Adventure Queen and Crewroom Ambassador - Anna McNuff - seen here wearing her Crewroom Explorer Jacket, shares another nugget from her amazing journey across South America...
What is that?!’ I shout at Faye, pointing over to a huge chunk of ice off the left hand side of the ship. Slender tentacles of ice reach out from the centre of the shape as if they are hands grasping for the shore. There are swirls of royal blue and white in almost perfect spirals towards the back of the structure, leading into a neat little nubbin that resembles a cinnamon bun.
As we move past the iceberg, new aspects of the shape are revealed, and new shades of colour too. I announce to Faye that it looks more like a Mardi Gras float than an iceberg - I am transfixed by it’s beauty. There is something so untamed about a shape as random an asymmetric as this iceberg. Waves from the lake slap against its sides, and I wonder how long before it changes form entirely once again.
We mess around for the next 30 minutes on deck, enjoying being splashed by icy waves at intervals and pulling on more and more clothing as the temperature begins to plummet. At last we arrive at the main attraction. The captain cuts the engine and the air is filled with a welcome silence. The crowd falls silent too, so that we can all hear the creaks and groans emitted by the mighty wall of ice in front of us. I resist the urge to break the silence by bursting into song about the White Cliffs of Dover, but this is precisely what the glacier reminds me of - one end of it at least. The other end is much less of a solid wall and more like a bleached pile of Kryptonite crystals. Huge columns of ice shoot upwards, some stuck together, and others entirely alone in their skyward mission.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of an Orange rubber dingy pulling away from the boat. Three men clad in t-shirts and matching bright orange life jackets zoom off into the distance. We’ve heard a rumour that later on we’ll be served whisky over a block of pure glacier ice, and I assume that this dingy mission is part of the process. Given that the only other thing served on this 7 hour trip was a single coconut biscuit at 10am, I am a little perplexed by the crew’s slightly off-centre choice of daily nutrition.
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