Waking up on the island of Isabela's coast makes you think you have travelled back to ancient times. Few places on the planet can exhibit such a concentration of wildlife, where one can also be in the midst of them. The animals' daily lives took place before our eyes and everything happened at the same time. We gently wandered between seals and penguins who barely took any notice of the two-legged visitors, and it was difficult to know where to look and photograph. The elephant seals were literally in piles and between the piles of blubber, the penguins tried to get up to reach their nesting sites higher up. At the ascent of Sandy Bay, it was rather difficult to find a vacancy on the beach to go ashore. And we didn't have to search very long to find the animals. When you are here you can also take the opportunity to tick off three other species: king penguin, gentoo penguin and rockhopper penguin. In other words, you have to visit Macquarie Island if you want to have seen every penguin species in the world. The most special is the royal penguin which nests only on this remote island. This is home to about 80,000 elephant seals and hundreds of thousands of penguins and other seabirds. At the very bottom right corner of the world map you can see a small line sticking out of the depth of the sea - MacQuarie Island. Today we made a landing in Australian territory, on the most remote island imaginable. Having this experience in the magnificent archipelago of Svalbard, on a friendly and homely ship like M/S Quest, with all these lovely fellow adventurers to share the moment with, makes it a trip that I will never forget.
This is what makes a Svalbard expedition so special.
and much more.Īs someone told me – “on an expedition cruise you need to be in the moment, there is nothing else but now”. Other moments of minor miracles, such as watching the ivory gull feeding in front of a glacier, seeing ice shapes like stolen out of fairytales, the surprisingly lush and green playgrounds under the grand bird cliffs, enjoyed by young foxes, the many shades of grey on a rainy day, the many colours of ice in different light, seals popping their heads out of the water to have a curious look at us in the Zodiac, the warm welcome of our Russian guide in Barentsburg, Kitiwakes nesting on the window ledges in the village. During the trip there were many moments of rapid weather changes and beautiful settings, and we got to experience an especially memorable one while we headed out in the Zodiacs during an early morning, and later on returned to the ship as the fog lifted, revealing the colours of the astonishing landscape surrounding us in Hornsund.