The Antarctic Peninsula - Travel

Port Lockroy is a beautiful natural harbour on Goudier Island on the Palmer archipelago, reached by passing through the towering grandiose cliffs of the Neumayer Channel.

Like many sites currently occupied in Antarctica, it was used by the whaling industry after its discovery in 1903.

A British base was established in 1944 (British base "A") and it is now designated a "historic site" under the Antarctic Treaty. Since 1996, the base has been opened during the summer months by British Antarctic Survey under the guidance of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT). It is possible to look around the renovated buildings and museum and get a flavour of what life used to be like in Antarctica on a base in the 1950's.

There is even a gift shop and Post Office where cards and letters can be franked before being placed on the next available ship for transport to their destination via Britain. Port Lockroy is currently the most visited site in Antarctica with about 6000 tourists each summer. Post office diary

An environmental monitoring programme was established when the base began being manned in 1996 to to investigate potential visitor disturbance to the rookery of gentoo penguins nearby. It appears that so far, the large numbers of visitors have had no discernable impact on penguin breeding success, which is more closely linked to local environmental conditions, such as snow cover or the availability of krill.

There are also relics from the whaling days at Port Lockroy such as a massive fin whale skeleton. The fin whale is the second largest whale (after the blue whale). Each year the skeleton is reassembled after the weather blows it apart all winter. This particular whale has even been shown to have had arthritis because some of its bones show deterioration in the same way that arthritic human bones do.
 

Signy Island Base in the South Orkney Islands Chilean Antarctic Research Base Gonzalez Videla, Paradise Bay Photographic Print

At some point on your Antarctic trip you may well visit a research base or station. These are manned (and womanned) typically by staff from one particular country as they are  run on a national basis. Some bases are more accommodating than others depending on the level of tourist traffic that comes their way, how long the people have been on the base and how keen they are for distractions. Some are keener on tourist visits than others and some base personnel are more amenable to visits than others.

This is often an excellent opportunity to see an aspect of Antarctica not often seen at close quarters (Antarctic personnel are sometimes the most timid and bizarre of the endemic wildlife of the region). There are usually two categories of people on a base, those who arrived the same summer for whom you may be an annoyance or at best nothing much unusual. Then there are those who have just completed a whole winter (or more) for whom the arrival of a ship full of new faces is a rare, exciting  and exotic luxury of the highest order (I know this, I was one of those people!). This second group typically see the first annoyed group as coming considerably below the tourists in the pecking order for being annoyed in the first place.

If you can befriend these winterers, they may take you places the average tourist doesn't go, they will also know that they are not exactly supposed to do this, but may also not care very much that they're not. Don't push it though, they are a delicate species and getting on the wrong side will mean an opportunity missed. Please respect the base, it is their home even if it doesn't look very private or much like your home.

You may get an extra slide-show (tourist ships would supply lunch and entertainment while I gave a slide-show in return - a traditional role passed on through the generations of winterers) guided tours of the local environs and the opportunity to buy or trade t-shirts, sweat-shirts etc.

The Antarctic Peninsula is mainland Antarctica, so until you have been here and set foot upon the ground, you have not truly been to Antarctica. It also offers the possibility to cross the Antarctic Circle. Most ships will steam down past the line of 66° 33′ 44″ ( or 66.562° ) degrees of latitude so that passengers can say they have done it.

The Antarctic Peninsula is truly a serenely beautiful place that makes you feel like you are (quite rightly) in the cage of your ship an intruder into another world. It is here that your dreams of visiting Antarctica will become reality in a way that you can't really appreciate if you have never been there.

The Peninsula along with the attendant islands are the best places to view wildlife in Antarctica.