Never before has a trip ended with me so instantly and unhesitatingly wanting to set out all over again.

Setting Sail

The moment the ship left the dock in Ushuaia, it suddenly hit me: I was really going to Antarctica.

The night before, I had stood by the water in Ushuaia watching a dazzling sunset and ran into a group of travelers who had just disembarked from an Antarctic cruise ship. The full, radiant happiness on every face made me wonder what kind of magical place Antarctica must be.

Luckily, I was about to find out for myself.

Our ship slowly made its way along the Beagle Channel toward the farthest south of the world. As wind and rain suddenly swept in at dusk, my heart remained utterly calm.

For the next two days, we sailed across an endless expanse of open ocean. The notoriously fierce Drake Passage and the westerlies, which I had long expected, turned out to be surprisingly gentle. My hopes for towering waves were dashed, and the journey began in quiet, steady fashion.

We crossed 60° south latitude and entered the Southern Ocean.

Icebergs

On the morning of our second day crossing the Drake Passage, an announcement came over the speaker from the expedition leader: “We’ve spotted the first iceberg of this voyage, and the captain is turning the ship so we can go pay it a visit.” I grabbed my camera and ran to the bow, and there it was...

The first iceberg of my 30 years of life.

They say you only see the tip of the iceberg. The part above the water accounts for just one-tenth of its mass; who knows what wonders lie hidden below the surface.

As we ventured deeper into the Antarctic Peninsula, seeing icebergs became less and less unusual over the following days. Do you get tired of them? Not at all. Standing on deck with a mug of hot cocoa, gazing at each one, is something I could never get enough of.

These massive, fantastically shaped icebergs are works of art adrift at sea. Without meaning to, we had wandered into a world-class museum called Antarctica.

The sculptors named “Westerly Wind” and “Ocean Waves” labor day and night, creating their one-of-a-kind masterpieces.

And every so often, another artist—the wandering poet called “Sunset”—slips into the gallery unannounced and adds a few effortless strokes.

When the sea was calm, we cruised among labyrinthine clusters of icebergs in a Zodiac. The bracing ocean wind carried a vivid, soul-cleansing blue straight toward us. This kind of natural beauty simply cannot be understood without being there in person.

Cunning floes quietly boxed in our little boat, and by the time we looked back, there was no clear way out. We became willing captives of beauty.

Our experienced guide led us on a winding route, and by happy accident we discovered a piece of black ice, even rarer than blue ice. Every piece of black ice is ancient glacial ice. Compressed over thousands of years, it has expelled all air and impurities, becoming extraordinarily pure.

Finding black ice and chipping off a piece to bring back onboard for a one-of-a-kind Antarctic whisky is a ritual unique to this place.

A week before we set sail, A23a—the largest iceberg on the Antarctic continent—finally broke free after being trapped for 37 years and drifted from the Weddell Sea into the Southern Ocean. Maybe next year you’ll be lucky enough to encounter this grandpa-sized iceberg, older than I am and roughly the size of 6 Singapores.

Penguin Diaries

Contrary to what many people first assume, most penguins are not actually native to Antarctica. They are spread across the vast waters of the Southern Hemisphere, from South America to Australia to South Africa. There is even a species in Ecuador that successfully crosses the equator—talk about heat tolerance.

By the numbers, only 5 penguin species truly live in Antarctica long term. Of those, 3 are more like green-card holders, while only 2 are true locals with precious Antarctic residency.

Every year, as Antarctica gradually warms from late winter into early spring in the Southern Hemisphere, the penguins finally return to begin a new breeding season. By late October, the males arrive first, searching through the snow and ice for exposed rocks to use as home base. They turn into architects, diligently gathering pebbles to build their nests.

A safe, comfortable, and attractive nest is a male penguin’s greatest asset when it comes to attracting a mate. See? No matter where you go, good real estate is always a core competitive advantage.

Not enough? Add a few little wood chips for a deluxe interior finish.

Beneath penguins’ adorably clumsy exterior lies a surprisingly devious streak. Because pebbles become an almost scarce strategic resource during breeding season, lazy outlaws soon turn to crime.

We watched three penguins take advantage of another penguin’s husband being away and absolutely ransack the nest, leaving the victim’s home stripped bare in an instant.

