“There’s something about three weeks…” - spoken this morning by a guest having coffee.

Was it only 21 days ago we cast off from this very pier, almost trembling with anticipation of what was to come? Have we really come this far in so short a time? Perhaps each wave we passed was a mark of time, as if the ocean had replaced clocks as our timekeeping piece. Instead of 3732 nautical miles, it was ten million waves…

Or was it the few thousand icebergs passing the windows – some so huge they earn a name – most simply beautiful, unique and anonymous.  How do we account for a single morning with half a million king penguins and two thousand fur seals all celebrating the dawn?

This expedition has meant a re-calibration of the concept of time. How many humpback whale flukes constitute five-hundred and four hours? If the flukes measure the hours of our days, then whale spouts are surely the minutes of each hour. Days begin not with a sunrise, but by the “ding-dong” and a soft voice from the PA system, a system that now seems a far more advanced way to tell time than any atomic clock.

Even a skilled penguin counter would utterly fail to estimate the total number penguins we have seen since climbing the gangway in Ushuaia. Count the muddy web feet squishing through the guano and divide by two, then multiply by the passing flocks of pintado petrels…

This voyage began with a ship full of strangers with little in common other than a desire to explore. As the National Geographic Orion sails west down the Beagle Channel, she returns to Argentina filled with a single family, one-hundred and seventy-four brothers and sisters brought together by a place called Antarctica.

Tomorrow will be a day of farewells, of hugs and tears and handshakes, and slowly we will each fly off in our own directions - like wandering albatrosses, looking for new horizons…