the north Pole, over ice. Director Mike Hoover had filmed the Academy-Award-winning short film Solo in the 1970’s, and more recently with Johnson, the award-winning Up. Johnson had been the first woman to solo climb El Capitan, and cameraman Ron Peers had set a world speed record solo climbing El Capitan. These people had done all the things that I as a kid had told myself I was going to do someday, but then through a series of almost imperceptible cop-outs had put off and put off until I had actually forgotten about them, so that here I was now, an adventure tourist, and here they were, real live adventurers.

Chuck, US congressional committee staff specialist in small business affairs, was also along for the ride through the Magellanic islands to Puerto Williams. Unlike the great majority of Capitol Hill staffers, he had been in Washington for many years. He could earn more money elsewhere, but he told me he enjoys the power of having people coming to him hat in hand day after day, begging favors.

Our motley group of passengers was rounded out by evangelist Arthur Blessitt (his real name) and his son Joshua. Lying in a hospital bed near death, Arthur had had a vision of his life’s work: to carry the cross around the world – literally. He had a big eighty-pound cross of wood he carries over his shoulder, the trailing end having a little wheel attached to it so it won’t be so hard to drag. Arthur has walked all around the world with this cross, handing out little stickers that say "Smile! God loves you" and sending back regular reports to his own evangelistic radio program. Antarctica was the only continent to which he hadn’t carried the cross as yet. He was about to rectify this.

Arthur told me how during the Israeli invasion of Beirut he and Joshua and some journalists had arranged to be put ashore via Zodiac at night from a small Greek freighter out of Cyprus. Joshua had been just a little boy then, but in Beirut at that time, they didn't hesitate to shoot little boys. During a lull in the small arms fire the next day, Arthur and his son had made their way across the no-man's land between the opposing forces dragging their crosses and calling "Smile, everyone! God loves you!” The two had been welcomed by the Palestinians, and had eventually found their way to Yassir Arafat, with whom Arthur had got his picture taken for his biography, Arthur, Peacemaker.

There was what seemed like an interminable delay as the immigration officer browsed through our passports and wrote on little slips of paper. Not long before dusk, the Rio Baker was under way with an endearing "chugga-chugga-chugga” sound down the Strait of Magellan.

I had always pictured the strait with jagged, rocky walls and a full gale howling right down between them, but there was now only a light breeze pushing some drizzling rain showers across the gentle hills on either side.

By morning, we had cleared the strait and had turned east into the Beagle Channel. Now the islands around us were craggy and mountainous with snow-capped peaks on Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego.

A few glaciers spilled down from the ice field on the big island, strewing bits of ice in the channel. Their reflections shimmered across the placid water on a bright, cloudless day. The islands looked to me to be a great place for some sea kayaking that day, although the small trees ashore had been shaped by strong winds from the west and the shores were steep with few good landing places.

Capitán Soto brought the ship to a stop so Sam Posey could be filmed delivering the introduction to the “Spirit of Adventure” show in front of one of the glaciers. Due to the cancellation of the Rio Baker’s first voyage to the peninsula, Posey and Love would be forced to fly back to North America from Puerto Williams without ever making it to King George Island, which had been their original destination. Posey said he was relieved. We had made a slightly unsettling discovery when a small patrol boat had motored past, leaving the Rio Baker rolling violently in its puny wake: our ship rolled at the least provocation, and in two days’ time, we were headed around Cape Horn into the waters of the infamous Drake Passage. I have worked 2.S a deckhand in happier times, and I have never been seasick, but I resolved right then to apply an anti-motion-sickness scopolamine "Trans-derm" bandage to my skin before we passed the cape, just in case. If I were ever to be sick, this would be the time for it.

Mike Hoover was holding forth his views on all subjects at mealtimes. The tall, dark, wild-eyed director was the charismatic leader of the film crew, or "family," as they sometimes called themselves. He was belligerent, arrogant, vital, and interesting. He picked cruelly and relentlessly at Katherine Love, seeming to find her poise, good looks, and intelligence offensive.

He was that particular day toying with the idea of an ad hoc division of humanity into two classifications: an elite group of “real people” like himself, and the larger group of “electric can opener people.” “Electric can opener people” are all those who either own one of those devices, or who would own one were it not for some quirk of fate.