The worst offenders are Adélie penguins, those apparently gentlemanly birds in neat little tuxedos. If you replaced the stones in each Adélie nest with a different color, I guarantee that before breeding season was even halfway over, the entire colony would turn into a riot of color.

So these mischievously adorable Adélies switch careers from architect to accountant, keeping inventory of their pebble stock. Some will even stand guard over the construction site on an empty stomach.

But lovable troublemakers still have their fans, and Adélies may be the most cartoonified penguins of all. The little penguin on Japan’s Suica transit card is an Adélie. The famous Penguin Books logo is also based on an Adélie penguin. Even the penguin that has been blinking from the lower-right corner of Chinese computer desktops for more than 30 years is—yes—another Adélie.

After paying such a hefty bride price to win a wife, it’s time to start making baby penguins. This older couple, still enjoying their romantic moment, was surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers.

By late November, the penguins officially begin incubation. The parents take turns: one sits on the eggs while the other heads out to sea to feed. The whole process takes a little over a month, so the fluffy chicks won’t appear until January.

Making a living is not easy, but one thing to remember: never walk in front of a devious Adélie penguin. It may casually kick you into the sea just to see whether there are any seals in the water.

Life is hard for a penguin too, so sometimes it is best to just lie flat and paddle around for a while.

Penguins are not really afraid of people. Their real predators are the seals in the sea that crave penguin meat, and the skuas in the sky eyeing their eggs. As for these upright, sneaky land creatures approaching them, they are not especially alarmed. Sometimes they are even quite curious about this group of animals that also shows up here at this time every year.

They can even coexist peacefully with seals, because once a seal leaves the water, it turns into little more than a wriggling blob. For them, sunbathing, yawning, and scratching an itch matter far more than hunting penguins.

Q: How many steps does it take to secretly carry off a penguin?

A: No matter how many, step one is definitely pinching your own nose shut.

Because they smell absolutely terrible. Penguins mainly eat krill from the sea, but their digestion is poor, their hygiene habits are not exactly refined, and they even use projectile droppings as a weapon. The whole breeding ground ends up saturated with a fishy, marine stench. If you did not grow up by the ocean, your first landing on the island might well make you pass out.

Those penguins with no sense of fair play who chose to set up base right next to the research station really made life hard for the scientists.

You also see solitary penguins, all alone. It is hard not to imagine that they are the madmen and adventurers of penguin society, no longer able to endure the breeding colony’s daily noise and unchanging routine, deciding to leave everything behind and head for places penguins are not supposed to go, reaching distances no penguin has ever reached before.

Joining our journey were two American scientists whose main fieldwork was... counting penguins. By tracking changes in the size of different penguin populations, they study shifts in the ecological environment of Antarctica and the surrounding waters.

This may well be one of the world’s smelliest happy jobs.

Lemaire Channel

If you ask me where Antarctica is most beautiful, I would answer without hesitation: the Lemaire Channel, especially the Lemaire Channel on a sunny day.

We spent five days on the Antarctic Peninsula. After passing through the dazzlingly beautiful Neumayer Channel, Port Lockroy, and Damoy Point on the second day, our expectations for Antarctica were already sky-high.

And then the Lemaire Channel exceeded them.

It simply showed us its very best side.

This is a long, narrow passage between the Antarctic Peninsula mainland and the offshore islands, narrowing to only a few hundred meters at its tightest point. Snow-covered peaks rise on both sides year-round, creating an intense sense of grandeur and pressure, while the fjord keeps the water calm, forming a naturally perfect mirror.

Good weather is also an essential condition. Even the expedition staff said that crossing the Lemaire in weather like this is worth half the ticket price by itself.

Everyone greedily crowded the bow, trying to preserve this fleeting beauty, while exclamations in every language rose and fell around us.

The busiest of all, naturally, were the people with long lenses and heavy cameras running back and forth across every deck. Only after feeling the cool breeze of the Lemaire can you understand why it is called “Kodak Gap” — it absolutely devours shutter clicks.

Even knowing many of the photos would end up looking similar, we still could not resist pressing the shutter, just as I still cannot resist posting more pictures now.

Not even advertising law could stop me from declaring: “The most beautiful waterway in Antarctica!”

In the sea at the turn from late spring to early summer, stubborn floes that refused to melt drifted everywhere, like a shattered starry sky scattered across the water.

