After two centuries of exploration, Antarctica is still a place where human visitors are rare, writes Jim Eagles.
The Antarctic was in a rare good mood the morning we landed for the first time on its frozen shores.
This loneliest, coldest, emptiest, least-hospitable place on earth has many moods, few of them amiable, and we sampled most during our cruise on the former Russian polar research vessel Aleksey Maryshev.
But on this first day, the skies were sunny and the waters of the Weddell Sea were relatively calm as the zodiacs took us from the ship to a landing site on Brown Bluff at the northeastern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
It was quite warm by Antarctic standards so I was only wearing a thermal top, polar fleece and parka, woollen gloves, thermal longjohns, heavy trousers and waterproof pants, two pairs of socks, gumboots with fleecy inner soles, a buff round my neck and a thermal beanie.
The amiable reception continued on shore where thousands of adelie penguins in their natty black and white dinner jackets lined up to welcome us.
They had even laid out what looked like a red carpet, though on closer inspection it turned out to be a pathway of evil-smelling red guano, coloured by the shrimp-like krill which is their main food.
As we splashed ashore over the pebbles, the penguin chicks set up an enthusiastic yowling, seemingly hoping we might be their parents, back from the sea with bellies full of food, while the adults stood incuriously to attention, like a bored guard of honour.
When I sat on a boulder to survey the scene, one particularly adventurous chick sidled up to investigate my gumboots, gave a hopeful peck, then extended his flippers and performed a strange little dance of greeting.
Penguins are the dominant life form on the Antarctic Peninsula and in summer, when the ice recedes a little, leaving patches of rock on which they can build nests and allowing easier access to the sea, the coastline is thronged with colonies of adelies, red-beaked gentoos, perpetually smiling chinstraps and the occasional yellow-headed macaroni, all frantically raising chicks.
Day-to-day activity in these communities is reminiscent of Coronation Street - non-stop emotional dramas - except the actors are (a little bit) shorter and (a lot) better dressed than the ones on television.
On this initial visit to a rookery I sat entranced watching the scenes of penguin domesticity: down-covered chicks calling anxiously for their parents or being fed regurgitated krill, larger youngsters getting pecks of reprimand for getting too close to someone else's nest, eager homebuilders surreptitiously sneaking pebbles from their neighbours, harassed parents being chased by screaming chicks demanding more food and other adults staring blankly ahead as though trying not to notice what was going on around them.
There were indications of a darker side, with chicks huddling together in panic whenever the ominous dark brown shape of a skua appeared overhead, but for now even the predators seemed to share the sunny atmosphere.
A young Weddell seal dozing in the sun did not deign to notice our arrival, but a couple of snoozing fur seals stuck their heads up, barked and bared their teeth to warn us not to come too close, then rolled over and went back to sleep.
If this was Antarctica it seemed a rather pleasant place, not at all the deadly wilderness which has lured countless explorers, whalers, scientists and the odd tourist to premature deaths.
But we saw a different side to the polar region just a day later when we motored up the Antarctic Sound en route to Argentina's Esperanza Station, in Hope Bay, where a small village, complete with school and chapel, has been built alongside a big gentoo rookery.
Out of nowhere a ferocious storm blew up and suddenly our ship was being lashed with hurricane strength winds - gusts of 130km/h - which whipped the sea into a frothing white mass, filled the air with spray and tossed the blocks of ice floating in the water like a giant cocktail shaker.
These kabatic winds, caused by dense cold air spilling from the frozen central plateau down to the warmer coast, have been recorded at an incredible 327km/h.
Even our vessel with its specially strengthened hull had to retreat to calmer waters, along the way passing three humpback whales and a squadron of penguins which popped out of the giant waves like so many corks.
That evening, we saw another scary side to the Antarctic when we did a zodiac tour of the huge rocks which stand like Dragon's Teeth - that's their name - at the northeastern end of Astrolobe Island.
In one bay hundreds of hungry chinstrap penguins chattered anxiously at the water's edge, each trying to persuade the other to go in first, while two leopard seals performed a deadly patrol offshore.