Posey, well-groomed and affable, stood accused of being an electric can opener person. Posey was no pushover. Without ever becoming unfriendly for a moment, he gradually won Hoover’s respect. I, on the other hand, came very close on one occasion to whacking Hoover over the head with a bottle. My approach also seemed to win Hoover’s respect, at least for the moment. What I found most remarkable about Hoover was that anyone so obnoxious could at the same time be so likeable. He was, as a matter of fact, one of the most entertaining people I had ever met.

The ship was shadowed by petrels from Punta Arenas to Cape Horn. The big birds matched the Rio Baker’s nine-knot cruising speed almost without effort. They would swoop back and forth over the ship’s wake, stopping to feed occasionally. Often, they would glide forward along the ship’s flank almost within arm’s reach.

I saw Bill, the “trained naturalist,” standing on deck.

“Hey, Bill,” I asked, “what kind of bird is that?”

As usual, Bill hesitated just ever so slightly, rolling his eyes to the side a bi t as he seemed to be thinking "Oh, God! McCormick and. his moronic questions" before he answered pleasantly: “Petrel.”

“Would that be a Magellanic petrel, a giant petrel, or some other kind of petrel?” I asked.

He looked at me in mild annoyance for a second before he answered, “I don’t know.”

So much for the benefits of traveling with a “trained naturalist.” I honestly don't know whether I really wanted to know what kind of petrel it was, or if I just wanted to needle Bill.

We were docked in Puerto Williams the next day. Puerto Williams is a small town with three or four gravel streets, a church, and a small naval installation set by the water in a lush temperate forest. Due to the presence of the naval installation, we were not permitted to use our cameras. I guess Chile was hiding something from the Argentines, but I don’t know what it was. To pass the time, I walked a few miles out of town in a drizzling rain to a small dam and waterfall where there was a tiny shrine to Saint Mary decorated with plastic flowers.

A day later, we were joined by fifteen or twenty new passengers who had flown in from Punta Arenas on an International Adventurers twin Otter aircraft. This was a rude invasion that -put my nose right out of joint. I had at first pictured myself riding to Antarctica on a polar research vessel, and that fantasy had been shattered, but I had clung to the egotistical belief that, sure, I was being escorted on a guided tour by Cosmic Hippie Expeditions, but this was still and adventure I was involved in, not mere tourism. I felt as though I was somehow a cut above all those people riding around Europe on motor coaches and snapping pictures at scenic overlooks along the highways of national parks the world over. But now a whole bunch of tourists, normal-looking people dressed in street clothes and carrying Samsonite luggage, invaded our little floating egomaniac’s clubhouse. It was almost too much to take.

Worse still, it turned out that this cruise on the Rio Baker was something I could have purchased through any travel agent in North America for $3595. For $5400, I was of course receiving special benefits not available to the other tourists: a hiking excursion in Patagonia, the privilege of traveling with a trained naturalist, and most important, permission from Capitán Soto to disembark in a kayak.

Another disturbing revelation that resulted from the contact with the newcomers was that the other tourists had been informed of the closing of the airstrip at King George Island as early as the last week in December, whereas Bill had not broken this news to John I until January ninth, after we were already in Patagonia. I guess this was because if anyone from Cosmic Hippie had informed us that it would have been physically impossible for us to carry out the originally-planned expedition before the trip ever began, they would then have been running the risk of having to give us each a full refund of $7000.

The new arrivals were not receiving that for which they had paid International Adventurers, Inc. Due to the closing of the airstrip, the Adventurers were forced to save themselves the expense of flying the tourists across the Drake Passage and to cut short the time spent in Antarctica, having the tourists instead spend their vacation time cruising the Drake on the Rio Baker at nine knots.

Huge, the Adventurer’s tour leader for this group, told me with a smile that it was too bad about my Antarctic exploration trip not working out. In the next breath, he explained to me how the Adventurer’s new airfield in the Antarctic was enabling them not only to run the $69,500-per-person X-ski tour the next year, but also to very shortly initiate a series of air tours whereby tourists would spend four or five days in Antarctica, including a few hours at the South Pole, itself, for $25,000 per person, and Huge would lead those trips. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

I was really beginning to wonder about this “isn’t that fantastic” stuff. It would always follow the observation that the tourist couldn’t have something he wanted, but that the tour operator was doing quite well for himself. Was I supposed to be having my vacation adventure vicariously? Were they so impressed with themselves that they thought I should be satisfied just to hear about their own exploits? Or were they just laughing at me?

