It was brilliant, can´t put it any other way. However, I´m not going to tell you all about it now, you will have to wait a bit because I have to pack, sleep a bit and then get on a bus at 8 o´clock tomorrow morning to Punta Arenas in Chile. 14 hours, it´ll be wild fun. From there I´m heading to Puerto Natales where I´ll join Arnon again. Guess we are going to Torres del Paine National Park straight away (we´ll have to get there while the CONAF-people (N.P. wardens) are still on strike, then we won´t have to pay the entrance fee!!!) and do the circuit.

Anyway, the penguins really won my heart over, and the whales we saw were really tourist friendly, breaching (jumping out of the water and falling on their backs) and swimming around the boat. The scenery was pretty wild as well, and a personal highlight was our landing at Brown Bluff, a hyaloclastite volcano erupted under ice a long time ago. As some of you know I was studying similar volcanoes in Iceland in 1999 and at that time read some (pretty scary, actually) articles about Brown Bluff. Did not for a second, at that time, think I´d be standing on shore there looking up at the volcano anytime within my lifespan. And now I have. Cool.

Since there are no man-eating creatures in the Antarctic (as far as I know) I didn´t try to moon any of them (as I did in Svalbard way back when). Instead I managed to scare the shit out of some of the penguins down there (imagine standing outside the supermarket buttoning your coat and when you look up there is Hulk or King Kong standing an arms length away. I´m sure you´d squeak and run into the supermarket again), it was actually hard to avoid it because there were simply so many penguins. And they are so comic, I just love them.

More later!!

Oh, forgot: Happy New Year!