Had we arrived earlier, too much hard ice would have blocked the ship’s passage. Our Ukrainian captain, rich in experience, guided us carefully yet confidently through this polar “asteroid belt,” like Captain Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise. Every time I thought we were about to hit a small iceberg head-on, he would glance over and say it was fine, and sure enough, we would slip right past it.

That day, two other lucky cruise ships crossed the Lemaire Channel alongside us: G Adventure’s Expedition and Poseidon’s

Cruising through the ice and snow, every ship looked this moving, and I began to understand why sailors refer to the vessels they love as “she.”

The three ships followed one another at just the right distance, breaking ice in sequence and pushing aside a glittering scatter of frozen fragments. We stood on deck, waving hard to the travelers in the distance and shouting, “Can you feel the happiness?”

Then, from far away, a small sailboat drifted into view. Yes, sailboats can reach Antarctica too. Before departure, at a small restaurant in Ushuaia, we happened to meet three fellow countrymen from Spain, full of spirit and about to set off by sailboat.

Where we come from, the wind runs in our blood.

It sounds adventurous and romantic, but when a small sailboat meets the towering winds and heavy seas of the Drake Passage, with limited supplies on board, comfort is not likely to be part of the experience.

But with so few passengers, they can choose virtually any landing site on the Antarctic Peninsula without restriction. Some of them stay for a month or so, leisurely spending an icy summer there.

The little boat drifted gracefully away before us — a small craft gone from sight, the rest of life left to rivers and seas.

What Whale-Chasers Say

Ever since we began roaming the Southern Ocean, a mysterious rumor gradually spread around the ship: in the dark currents beneath us, a group of huge unidentified creatures was appearing and vanishing.

This creature was described long ago by Zhuangzi in Free and Easy Wandering: “In the northern darkness there is a fish, and its name is Kun. So enormous is Kun that no one knows how many thousand li it measures...”

Whales are another magical animal you can see on an Antarctic cruise. Krill resources are extraordinarily abundant at the two poles of the Earth, and krill are exactly the delicacy whales crave. So every austral summer, all kinds of whales make the long journey to Antarctica for a buffet.

The best whale-watching season is actually February and March, so on our early-December itinerary, it wasn’t until we reached the famous Gerlache Strait that we had our first close encounter with the “largest mammals in the world” so often mentioned in elementary-school quiz books.

The easiest species to spot were humpback whales and minke whales, along with a few “undercover agents” mixed into the whale lineup. For example, this round-headed pilot whale actually belongs to the dolphin family.

An even more famous impostor is the orca, whose wonderfully intimidating English name is killer whale. Doesn’t its black-and-white coloring look familiar? Send it to Sichuan and it could probably pass as a panda.

Orcas are famous mama’s boys of the sea. Male orcas never leave their mothers’ side for their entire lives. The only exception is that they spend a few days at the bride’s place after mating, then head right back home—proof that “mom is the best” really does apply in the ocean too.

As a matriarchal society, orcas usually live in pods of four, five, six, seven, or eight, essentially all led by single mothers. Highly intelligent, immensely powerful, and fond of coordinated attacks, they rule the seas like an aquatic mafia. Even the fearsome great white shark is little more than a bronze-tier player in an orca’s eyes—to put it bluntly, “I haven’t even started trying and you’re already down.”

Humpbacks, by contrast, are true whales. They’re natural show-offs, usually happy to perform all kinds of breaches and surface acrobatics in front of people, but we probably ran into a few food-obsessed ones, because they kept their heads down in the water and just kept eating.

A humpback whale’s tail pattern is like a human fingerprint—every one is unique. The one we photographed turned out, after checking the system, never to have been recorded before, which meant we had the right to name her. A few days later, at the ship’s auction, someone actually paid several hundred dollars for the naming rights.

But the history of whales is also a tragedy of the sea. Over the past century-plus, Antarctica’s whales went through an unimaginably dark period. Whalers from Norway, the UK, the US, and other countries slaughtered them here for whale oil. In just sixty years, blue whale numbers crashed from 200,000–300,000 to only 2,000–3,000. Fin whales were reduced to just 20% of their former population, while only 5,000 humpbacks survived.

Seals could not escape the same fate.

Much like the old saying about taking fish from a lake on the Yangtze without regard for tomorrow, Westerners were no less ruthless when profit was at stake. Nature’s greatness and fragility are two sides of the same coin, and both desperately need our care.