As we chugged into the open ocean near Cape Horn, we began to plow through some of the big swells that would be routine fare on the Drake. I clung to the rail at the very point of the bow watching dolphins race gaily back and forth in the bow wave of the ship. As the Rio Baker would meet each steep wave, the bow would rise abruptly and then plunge straight down into the trough to be hurled upward again by the next wave, and I would be enveloped in a cloud of white spray. The white water spray is not particularly dangerous. The green water is a lot more solid, though, and the green water was getting alarmingly close to my feet at times. There is power in that green water at nine knots – power to rip my hands right off the railing and sweep me over the side, should it rise high enough over the bow. I decided to call it a day. I picked my way gingerly across the cargo deck, which had wavelets of sea water sloshing across it. Capitán Soto met me by the bridge with an angry, greenish-red face and ordered me to stay off the bow.

On the after deck I stepped carefully over pools of yellow, chunky vomit deposited there by persons who had apparently been unable to make it all the way to the rail. The sticky chunks would gradually dry out and become semi-permanent features of the deck. On the observation deck a passenger lay in a sleeping bag, appearing to be having a near-death experience. He had a ghastly greenish pallor the likes of which I had never seen before. He seemed almost comatose lying there in a pelting rain. A few hours later, he made his way below with the help of his cabin-mate. Most of the passengers, as well as Capitán Soto, had made their way to their bunks by a couple of hours after we had passed the cape, and a few were to remain there for the entire voyage.

The Rio Baker had been freshly refurbished for carrying passengers. Plywood paneling had been put up in the salon and a few pictures hung by single nails, and now the pictures described monotonous arcs, swinging back and forth, back and forth, wearing deep grooves in the paneling.

Trans-derm patches were de rigueur, and had Capitán Soto and many of the passengers on their feet again by the next day. Over the course of the voyage, we would sometimes encounter rougher weather, when it would be impossible to even stagger about in a more or less straight line. In such weather, I would climb out of my bunk, keeping a good grip on a handhold, unlatch the door to the cabin and let it fall open with an inwards roll of the ship, then let go and plunge out the door to slam into the far wall of the corridor as the door banged shut behind me, then with the next roll of the ship I could sort of zig diagonally to the far wall of the corridor, then zag with the next roll, making my way comically from one handhold to the next. This was all in weather that, for the Drake, was relatively good.

Once in a gale we ran into, there were cries of alarm on the bridge as an especially large, steep, angry-looking, maybe twelve-foot wave approached off the starboard bow. The helmsman spun the wheel frantically to bring the bow sluggishly into the wave, which struck the side of the bow with a “whump,” causing the ship to shudder slightly and sending water across the foredeck. The first mate turned to me and clapped his hand a few times on his chest to indicate a pounding heart. I laughed, but I was glad that we always had relatively good weather and never ran into any of those forty-foot seas that I’m told are not all that uncommon in those waters.

The Adventurers had overbooked the voyage, so Huge and a few others were sleeping on the benches in the salon or in the lifeboats. This situation would last until the “Spirit of Adventure” group disembarked on the peninsula; they were to be picked up by a different ship in another month.

Before the end of the first day out of Puerto Williams, life on board had settled into the monotonous routine of any ocean cruise. Meals were the main form of entertainment, even though the food wasn’t very good. In his white linen jacket, the waiter was the soul of swarthy unctuousness gliding gracefully from deck to deck with twenty or so cocktails balanced on his tray at the Chilean happy hour of onces, often at times when the rest of us could not walk a straight line in the pitching and rolling of the ship. The guy was amazing; he never spilled a drop.

Our hosts had thoughtfully provided a VCR and some tapes of TV shows about Antarctica, but it was pretty hard to hear the shows above the hammering of the ship’s generator. The only time it was possible to hear anything less than a shout in the salon was when the generator would break down, but then, of course, there was no electricity to run the VCR. Mostly, people read or played cards.