We watched with horrified fascination, half-hoping to see a kill and half wanting the penguins to get away, but the stalemate persisted so Sergey, our madly impatient Russian zodiac diver, zoomed impatiently off into the next bay.
There in front of us were two more leopard seals, around 3m long, weighing about 400kg and sleekly dangerous, sleeping on a small iceberg. "Leepard zeal! Leepard zeal!" shouted Sergey excitedly and gunned the motor.
As we raced alongside the iceberg, one of the seals ignored us - as befits a predator which is pretty much top of the Antarctic food chain - but the second raised its evil serpentine head and warned us to keep away.
Instead, we hovered alongside the iceberg, cameras clicking furiously, until another zodiac came round the corner piloted by one of our expedition's wildlife guides. "Get back he shouted. "You shouldn't be so close."
His concern wasn't for us - although leopard seals have been known to puncture zodiacs with their teeth - but for the leopard seals, however the encounter was a useful reminder that not everything in Antarctica is cuddly and it is not a zoo where the dangerous creatures are behind bars.
On the other hand the biggest animals we saw during our explorations of the land seemed extremely amiable.
At Hannah Pt, on Livingston Island, we found giant sea elephants (weighing in at 4.5m and 4 tonnes) existing in harmony with little chinstraps and gentoos (75cm and 4-5kg).
Groups of young male sea elephants, not yet big enough to compete on the breeding beaches of the sea elephant capital of South Georgia, but still enormous, lie nestled together in wet, fetid wallows, where they seem to spend their time snoozing, farting and belching, occasionally waking up long enough to open a bloodshot eye, stretch and yawn, before dozing off again.
We weren't allowed to get too close, but the local penguins wandered freely through these vast conglomerations of flesh on their way to and from the sea, sometimes pausing to check out one of the monsters, maybe even to mention the name of a good weightloss programme, without the slightest sign of upset on either side ... though I suppose there was always the risk of a penguin being accidentally crushed if one of the big boys rolled over at the wrong time.
It doesn't do to take Antarctic creatures for granted, however. An idiot guide who carried out a dare to kiss a sea elephant apparently got half his face bitten off.
And, while all the Weddell and crabeater seals I saw were sleeping, the fur seals certainly showed themselves capable of aggression.
According to our expedition leader, Monika Schillat, young males like nothing better than to boost their egos by making a few tourists run away. "If a fur seal challenges you, do not retreat," she advised. "Stand your ground. If necessary pick up a couple of pebbles and clack them together because the fur seals hate that. But don't give way."
Sure enough, even though we tried not to get too close to fur seals, some of them did come looking for trouble.
On the Hydrurga Rocks - a bare lump of stone positively teeming with wildlife - I watched with amusement while one young male wandered around clearly looking for humans to scare. The highlight came when he ostentatiously posed so a young woman could take his photo and once her shutter clicked rushed forward with teeth bared to chase her away. Obviously a television personality in the making.
Rather more disturbing than the macho posturing of the seals was watching the eternal brutal battle between the skuas - heavily built, dark-brown gulls who are the vultures of the Antarctic - and the penguins.
Because skuas look vicious and penguin chicks are cute it is natural to want to intervene but you have to accept such seeming brutality is the reality of the way nature operates.
On Cuverville Island I was watching a group of gentoo penguins peacefully resting in the sun when suddenly a large skua landed in their midst. The adults ignored it and the youngsters huddled together but one downy chick lying on its stomach on a rock slumbered on serenely.
Next minute, the skua leapt in the air and, driving itself forward with its wings, gave the chick a tremendous blow in the abdomen with its powerful beak. There was no bloodstain that I could see but the chick staggered around yowling for several minutes afterwards so it may well have been mortally wounded. The skua waited to find out but I wandered off to find gentler viewing.
There were similar incidents at most of the colonies we visited and the number of dismembered corpses, plus the frequent sights of skua tearing a dead chick apart, demonstrate that the attacks do often succeed.
Perhaps because of this, skuas are fiercely protective of their chicks, and deal roughly with intruders.
