South Georgia Island is a wild and romantic place, not dissimilar to Africa's Eden, Ngorongoro Crater. Both are small in area with abundant and fearless wildlife. South Georgia is a 100 mile long wilderness oasis in a world mostly out of sync with nature. This outpost lies "south of where most ships sail," at latitude 54 degrees, a thousand miles from Cape Horn or Elephant Island, take your pick. This explains why there has never been a permanent human settlement here, only lonely whalers and members of the British Antarctic Survey.
The typical island fantasy is a place of warm sun, bare skin, white sand, and gentle surf. Add lovers strolling on the beach and you have a picture post card. But not of South Georgia. Over half of this island is capped by permanent snow and ice, with 150 glaciers spitting bergs and bits into a frigid sea. The surrounding ocean is also littered with giant tabular icebergs, each one a work of art, calved from Antarctica's ice shelves. The island is as jagged as a dragon's spine, with more than 300 peaks rising like steep ramparts from the sea and jutting through a mantle of ice, into a sky that's usually dark and brooding.
Most of these peaks have not been named much less climbed, though a few have been graced by the footsteps of Ernest Shackleton during his heroic trek of 1916.
The massive king penguin colony at St. Andrews, on South Georgia Island, is one of the more impressive natural history sites on planet earth. The fluffy brown chicks, called oakum boys, are forced to gather in the muddy shallows around ponds and streams. Parents get the prime real estate, high and dry, to lay their precious eggs. (next photo)