Antarctica at Last

As we approached the South Shetlands, we began to pass majestic icebergs. This was more like it! The South Shetlands are a hundred-and-sixty-mile-long chain of numerous small islands and eight major islands of up to forty-two miles in length. As we cruised through the Nelson Strait in our approach to King George Island, we were joined by skuas and snow petrels. Flashes of white on the surface of the water caught my eye. Looking closely, I saw that they were penguins leaping out of the water, “porpoising” as they swam. There seemed to be hundreds of them in every direction.

We chugged into Maxwell Bay and dropped anchor just off the Chilean base there. The passengers piled into Zodiacs and went ashore to tour the base. The passengers piled into Zodiacs and went ashore to tour the base. The base commander graciously escorted us through the meteorological center and the base infirmary. The base is unusual in that a number of families with children live year-round in the dreary pre-fabricated buildings there. The Chilean government no doubt figures this will bolster its territorial claims to the area. The base sports a post office and the Antarctic’s only bank, which serves the Chileans, tourists, and personnel from the adjacent Soviet base and the new nearby Chinese base. There is also a store complete with souvenirs available for the many passengers of the large cruise ships that call at the island.

Next we reboarded the Zodiacs for a photo opportunity at a penguin rookery. With no natural predators in Antarctica, the little gentoo penguins and some nearby elephant seals did not become unduly alarmed at our presence, although they weren’t all that pleased to have us as visitors, either.

The ship prepared to depart for Deception Island, and active volcano at the southern end of the chain, but the windlass broke down and we couldn’t raise anchor, so we spent the rest of the day in Maxwell Bay. When we did get under way, we were followed for a short distance outside the bay by a pod of orcas.

I was alone on deck in the wee hours of the morning all agog as we approached Deception Island. There had been a minor eruption there in the 1970’s which had sent some scientists scurrying back to King George Island, but the volcano was now quiescent. There were a few hot springs inside the caldera. The whole island is a big crater with edges about 1500 feet high. The southeast quadrant features some spectacular hundred-foot high pillars of rock rising out of the sea just off shore, with sheer two-hundred-foot cliffs rising behind them.

The whole island is shaped like a giant onion ring with a break in it. We sailed through the break, past a magnificent pillar, along a sheer cliff wall, into the caldera. The caldera forms a perfect harbor. On the return voyage, we would wait out a gale there.

I was as excited as a little boy about Deception Island. It looked like a good hideout for Captain Nemo. “Wow!” I thought. “Neat! Just like in the movies!” This is the thought that had led me to the folly of this expedition in the first place; I want life to be “just like in the movies.”

Inside the caldera, there is an old whaler’s base. We went ashore in the light snowfall at six in the morning to investigate the ruins. It is perhaps ironic that in this vast and pristine land, the focus of our sightseeing was always on the rotting, rusting debris of mankind’s presence. I really wanted to climb to the top of the rim to have a good look around, but Huge hustled everybody back to the ship by seven-thirty so we could get under way again.

As we approached the Antarctic mainland, I pestered Bill about getting ashore for a couple of days. The Rio Baker was going to cruise down the peninsula and then turn around and come back. If we could launch the kayaks as soon as the ship reached the peninsula, maybe we could land and make camp there until rendezvous with the ship on its return. I hadn’t lugged those skis and crampons and the rest of that ludicrous pile of gear all over half of south America for nothing, had I? Let’s go for it, I urged.

This discussion brought out the shame-faced admission from bill that we had no tents, stoves, camping gear or climbing equipment. There had been something funny about the camping gear all along. Cosmic Hippie was to have provided all group equipment, but now the revelation came that we only had the two boats and some survival suits for use on the water.

The realization that had been only a faint glimmer on the horizon of my consciousness finally dawned: those swindling sons of bitches from Cosmic Hippie Expeditions had never intended from the time they had left Vancouver to take us on any kind of “exploratory trip extraordinaire” on the Gerlache Strait. If they had had any respect for us at all, they would have brought the group equipment just for the sake of appearances, but they had been too cheap to pay the overweight baggage charges to send down a lot of gear they knew we would have no opportunity to use, except in Patagonia.