At Port Charcot, on Booth Island, I was climbing up to the hilltop memorial to French explorer Jean Baptiste Charcot when I inadvertently blundered on a nest containing a fluffy brown chick. Next minute, I was ducking and fleeing as a screaming skua came hurtling past just centimetres above my head. Fail to retreat in time and you can get your head scraped.
As well as trying to fight off attacks from skuas, the poor old penguins also have to put up with other birds stealing their food.
At Port Lockroy, an old British base now maintained as a museum, I sat taking pictures while a gentoo penguin fed its chick when suddenly they were attacked by an innocent-looking snowy sheathbill.
The sheathbill smashed into the luckless chick with the aim of dislodging some of its krill lunch, dashed off with its booty to feed its own chick, a ball of fluff hiding under a station building, and then returned to the attack.
Despite all those challenges penguins are thriving on the peninsula - one theory is that the massacre of whales has left a niche for them to fill - and some species are even expanding their territory.
There were reports that a moulting emperor penguin, the golden-chested giants of the penguin species normally only found further south in places like the Ross Sea, had been sighted on Booth Island, though we weren't able to track it down.
We did, however, manage to find two macaroni penguins in a colony of chinstraps on Livingston Island. Macaronis, with their magnificent golden crests, are usually found on islands further north. But this pair seemed quite settled amid their plainer neighbours, and affectionately preened each other, oblivious to our admiring glances and enthusiastic photography.
But, if that showed a warm side to the Antarctic, its specialty is definitely chill. Although it didn't ever get really cold during our trip we did get a slight taste of what it can be like during a pre-breakfast zodiac cruise in Paradise Harbour.
Named by early whalers for its glacial beauty, this is a place of ice. At the head of the harbour is a mighty glacier, and the slow flow of its river of compacted snow forms huge ice cliffs, pieces of which from time to time break off, with thunderous cracks, forming giant icebergs or small fragments bobbing in the water.
The morning of our visit it was grey and drizzly, with dark clouds covering the surrounding mountains and blotting out the sun, a chill wind was blowing from the vast icecap to the south, and as we moved around in our zodiacs it was bitterly cold.
And the ice was everywhere, looming in great peaks above us, floating in the monstrous chunks which would later drift out to sea as icebergs or bobbing about in small pieces on the surface of the water which clacked together as we passed.
It reminded me of those marvellously evocative lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
It was stunningly beautiful but by the time we retreated to the warmth of our ship and a hot breakfast the cold had penetrated my layers of clothing, my fingers and toes were hurting with the chill, and the small areas of face that were exposed to the elements had gone numb.
It was another timely reminder that this is a place where temperatures in winter reach minus 50, a place so inhospitable that it is the only substantial area of land on which the human race never settled, where still today people cannot survive unaided.
Sure, many countries have stations in Antarctica, many of them futile attempts to demonstrate some sort of sovereignty, but in truth they are artificial and transient, because this is a land whose surface we have yet to even scratch.
At several landing points on our trip we came across reminders of how unfriendly Antarctica is to humans.
Just around the corner from Paradise Bay is Argentina's Almirante Brown Station, which was abandoned 20 years ago after the leader burned down the main accommodation block so he wouldn't have to spend another year there. Today it houses an emergency shelter and a colony of gentoo penguins.
On Paulet Island are the remains of the stone hut built by a 1902-03 Swedish Antarctic Expedition whose boat was crushed by ice, and the lonely grave of one member who didn't make it home. They are now little more than tumbled piles of stone on which the adelie penguins nest.
And on Deception Island are the giant steel tanks and sturdily crafted wooden buildings which from 1910-1930 serviced a huge Norwegian whaling operation and for a few years in the 1960s was a base for the British Antarctic Survey.
The buildings are collapsing, wooden boats and old whale bones lie equally dead on the beach and the only sign of life was a fur seal sheltering in the remains of an old floating dock.
It reminded me that the Antarctic is a fabulous place to visit - in summer - but despite two centuries of exploration and 50 years of tourism it is still a place where human visitors are rare and hectares of ice and millions of penguins dominate. That's what makes it so unique.
Jim Eagles made his own way to Ushuaia in Argentina but travelled to Antarctica as guest of World Expeditions.
