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On Feb 19, 2005, I stepped off the boat and stepped onto Antarctica. We landed at Brown Bluff on the very tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, a volcanic cliff side beach with waves crackling over a shoreline of smooth, black rocks and noisy with the thousands of gentoo and adelei penguins running around.

Well, not running. Waddling. Wandering. Hopping. Stumbling. But certainly not running.

I touched Antarctica. It was a cold and blustery morning, and we were all glad we sprung the extra few dollars for the Gore-Tex as the near frozen ocean spray stung our faces and splattered against our parkas when we motored our zodiacs over the bumpy, black surface of the water.

We landed amongst a family (Group? Pod? Herd?) of barking fur seals who would growl menacingly if you walked too close and disturbed their morning nap. The fur seals reminded me a lot of neighborhood dogs. They just wanted to make sure you knew exactly whose beach this was. And then after announcing their supposed authority would go back to scratching themselves with a flipper, chasing penguins, swimming around incoming zodiacs or just snoozing on the shore.

The beach was decorated with both the decaying remains icebergs glistening in the morning sun, and the decaying remains of countless penguin corpses, certainly not glistening at all. Seems many chicks just don’t make it very long what with the cold and the severity of the land and the brown skuas and leopard seals everywhere.

There is no sense of tragedy in this. The beaches are teeming with the tuxedo crowd, and from what I can tell, they are the primary food source for more than a few species. Really, the chickens of their sea.

Anyhow, I touched Antarctica.

After ten years or so of saying I was going to make it to the seventh continent, I finally found myself there. Wet. Cold. And a bit dumbfounded by the whole experience.

I would like to say that touching Antarctica made me grow as a person or inspired some new feeling of enlightenment, but the most profound realization I had upon finally touching ground was this: penguins smell bad.

Like really, really bad.

I wish I had some way to describe just how bad, but on a good day when the wind is blowing just so, you can smell a penguin rookery miles away. It’s like bird shit and regurgitated fish and the smell of the ocean all rolled into one. And yet despite the noxious environment, I also have to admit, they really are endearing little bastards. They exhibit almost no fear of man and unless you walk too fast or too close they spend a lot of their time just checking you out. They waddle around and squawk and cackle and chase each other around the beaches, stumbling all over themselves. They manage to hop and scramble and climb up onto some seemingly impossible perches, and if you are patient and quiet and lucky and happen to sit down in the right spot at the right time, a few curious gentoo chicks will frequently waddle on up to you to peck at your shoes or climb onto your lap or nestle down under an arm or on your legs.

While I was leaving Brown Bluff a gentoo chick hustled on up directly to me, stood underneath me, maybe ten inches from my toes and just looked up at me curiously.

I swear it almost made me want to take the puffball home.

At least until I remembered all the foot-long streaks of green and red that painted near every square foot of the beach.

Let’s just say a penguin isn’t too discriminatory in just where and how it relieves itself, and from what I have observed, they do it both frequently and with impressive force.

And I don’t need to go further into the olfactory results of said business.

All this is made worse by how adorable they are and how badly you want to get photographs of them. And subsequently you will do something that at first seems logical. Like kneeling or sitting or laying down to get closer for the prize National Geopgraphic photograph. What you don’t realize at the time is that any part of you that touches any part of a penguin rookery is destined to smell exactly like a penguin. Maybe forever. In my bag right now I have near a thousand dollars worth of Gore-Tex paraphernalia that I am seriously considering incinerating if only for the common good. I have already washed much of it in Woolite and warm water and am wondering if perhaps kerosene might be a better alternative.

Worst yet is that underneath my brand new, Gore-Tex, Marmot ski gloves, the wonderfully warm and comfy and dry and probably very expensive gloves my sister bought me at Christmas, I wore my new polypro glove liners. And when taking photos I would remove said warm and dry and comfy ski gloves so I could manipulate my camera with ease. Of course, I would also get down on the ground, put my hands protected with the glove liners in the snow or in the dirt and later, would put them, stinky from rotting penguin goo, back into the new gloves. So now, despite the relatively successful washings that have removed most of the odor from the outer shell, every time I stuff my mitts into the warm fleece liner, they come out smelling like penguin guts.

Trust me. You never want to wipe a cold, runny nose with a hand that has been around penguin poo.

From Brown Bluff we sailed off across the Antarctic Sound on a bright and reasonably warm afternoon through the Antarctic Sound, through the iceberg alley, and past hundreds of floating, tabular islands, many larger than you average, suburban subdivision. We landed again on Paulet Island for another round of penguin molestation, harassment from the fur seals, and the ambivalence of the portly Weddell seals. Really. As adorable as they are, they have the general shape and mobility of your average garden slug. They look like big, spotted bratwursts. With flippers. Iceberg sausage. But like most all the life in Antarctica, their lack of grace on land is far, far surpassed by their artistry and almost unbelievable athleticism in the water. The speed and ease with which the penguins and seals can move and manipulate through the water is really something to see.

We spent most of our evenings sailing across various bodies of water in the Antarctic, and inevitably these crossings were spent uncomfortable and unbalanced in the rocky waters I grew to expect and eventually, to loathe. There was some sick, perverse irony in the fact that we would begin sailing just as soon as it was time for dinner. The ocean would be worst right as soon as I had to do something seemingly effortless and mundane. Simple things you take for granted when on land. Putting on your pants. Taking a leak. Opening a door. Try these things when the room is moving violently back and forth and after a while all you really want to do is just lay in bed until the moving stops.

On February 20, we landed first at Half Moon Island , where the morning light erupted through the clouds to shine on a rocky shore of orange cliffs and glistening glaciers and thousands of chinstrap penguins.

From Half Moon we motored out to the Norwegian whaling ruins of Deception Island , located on the shore of a sunken caldera of a still active volcano. The sands here alternated from red to black, as orange cliffs rose from the submerged crater and fur seals lounged on the warm sands and in the rusted, decaying ruin of the whaling station.

With every corner and every landing and every berg I found something beautiful and dramatic. The sky in Antarctica, at least in the tiny corners of it I managed to visit created impossible light. Grays and blues and greens and yellows that I have truly never seen anywhere else in the world. And every time I thought I saw something impressive or miraculous or spectacular, it was almost as always surpassed by whatever lay around the corner or on the next landing.

Antarctica it seemed to me a place of stark contrast between light and dark and hot and cold and land and sea. Aside from the occasional lichen or moss, plant life was near nonexistent, and perhaps most surprising was the complete lack of insects. Seriously. Never once saw or heard a bug. Of any kind. Anywhere. Think about that for a minute. It’s actually a little spooky.

In many ways it reminded me of life in the desert. A place where life seems abundant only because of its relative absence. The light. The rock. Everything seemed raw and severe. And yet simultaneously refined and sculpted and beautiful.

Really. I’ve never been anyplace quite like it.