Bill was basically an honest person. If he had been a good liar, he would have said that we could not obtain permission at this point to disembark, because in fact, I was being quite unrealistic in thinking that Capitán Soto might be willing to risk not finding us at the rendezvous on his way back to Punta Arenas. But the strain of keeping up the pretense had finally got to be too much for Bill, and just for that moment he gave it up. I looked at him a moment, and then walked off.

The Rio Baker headed south-southwest down the Gerlache Strait and soon dropped anchor in the lee of Nansen Island, just a couple of miles from the mainland, at an old whaler’s haunt named Foyn Harbor. The kayaks had been assembled on the deck of the ship earlier by John and Bill and a would-be free-lance travel writer named Ruth Berkowitz while I had stood by with the rest of the passengers and watched after being informed by Bill that my help would not be needed. Actually, I had not stood and watched for more than a minute, for I was too angry and humiliated at being treated like a non-participant in front of the whole ship’s company while I was a paying customer and Ruth Berkowitz was not. Anyway, now we were about to get to paddle about for an hour or so, so that John and I could experience our “kayak expedition” and Cosmic Hippie could later advertise that they had run a “successful” trip.

The Zodiacs had already buzzed off with full loads of sight-seers to go look at three beached and rotting longboats. Mike Hoover had one of his Zodiacs in the water and was tinkering with the engine while tied up to the side of the ship. Bill was fretting because Hoover was right where we’d have to be to enter our boats. John and I carried one of the kayaks to the side of the ship to put it in the water. Bill stopped us. He didn’t want to interrupt Mike, he said. He said we should try the other side of the ship, which we did, but then he fretted because there was no ladder on that side, and he thought it would be too hard a trick for us to enter the cockpit of a kayak while hanging from a rope, which was certainly a well-founded concern.

I ventured the suggestion that with two long lines on the kayak, we could tow it from where it was around to the companionway on the other side of the ship by simply walking it around the ship’s stern. This suggestion was treated as sheer idiocy. There was an eighteen-inch swell running, the companionway had sharp corners, and Bill was afraid that the canvas hull of Cosmic Hippie’s boat might get a tear in it as a result of this violent sea.

So we hauled the kayak back on deck and waited for Mike Hoover to get done. All told, we spent about twenty minutes of our all-too-brief time in Foyn Harbor fidgeting around on the deck because we didn’t want to disturb Mike. We were later to launch the boats again at Bahía Paraíso, and all told, we were to have a total of about six hours in kayaks in Antarctica. For this I had paid $5400 plus another $1080 in airfare, so in retrospect I see that I paid $6480 divided by 6 hours, 20 minutes, or $17.05 per minute for this opportunity to kayak in Antarctica. I therefore spent $17.05 times 20 minutes, for a total of $341 just to keep from disturbing Mike Hoover, and John spent an equal amount, so together we spent $682 rather than ask Mike Hoover to move out of the way.

Now, here’s the point of this story: Bill wanted his clients to sacrifice what they wanted to do in favor of Mike because bill’s clients, no matter how much they were paying to do this, were just tourists, whereas Mike was doing something important.

In the end, I was overwhelmed by an anti-social impulse to disobey my leader’s instructions, and tearing free of all standards of good conduct, to the annoyance and consternation of Bill I called over the side: “Say, Mike, could you move forward a moment? We need to get in the water.”

“Huh? Oh, sure. Sorry!”

So John and I were finally sea kayaking in Antarctica. Never mind that it was a far cry from what we had intended; it still felt good. Foyn Harbor was completely ice-free. The air temperature was above freezing, but sleet showers and snow showers were passing through on a gentle breeze. We paddled in close to shore, admiring the high walls of packed snow above the pebbly beach. Small islands in Antarctica take on a characteristic dome shape as snow mounds up to a great depth in the center and slides off into the sea on all sides. On large islands or on the mainland, the snow packs to ice and forms a cliff at the water’s edge.

Bill and Alejo, the Chilean guide for the “Spirit of Adventure” group, caught up with us near the rusting hulk of a Norwegian whaler half out of the water just off shore. In what seemed like a very short time, the Rio Baker, about three-quarters of a mile out in the channel, was hooting for our return.

