to achieve this. Needless to say these were the people who also didn’t appear to listen to instructions! We generally held back and let the crush die down before getting on.

We had been told that we had a four hour landing, and after a briefing explaining where you could and couldn’t go, we were free to head off on our own. This place was just amazing, even from the ship you could see the vast numbers of penguins swimming about in the water. There were loads of them swimming almost like dolphins the way they glided through and out of the water. To make a landing the zodiac driver has to just drive the zodiac onto the beach which must be pretty tricky anyway, let alone when you have literally thousands of penguins standing around waiting for one brave soul to start the swimming off. It was really slow going through all of the penguins as we made our way up to the remains of the stone hut that

was used by the Swedish explorers.

Everywhere you looked there were penguins, the noise and smell was quite considerable and you just couldn’t help yourself clicking away and taking an enormous amount of photos! After viewing the hut we made our way back down to the beach and decided just to sit down somewhere and watch the comings and goings of a very large penguin rookery. There were penguins as far as the eye could see and so far up on the steep slopes of the island. It is amazing to me why on earth these little penguins nest so high, but they do and there is a constant stream of them either making their way to or from the sea. They also all congregate at the waters edge and hang around until one picks up enough courage to enter the water, then they all follow on mass. I loved penguins before I came to Antarctica and to see them like this was just an utterly joyful experience. The chicks