Oh, Ship!

There’s an old Chinese saying I just made up: “If you do two things at once, you’ll do them both badly”. Barbecuing is fun and so is hot air ballooning. But you should never barbecue in a hot air balloon. Roller coasters and colonoscopies are both good things, but not at the same time. Ditto sex and petting zoos.

Six days on the world’s roughest seas. This was my vacation.

This also holds true for solar eclipses and visiting Antarctica. Fans of this Substack – IF WE HAD ANY – know that these are two travel experiences I had no complaints with: I cruised to Antarctica twice and chased four solar eclipses. So what could be better than seeing a solar eclipse in Antarctica? It turns out, just about anything.

It was all downhill after the Ushuaia Prison Museum.

There’s a solar eclipse TOMORROW over Spain, Britain and Iceland! Total solar eclipses pop every thirteen months or so, in seemingly random places: Australia, Wyoming, Chile, Bali, and in December 2021, over the waters around Antarctica. There was nowhere else on earth you could see it, so seven different cruise lines decided to send ships there. We joined a college alumni tour, with groups from Harvard, Duke (the Harvard of the south), and Colorado College (the Harvard of downtown Colorado Springs). There were also passengers representing the Smithsonian. My only affiliation with them is that I subscribed to Smithsonian magazine back in the nineties. I let my subscription lapse, because, you know, it’s boring. And yet the magazine kept coming.

Year after year, decade after decade, Smithsonian keeps showing up in my mailbox, uninvited, unpaid for. I even moved across country... and yet somehow it found me. It’s like a curse that won’t stop until I make it all the way through one issue. A recent copy actually had a 13-page article on the history of Roquefort cheese. Nope, won’t be reading that.

Every cruise to Antarctica leaves from Ushuaia, the southernmost port on earth. It’s a remote area, and in 1902 Argentina figured the best way to populate it was by building a huge prison there. This gave them a town, although one largely populated by rapists and murderers. Not a great tax base. This giant octopus of a prison has been converted to a cultural center, with a different museum in each tentacle: there’s art, history, maritime and wax. It’s sort of a Smithsonian Penal Institution. Ha ha, take that, Smithsonian.

Ushuaia’s main employer is no longer the prison; it’s a cell phone assembly factory. In other words, a prison.

Still Ushuaia is a charming tourist town, where you can get a king crab dinner for something like three cents. This is all thanks to Argentina’s amazing plummeting currency. The value is dropping so fast, the money should come with a slide whistle.

The Argentinian peso used to be worth a dollar – now it’s worth half a penny. I learned this after using a local ATM. I thought I was getting two hundred dollars – instead, I got a buck. Plus a ten-dollar service charge.

Most South Pole cruises sail into the protected Antarctic Bay. There you enjoy a week of calm seas, blue skies, and penguins. But that’s not where the eclipse was, so instead we headed east… into the roughest oceans on earth. Sailors have said of the southern latitudes, “Beneath forty, there is no law. Beneath fifty, there is no God.” We were about to spend the next week in the sixties.

We talked two college friends into joining us. They haven’t spoken to us since.

I gazed back at Ushuaia as it receded in the distance. The last thing I saw was a billboard with the city’s nickname on it: The End of the World. It was a real horror movie moment. There was even the wheezy old man who predicts doom early in the film. He was a professor who’d been chasing eclipses since the forties. He turned to me and said, “We’re not gonna see anything. We’re not gonna see anything at all!”

Our itinerary speaks volumes: we were heading through Terror Cove, past Danger Islands trying to reach a point called Inaccessible Point. Spoiler alert: we never got there! For three straight days, we plowed through endless fog. The seas churned like a cheap washing machine, a Kenmore if you will. These waters would challenge a massive oil tanker, and we were a dainty French cruise ship, fragile as a croissant. The waves were higher than the boat itself, and constantly swamped us. The name of the cruise line was Ponant. That’s French for West and the boat was heading east, so we weren’t doing one thing right.

I claim this as the worst vacation ever!

The rocking never stopped – side to side, front to back – and if you paid extra for top deck suites, you got the worst thrashing of all. Early on, the rear of the dining room was flooded, but the staff continued serving three meals a day. There was glassware breaking, tables sliding, and dessert carts rolling in all directions – still, the Filipino busboys never lost their smiles and the French waiters never lost their arrogance.

Like robots, they set out three elegant meals a day that everyone was too seasick to eat.

It’s hard to describe seasickness – it’s not just nausea. It’s an existential woe, it’s your body betraying you. It goes to your core – for guys, it’s like being kicked in the balls. For ladies, it’s like – I don’t know – giving birth to Sean Hannity. When I was seasick, if someone had walked in and shot me in the head, my last words would have been, “Thank you.”

Virtually every passenger was wearing seasick patches, small round band-aids you stick below one ear. I don’t know if they work, but they alert other passengers, “I may throw up on you at any moment.”

It looked like a dystopian movie: people shuffling around glassy-eyed, with little on/off buttons stuck to their necks.

Each morning at eight, the French captain would come on the P.A. System: “Bonjour, everyone. I hope you had a sweet night. Ehhhhhhhh…”

We quickly learned that ‘ehhhh’ was French for bad news. “Today’s whale watching boat has been canceled. Ehhhhhh… the Penguin Encounter will not take place… Ehhhhh…” The longer the ‘ehhhhh’ the worse the news was. Every single activity and excursion was canceled due to bad seas. One old passenger grumbled, “I didn’t pay all this money for a boat ride!”

I replied, “Well, ya kinda did.”

Would we see a solar eclipse? Would it be worth all this suffering?

The answer appears in next week’s column, but you’ve got to be a PAID SUBSCRIBER to see it! Just $5 a month.