The next morning we were anchored off the abandoned Chilean base, Gonzalez Videla, at Bahía Paraíso. I was too excited to sleep in, so I went ashore at five in the morning to look at the penguins. Since there are so few places to get ashore in that part of the world, most of the places that do exist contain colonies of penguins. The various bases along the coast of course need access to the water, so most of them share land with resident penguins. This has not been a happy development for the native wildlife. Incredibly, members of the same scientific community which has lobbied against tourism on the grounds that it may disrupt local ecosystems have allowed their sled dogs to run free at some bases, wiping out the unsuspecting and defenseless birds.

The two crewmen with whom I had come ashore at Gonzalez Videla pulled out little box cameras, tied their boat to the rocks, and forsaking their duty to the ship went into the empty base with a naughty air, talking excitedly like boys playing hooky. The crew seemed far more excited about visiting Antarctica than did the tourists. The crew was guilty of the kind of misbehavior of which the scientific and environmentalist communities have accused tourists: harassing the penguins and looting artifacts from the abandoned bases. One of the more peculiar artifacts I saw taken came from the whalers’ base at Deception Island. The whalers were active there in the 1920’s, but there was also the fuselage of an Otter aircraft there, indicating use perhaps as late as the 1970’s or 1980’s. It was from the debris of this era that one crewman selected as a souvenir a plastic washing machine agitator.

I helped Bev Johnson and Ron Peers unload supplies from their Zodiac, and I got a ride back to the ship with them. They were disembarking here to take their Zodiacs somewhere, they wouldn’t say where, to climb a mountain, they wouldn’t say which. They would be picked up here in a month by the last ship out before iceover. How I wished I had been going with them.

The Cosmic Hippie group put the kayaks in the water again and headed up the bay. John, Bill and I were joined this time by Ruth Berkowitz. Ruth had never been in a kayak before, and she and Bill proceeded slowly with a great clashing of paddles. Ron Peers was a white-water kayaker par excellence, and I think he would have enjoyed a nice morning’s paddle, but Cosmic Hippie was bucking for a favorable mention in any travel articles Ruth might publish, so Bill had chosen Ruth as our fourth team member. I would never have consented to this choice if asked, but my role here was more that of financier than participant.

Here’s a valuable travel tip: if you are so wrong-headed as to wish to purchase the services of outfitters for an “adventure tour,” first obtain a letter from the editor of a travel magazine stating that you’re working on an article about their trip. On presentation of this document, you’ll not only get the services of the outfitter free or at cost, but you’ll also have the red carpet rolled out for you, even while the outfitter treats his paying customers like dirt. I have spoken with the editor who gave one of these Aladdin’s lamps to Ruth (he never published her article), and if you can demonstrate an ability to read and write, you should be able to get one.

Bahía Paraíso is a shallow semi-circle in the coastline, sheltered by a couple of large islands from one mile to three miles off shore. The islands have mountains up to 2,500 feet in altitude, and the mainland rises to about 6,000 feet at the back of the bay. The day was bright and clear, and because of the heavy survival suits we were wearing for safety’s sake, quite warm. The surface of the water was smooth as glass, rippling only with the passage of an occasional crabeater seal.

Deep booms like echoing gunshots sounded every several minutes as the heavily-glaciated walls of the bay shifted and cracked. Once, several tons of ice calved from an ice cliff and plunged into the sea a couple of hundred yards from us, sending forth a swell that caused all the floating bits of ice about us to sloosh and chime as they clattered together. We stayed some distance from the shore much of the time because showers of high-velocity flying ice chunks sometimes accompany calving.

We forced the boats through vast fields of basketball-sized bits of glacier ice. The larger chunks of ice – little bergs or “bergy bits” as they’re properly called, provided convenient floating platforms for seals to crawl out of the water to luxuriate in the sun. In our quiet boats, we could approach the very edges of the blue-white crystalline rafts without arousing in the seals any more than a lazy, passing interest.

Bill brought up the subject of leopard seals and gave us instructions for dealing with them if we ran into any. The leopard seal is a twelve-foot long, eight-hundred-pound predator which eats penguins and crabeater seals. They have attacked humans on the ice, perhaps mistaking them for penguins, but have never yet attacked humans on the water. Klepper kayaks have been attacked by sea lions and walruses before, but never by leopard seals. Of course this was the very first opportunity leopard seals had ever had to attack a Klepper. For all we knew, the entire leopard seal population of the bay might be coming at us at that very moment like so many torpedoes, mistaking each boat for a crabeater seal with two penguins riding on its back.