A Kind of Beauty Only Chinese People Truly Understand

On the way to the Antarctic Peninsula, we passed an archipelago made up of several islands: the South Shetland Islands. We were scheduled to make a brief stop at one of them.

Though it is called an island, it is actually a natural harbor formed when a volcano collapsed and was flooded by seawater. Sailing in through the narrow entrance felt like entering the gaping jaws of some gigantic sea beast.

Looking into the distance, I could only stare in amazement. What kind of landscape was this? It was as if the heavens had suddenly been seized by inspiration and splashed ink across the world here.

There were only two colors here—black and white—yet in a single glance they conveyed the full meaning of layer upon layer of peaks.

As the ship slowly cruised across the inner bay, it felt like moving through a long handscroll painting of ink wash, each step revealing a new scene—a lesson in aesthetics that seemed made especially for an Eastern eye.

And after switching to a panoramic frame, didn’t it look even more like a traditional Chinese painting? Nature is the finest painter of all.

The volcano last erupted sixty years ago, destroying all the research stations and whaling facilities, so statistically speaking, we felt reasonably safe stepping ashore.

When the volcano erupts, what a spectacle of ice and fire this place must become. Beneath the blanket of snow lies the hottest force from deep underground. Even Jin Yong’s legendary Ice and Fire Island would hardly outdo it.

The earth’s veins seemed unbelievably clear here.

Because of the volcanic activity, this has also become one of the Antarctic region’s rare geothermal hot spring sites—though “hot spring” may be too generous; “icy spring” would be more accurate. The black soil onshore was forever shrouded in thick mist rising from the earth’s core. One casual snapshot I took there somehow won first place in the ship’s portrait photography competition.

People said it looked like the opening scene of a horror game.

Mom, I Finally Made It to Antarctica

On our last day in Antarctica, we were preparing to land at Paradise Bay, said to be the most beautiful spot of all. In the middle of the night, dark clouds filled the sky outside my window. I pulled on my shell jacket and headed to the bow. Wind whipped up the leftover snow, sleet and gusts came charging in, broken ice drifted through the water, and heavy waves slammed mercilessly against the hull.

The clear skies and gentle beauty of the previous two days had almost made us forget that this was still the coldest place on earth, with some of the harshest conditions anywhere. Overnight, it turned into a place where taking off your gloves or face covering for even a few seconds became unbearable.

The expedition team took their Zodiac out to scout conditions, with the waves looking vicious enough to swallow them whole.

Sure enough, there was no way to land. After checking the weather charts, the captain and expedition leader made the call on the spot to turn around and head for Neko Harbour instead. We had to say goodbye to Brown Station with regret.

One of the Chinese guides on board, who had been to Antarctica many times, comforted us by saying that among people who had visited Antarctica, Paradise Bay and Neko Harbour had about the same number of devoted fans—basically, different people fall for different views.

But when we arrived at Neko Harbour and saw that enormous fracture in the ice, glowing faintly blue as if lit from deep underground, it was far more than a case of different tastes. It was utterly dazzling.

I can hardly put into words what I felt at that moment, but even now, whenever I look at these photos again, I can still effortlessly feel that soul-stirring, tear-inducing beauty.

The constant collapse of ice cracks along the cliffs left thick floating ice near Neko Harbour, and our Zodiac once again had to crawl forward like an icebreaker.

The crystal-clear ice looked like a scattering of diamonds and sapphires across the sea. And every thunderous collapse of falling ice was followed by surging waves exploding across the water.

A bare heart-shaped rock—can you feel all that love?

Climbing out of the Zodiac with difficulty, I stepped forward with my right foot and onto solid pebbled ground. In that moment, someone beside me said, welcome officially to the Antarctic continent.

In other words, from here, one could in theory keep walking step by step all the way to the South Pole.

Before you stand snow-capped peaks hundreds of meters high; beyond the mountains stretches a 3,000-kilometer wilderness. If luck is on your side, perhaps you can make it to the southernmost point on this planet, just like Amundsen and Scott.

Of course, it’s also possible to end up like the many unnamed heroes in humanity’s long history of challenging nature.

Because each individual is so small in the face of the natural world.

And yet human courage keeps us moving forward. We climb, stumbling, to the highest point and look out over this blue world. Do you know what I was thinking?

"Life truly is a wilderness."

About the Author

This article comes from my friend’s WeChat public account. If you’re interested, feel free to follow it.