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Overview:
After reading Charlotte McConaughy's Wild Dark Shore- an excellent fictional novel set in the Southern Ocean- I decided to pull the trigger and finally visit a remote chunk of land that has been on my must-go-there list for too long.
Macquarie Island is a speck of basalt 34 kilometres long, 5 kilometres wide and a long way from anywhere, we're talking 1500 kilometres south of Australia and access is only via sailing vessel.
A Unesco World Heritage site, it is administered by Tasmania and visitor numbers are limited to 2000 people a year.
To set foot on the island and experience the awe of being surrounded by millions of sea birds and penguins and elephant seals and incredible endemic flora you have to be a research scientist or tradesperson based on the island or pony up a bit of dosh and book passage on an organised cruise. That's what I did.
The ship:
I travelled with my partner, Shiny.
We booked a Worsley Cabin on Heritage Adventures' 12 day 'Galapagos of the Southern Ocean' sailing tour to the sub-Antarctic islands.
All meals, zodiac landings and guided walking trips on Enderby and Campbell Island were included.
There were daily wildlife lectures from onboard experts, loads of sea life sighted from the outside decks and around 130 passengers all up.
8 levels high, the Heritage Adventurer was large enough to find a quiet corner and meal time exceeded expectations with 5 star 4 course lunches and dinners every day.
We met up with our ship's crew in Queenstown, New Zealand.
Then a coach down to Bluff at the far south of the South Island and off to the Snares Islands (no landing), Auckland Islands, Macquarie and Campbell Island.
Return to Bluff, coach back to Queenstown.
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| Map of route sailed by Heritage Adventurer sourced from chimuadventures.com |
Amazing, just absolutely amazing. I had a dumb grin on my face for most of the journey. I usually hate group tours and sharing my outdoor experiences with many others but this was next level.
We saw beautiful wildlife including:
King penguins
Royal penguin
Rockhopper penguin
Gentoo penguin
Snares crested penguin
Yellow eyed penguin
NZ fur seals
NZ sea lions
Pintado petrel
Giant northern petrel
Giant southern petrel
Sooty shearwater
Dotterel
Cormorant
Tomtit
Fernbird
Southern royal albatross
Light mantled sooty albatross
Campbell Island mollymawk
White capped mollymawk
Bullers mollymawk
Salvin's albatross
Southern polar skua
Sea elephant
Antarctic tern
Prion
Pipit
Campbell Island teal
Auckland Island teal
The itinerary is quite action packed.
There are a few ocean only days where miles have to be made up but most of the time aboard you are waking to sunrise in a new bay off a new island somewhere and crushing breakfast and coffee and heading down to pull on your muck boots (provided), jump in a zodiac and go check out a giant prehistoric plant or forgotten sealers camp and encounter some cranky sea lions. Good fun.
Staff were great. Mixture of bird nerds, ecologists, fine dining specialists, tour guides and problem solvers.
I spent hours gazing out of our cabin window, chugging brews and watching the edge of the world.
No internet.
We read books.
Watched intranet provided documentaries relevant to our travels.
We visited the library and looked up plants and animals we wanted to know more about.
Some of the afternoon lectures were very informative and fun.
Worked out, slept, chugged more brews.
Bits to be endured:
The ship is fairly well stabilised but I yakked my guts up and succumbed to seasickness for the first time in my life.
It IS the Southern Ocean after all, a turbulent zero-fucks-given body of water.
Anti nausea tablets were provided by reception and I chomped on them when necessary. Which was about half the time aboard.
We were at the lower end of the age bracket, understandably given the style of trip and financial cost for the privilege of visiting these remote isles. We didn't make any friends but that wasn't the goal in any case.
No one really irritated me greatly but watching others getting in and out of the zodiac crafts was often a viewing of wobbly, slow motion zombie like movements.
I'm grateful I got to walk on Enderby and Campbell Islands while I was fit and energetic and with full mobility.
We hit the dining room as soon as it opened every lunch or dinner to avoid the slow moving queues chasing a table and the buffet dishes. We also had the option to order in room dining with our room package so we did that a few times too.
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| Macquarie Island research station in the background. |
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Final thoughts:
This was a bucket list journey to a bucket list part of the world with Macquarie as the highlight.
Every wildlife encounter exceeded expectations and I still get a thrill thinking of myself standing on the fore deck over the bows with the ship chugging along in the inky black sea and nothing on the horizon for 360 degrees but albatross and prions dive bombing the waves and a very otherworldly feeling of isolation and peace rippling through me.
No phones, no internet, no news.
Just tough feathered creatures getting on with it on the bottom of the planet and allowing me to sneak a peek at their world.
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| Shiny on Macquarie Island with the big boat in the background and many flippered friends. |