Bill’s advice to us was to just act natural if approached by a leopard seal. Inasmuch as we had no means of defense if attacked, this was as good advice as could be given. Even if the likelihood of attack had appeared significant enough to warrant the expense of carrying any sort of weapon, it is extremely unlikely that we could have obtained permission to bring a weapon of any kind to Antarctica. Still, the “Spirit of Adventure” crew had managed to spirit an entire aircraft aboard the Rio Baker and to conceal it without Capitán Soto’s becoming any the wiser….

The chances of an attack on a kayak by any creature are probably not as great as the chances of being involved in a traffic accident on the way to the seashore. Sea kayaking lacks the same kind of mile-a-minute excitement as white-water kayaking, and appeals to a sort of individual given to morose speculation as he peers into the murky depths, who is, in the words of Hannes Lindemann, the first man to survive the crossing of the Atlantic in a kayak, “dreaming of other coasts.”

Still, a vivid imagination can pump up some adrenalin and put a nice edge on things. When you reflect on the fact that you are sitting right on the water line on a nine-inch wide strip of quarter-inch plywood encased in rubberized canvas stretched over a light frame of sticks not quite as thick as pool cues, and you are a few miles out and you spot a big shark nearby, you may experience a sort of a puckering sensation, if you know what I mean.

We went ashore at a tiny landing place in Leith Cove. It consisted of a little rocky beach and a mound of snow beneath the wall of ice. It so happened that Admiral Byrd had carried Klepper kayaks on an expedition to Antarctica in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s, but his expedition had landed on the Ross Ice shelf instead of on the true mainland. There was also a group of intrepid and well-financed Brits who kayaked all around Brabant Island on the Gerlache Strait several years before we got there, but they had never crossed the strait to the mainland. Since going to Antarctica is still a little bit of a rare thing, and so records are usually kept it’s possible to say John and I were probably the first ever people to land a kayak on the Antarctic mainland, or were at least the first of which there is any record.

This was a big deal for John. He asked me to wait while he jumped out of the stern position and splashed ashore in a rage to become the first man in history (“Whoop de do!” is probably most people’s reaction) to land on the Antarctic mainland by kayak. But he blew it. He waded ashore. After allowing him to savor the pride of this historic achievement for a moment, I stood up and stepped directly from the boat onto the shore. So just for the record, folks, I am the all-time champeen of Antarctic kayak landers. And nobody can take this record from me, because only one person can be the first. So kiss my butt, John. Serves you right for treating me like a chump.

I didn’t mention this before, dear reader, but John was in the stern of the kayak, and just to show that he was cool and that I was a fool, he had been making a big show to everyone in the bay of not paddling. Whenever I would look back, he would start to paddle a little, but as soon as I’d face forward again, he’d quit. Kayak paddles don’t make a whole lot of noise, but they do splash and drip enough to be audible. All the photos Ruth took show him grinning and holding his paddle aloft while I propelled the boat through the water. I was pretty well fed up with being the odd man out by now, and this was by no means the only trick I played upon him this day.

After writing this new entry in the annals of Antarctic exploration, we continued on past a large glacier and a rocky cliff full of shrieking sea birds to the Argentine base at Bahía Paraíso, Almirante Brown. This had been abandoned several years before when the main building had burned down. Rumor has it that the fire was deliberately set by a stir-crazy Argentine doctor, just so he could be evacuated from that place. This would have been during the long Antarctic winter, when Antarctica has been called “the worst place on earth.” I don’t think anything was ever proved, or that charges were brought, but it’s a good story and has been repeated in many places. What was left of the base was a collection of red shacks surrounding the twisted ruin of the main building on a steep hillside.

The usual practice on an extended sea kayak trip would be to cover ten or twenty miles on the water before making camp along the shore. Depending on the weather and the disposition of the company, the group might press on the next day or explore inland for a day. Of necessity, we turned back at Almirante Brown in order to get back aboard the ship, now just four and a half miles off, before noon. All told, we covered just ten miles that day. Cosmic Hippie Expeditions would later trumpet the story that this was the first-ever kayaking in Antarctica, another pioneering effort in the world of contemporary sea kayaking.

