The Most Amazing Place You've Never heard Of.

South Georgia, the most amazing place you've never heard of.

Everyone knows about the Serengeti Plains, the Galápagos Islands, The Great Barrier Reef and Yellowstone National Park as places to see great gatherings of wildlife. South Georgia belongs on that list. It is a crescent shaped island, 104 miles long and 23 miles wide that sits at the far southern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. It is at least a two day sail in a modern ship from anywhere across some of the roughest seas in the world and that must be one of the reasons it is so poorly known.

I first landed in the North at Salisbury Plain on Christmas Day 2014. The following two days we made landings at Saint Andrews Bay and at Gold Harbor to visit King Penguin colonies. I hate to give any of these places short shrift, but they each had similar characteristics. Each had a long curving sandy beach with a relatively steep slope. Beyond the crest was a gentle slope to pools of water. Behind that were grassy plains extending back a quarter to a full mile to glaciers and steep rocky mountains.

On the beach were King Penguins coming or going from the water along with burly male Antarctic Fur Seals, nursing mothers with their very cute pups and the rambunctious yearling males. In the North at Salisbury Plain there were very few Elephant Seals but they increased the further south we went from Saint Andrews down to Gold Harbor at the southern tip where it would be safe to rename the place "Blubber Beach". At Gold Harbor there were Snowy Sheathbills in addition to the ubiquitous Antarctic Skuas and scary Giant Petrels that patrolled all the penguin colonies for easy pickings among the weak, injured or poorly attended.

For each landing, the ship would anchor some distance offshore, but close enough to smell the pungent odor and see the particular pattern of black and white adults intermixed with the light brown of the young "Oakum Boys", as the still downy covered but full-sized chicks are known. Those going ashore would board a Zodiac from the rear deck of the ship and be zoomed ashore by the raft of Zodiac operators waiting to shuttle us. On the beach, were a gang of dry-suited, balaclava wearing strong men who would stand in the frigid surf and steady the boat while we swung our legs overboard and made our way up the shingle to the high tide line. There we were briefed about where we could or could not go in strict accordance with rules regarding our interactions with the bellowing, trumpeting, crying, flapping, swooping and belching menagerie of animal flesh before us.

Before us were a pathway of stakes with fluttering red flags to guide us. Along the way were Expedition staff in yellow jackets to fend off testosterone charged young male fur seals or to keep us from treading on seal pups or disturbing stoic molting penguins. If you have watched TV in the last fifty years (who hasn't?) you know what a spectacle the migration of the wildebeest of the Serengeti looks like, maybe you've even seen it, but you cannot picture this. As you walk up the beach the noise gets louder as you near the edge of the greatest gathering of birds you are ever likely to visit. The smell saturates your sinuses and you can taste it in your mouth. The calls range from off key trumpets to plaintive ululations. The colors the days I visited were rich and bright. Dark vegetable green of the tussock grasses contrasted with the flowing wind-whipped brown coats of the Peter Max-like overstuffed bodies of the "Oakum Boys". The beautiful adults were not a simple black and white but showed grays and silver in their plumage and accented with the bright orange on their faces and chests. Gray rocks stuck up out of the rich brown soil and between the beach and the uncounted masses adorning the hillside a chocolate pond made of a soup of melting ice water, soil and bird feces through which many of them waded to reach their stridulating chicks on the mile distant hillside.

No, it wasn't all pleasant. There were carcasses strewn here and there. Dead chicks, dead adults, dead seals and scattered bones. Smells that made you breathe through your mouth. A cacophony of sound  to jumble your thoughts. But you could not stand here and not feel the power of LIFE! This place was creation on steroids, turbocharged, full-tilt. This is a place you feel in your bones.