Two years ago, I travelled into Antarctica's Weddell Sea. We reached about forty miles away from the Snow Hill Emperor Penguin colony, before we ran out of time and had to return North. With another day in the plan, we could have got close to Snow Hill. But given it was Jan, we were probably too late in the season and the colony would have been empty. Still there was a chance of us bumping into an Emperor Penguin on an ice flow, with the extra time. I spent all my time looking, but I was unsuccessful and I vowed I would have to return to Antarctica. In early Oct, I spotted there was a thirty-five percent reduction on a bunk in a four berth cabin on the Oceanwide Expeditions' ship, Ortelius. The plan was Ortelius would head far enough South into the Weddell Sea to reach the Snow Hill Emperor Penguin colony.
Another attraction about this trip, is Ortelius had a helicopter deck and three helicopters which would be capable of landing passengers within walking distance of reaching the colony. I now had my excuse to return to Antarctica. With this last minute reduction, it was the best price that I've seen, in several years of checking prices for an Emperor Penguin trip. To reach an Emperor colony twenty-five years ago, you had to pay about three times this price to fly into Antarctica and camp on the ice or spend a month travelling from New Zealand to Antarctica and back. More recently there have been other trips heading South from Argentina, but they were still beyond my budget. Therefore, this was a near mythical species that I didn't think I would ever have a realistic chance of seeing. I booked the trip as soon as I had confirmed I could also book the flights to Ushuaia.
Seven weeks later and I was on a flight to Madrid from Heathrow, before boarding my connecting flight to Buenos Aires. I arrived late evening and was met by the owner of the private house with three flats in the back garden, which were a convenient place near to the international airport. The following morning, I was dropped back at the international airport for the flight down to Ushuaia. There was one stop en route at El Calafate airport. This airport wasn't there when I visited Argentina in the five week trip back in 1998.
Fortunately, my main luggage arrived safely at Ushuaia, which wasn't the case for at least one of the passengers who bordered the plane at El Calafate. When I arrived, I decided to hire a car from Hertz for the next day. A wise decision as the owner of the flat I had booked for the next 3 days in Ushuaia, gave me a real run around, before I finally managed to get into the flat. I would recommend that anybody seeing the Departamento Bahia Grande flat on Booking.com, give the place a wide berth. While it looked good on the website, trying to use the cooker, tripped the electrics in the flat. Something the owner knew about, but couldn't be bothered to do anything about fixing or warning the guests. While I knew how to reset the electrics, not everybody would know that. Additionally, the decor in the flat felt more like student, rather than tourist, accommodation. Still I was in Ushuaia and had two full days of Birding ahead of me.