This was not true, of course, because of Admiral Byrd and the Brabant Island Brits I mentioned before, but in addition to my world’s record of being the first to land a kayak on the Antarctic mainland, we did set two other authentic world’s records during our epic voyage. First, Ruth Berkowitz became the first woman to paddle a kayak in Antarctica. Second and by far the most sweeping world’s record is one more that I am claiming for myself. As I have already mentioned, I spent $6, 480 to participate in six hours’ kayaking in Antarctica. This is $1, 080 per hour. Surely, this is the most money per hour ever spent to paddle a boat.

The “Spirit of Adventure” film crew went on to film its “Antarctic Odyssey.” Beverly Johnson was said to be the first person ever to fly a gyrocopter in Antarctica. Ron Peers and Mike Hoover were both quite crestfallen when I later broke the news to them that Admiral Byrd had beaten them to this record, too. A distant relative of mine named William McCormick had extensively flown a Kellet autogyro, and early aircraft of the same type, on Byrd’s expedition to Little America in the early 1930’s. Beverly can still claim the title of the first woman to ever fly one there.

In watching “Antarctic Odyssey” on TV, it seemed pretty obvious to me that a supposedly dramatic sequence about whether or not the team would be able to make it back in time to the rendezvous with the ship had been staged. When Peers had asked me later what I had thought of the film, I got the impression he really wanted to know if I had noticed anything funny about it. I replied with some sort of diplomatic non-committal compliment, and he seemed relieved. It appears that “the family” had convinced themselves they were so much better than everyone else that they could get away with anything. Whatever the merits of “Antarctic Odyssey,” Sam Posey’s work on the project did lead not long after this to his position as host of ABC Sports’ coverage of the “Trans-Antarctica” expedition.

Ruth Berkowitz would experience difficulty and frustration in getting her article published. She and John had taken Bill’s advice to stop down their cameras’ lenses a couple of f-stops to compensate for the extra light reflected by all the snow and ice that was supposedly going to leave their pictures washed out, as Bill had learned from long years of experience. As a consequence of this, I had been the only one of the group to have taken any usable photographs of the trip. Photos are what sell travel articles. Ruth finally got her starry-eyed, gushing article published in Great Expeditions, a little magazine that uses newspaper-quality black and white illustrations, thereby helping to lure a new group of hopeful and unsuspecting tourists into the clutches of Cosmic Hippie Expeditions and International Adventurers, Inc.

Great Leader, thanks to the financial backing of John and myself, was able to add traveling to latitude 85 degrees South to his list of published accomplishments. Cosmic Hippie advertised to prospective clients that it had run a “successful” kayak expedition to the Antarctic, and in their catalog they printed a photo of John and me in a kayak to prove it. I just wish they’s send their prospective customers to me for an endorsement.

Arthur Blessitt had been talking about carrying the cross through the Sahara Desert. When I last saw him in Punta Arenas, he was on the telephone, a gin and tonic in one hand and a cigarette in the other, loudly arranging a luncheon with George H. Bush.

As for myself, I would spend a week longer than planned in South America. Through a series of mishaps, Cosmic Hippie had gotten its hands on my airline tickets and had turned them over to International Adventurers, who had thoughtfully re-arranged my reservations so that my flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago departed on the day after my flight from Santiago to Miami. Bill and I managed to part on a more friendly note than we had thus far experienced in our relationship. Maybe it was that we were both so glad to be parting.

If there is a moral to my story, it is that you can pay someone else to arrange a tour for you, but you can’t pay someone else to arrange an adventure for you. “Adventure tourism” is tourism, not adventure. While I was plowing north on the Rio Baker with John and Bill, that insufferable know-it-all Mike Hoover and his friends were having the adventure I would have wished for, because through their own abilities they had created the opportunity for themselves.

I’ve taken many a journey in my day, with guides, with tour operators, and on my own, and I’ve got to regard my trip to Antarctica as the most outrageously fouled-up disaster I could have dreamed of in my worst nightmare. Still, I look through my snapshots from that trip with a certain fondness. They say it’s only a fool who doesn’t learn from his mistakes, dear reader, so here’s the punch line: I’d do it all again in a minute.