New trip today: Antarctica and South America

In a few hours I’m flying out of Berlin, back down to south South America. The trip looks like this:

Clicking on the map will take you to the sosauce.com trip page where you can zoom in and out stuff. Also, the trip starts and ends in Punta Arenas, number 1 and 8 on the map. This means a loooong journey just to get there.

Yes, I’m returning to Antarctica! It is, by far, the most amazing place I’ve been to while working on cruise ships. Last time I managed to get off the ship and get up close to penguins on the islands and mainland of Antarctica. I even have a stamp in my passport! This time the ship will be doing what’s call “Scenic Cruising” which means it doesn’t stop, and nobody gets off. I will, however, try my best to wangle my way onto the zodiac, which they let off the ship so the photographer can take photos in spectacular places.

Either way, I bough myself a new zoom lens, so I’ll try to do as much wildlife photographs as possible. I hope to photograph:
whales
penguins
orcas
seals
various birds

And, as you can see by the map, I’ll be back in the Falklands again, for the forth time in the past year, so I’ll once again do my traditional walk and see if the bird families have grown up.

Other goals for this cruise:

– Write. Or, more specifically, edit Combat (working title) and Monster Story (working title). Combat won’t take too much, but the ending needs to change. Monster Story needs more work, and I intend to break the story into two parts. From the feedback I found that people were interested in the back story, but I skip over these events in the novel. What I’m going to do is write the “getting to the planet” story as a stand alone novella, and explain the entire story there. Then Monster Story will become the second novella in a sequence. I always had one more story to tell in the same universe, so that could become part three in a trilogy.

– Shoot video. I just released my International Juggler 2009 video. It’s now 2010, and this year’s video will continue in a similar way, but with a twist. It’ll have more structure.

– Read and record SFBRP episodes. I’ve decided to try out audio books, mainly because I wanted to get a copy of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, and audible could deliver it in minutes. Planning ahead means I could have ordered it from Amazon.com, but I’m not that clever.

– More video. I want to record some shaky footage of me in Montevideo and cut it into the Panic attacks video.

– New podcast. I’m thinking about starting a new podcast, where I release one per trip, telling stories and generally giving my thoughts about things I see and do. It’ll be called something like “Luke Around the World”, which is a crap pun, but sort of catchy. However, I only intend to release the podcast if I think it’s any good. Look out for that in a few weeks.

I think that’s about it. I’ll try to upload photos as I go.