About 150 people who never left the Marco Polo are disappointed. I'd be more upset if there'd been penguins. I feel like I'm on another planet. The ship is moving through the Gerlache Strait toward the Lemaire Channel. In the strait is ice, in chunks small enough for a cocktail and others, bergs with ridges of deep blue, large enough to water a desert or sink the unsinkable.
Penguins play, diving through our wake like dolphins, as if in celebration of our arrival.
Then the ship glides into the Lemaire Channel itself. It is a canyon of white and black, grander and tighter than what we had seen before. It is snowing now, thick snow, thick enough to blot out the peaks of mountains but not thick enough to blot out the majesty. The ship eases past an ice floe. On the ice floe is a single penguin.