Another perfect day as our ship sailed through another picturesque channel – Neumayer Channel. The landscape at first looked like Lemaire Channel…

The further we sail in, the water got calmer and it gave an almost perfect reflection! We were surrounded by mountains covered in snow so only two colors – blue and white. It was so dreamy that I felt unreal. I didn’t even know where to start taking photos…where did it begin and where did it end?

Even a panorama couldn’t capture the whole landscape, it was unbelievable!

It was like a mirror!

I was up at the deck the whole morning as the ship slowly sail through the Neumayer Channel.

We reached Damoy Point!

Lunch at Restaurant Aune was urg…….

Our snowshoeing kept delaying and delaying as it took more time for the crew to prep the landing site due to the amount of snow/ice and longer for passengers to get on the site. It was supposed to be at around 4 PM and kept pushing back every half hour to a point that it was almost 6 PM. Then, the activity desk put on an announcement to recommend our snowshoeing group to have dinner first, couldn’t they plan better or told us earlier? It was so last minute GRRRR!

We went to Restaurant Fredheim for a quick dinner and noticed they have a takeaway menu that has different dishes that you can’t order when dine-in…OMG they have fried rice and noodles!

New item on the menu – steamed buns! I ordered the pork steamed buns and it turned out the sauce was extremely salty! It would be great if it wasn’t that salty.

The king crab roll was really good this time with plenty of crab meat and sauce.

We quickly finished our quick bites, get dressed, and went down for our snowshoeing adventure. We got our snowshoes and hiking poles at the landing site. We all had difficulty putting on the snowshoes, one of my shoes was defective sigh! It took half an hour for the group to put on their snowshoes and ready to go!

It took a while to get used to walking with those snowshoes, you need to take big steps! The penguins!!!

They are super cute!

“Let’s go guys”…….LOL

The group of 4 this time:

Penguins are always the star 😀

As we lined up and start the hike, those 3 penguins walked right in and decided they want to be our tour guides. Aren’t they the cutest tour guides ever? We followed them for a while and they decided to take part LOL!

Our red jackets really stand out!

We hiked to the other side of the coast and saw another ship.

It was at around 7 PM, felt like sunsetting but it wasn’t…

I didn’t even realize that one of my snowshoes came off until I heard the person behind me keep saying “your shoes, your shoes” ohhh oops.

We stopped for a photo break and the crew pointed out that there’s a post office on that little island (it’s the southernmost post office in the world!) but it is closed due to COVID. I saw a Youtube video that people mailed postcards and bought “real” Antarctica stamps there…awww too bad we didn’t get a chance to do that!

That red cabin on that little island is the Antarctica post office!

We continued the walk, made a big loop, and headed back to the landing site. The whole hike took around 2 hours but it wasn’t strenuous as there weren’t steep climbs.

Jason behind me…

A turquoise and red cabin. The bird in front of us stole a penguin egg, oh nooo! Those birds are penguin’s predators 🙁 I want to run to it to rescue that baby penguin!!!

But we can’t disrupt the wildlife there 🙁

The crews were setting up the area for the overnight camping. I did not regret that we didn’t spend a thousand euros to overnight there, the camping starts at like 9 PM and they need to get up really early to pack up and leave by 5 AM. There wasn’t really a sunset or sunrise so I don’t think I missed out great photo opportunity.

The crews were digging a space for the portable bathroom xD

The penguin colony was only on this side of the coast, we didn’t spot any during our 1.5 hours hike!

The camping gear:

When we got back to the ship, we went to Restaurant Fredheim to order takeout; I burned all the calories on the snowshoeing 😛 The food was packaged in those fancy take-out containers.

It has compartments for appetizers, a main dish, sauce, and dessert. The fried rice was okay, a little bit salty, and I wish they were fried with eggs.

After a late-night “snack”, I looked out the window and saw some colors in the sky so I took my camera and headed out.

This was as close to sunset as it gets during early December in Antarctica!

Ahh the moon was out too!

The sun got behind that mountain and that was it so I headed back to our cabin.

Was the snowshoeing worth 62 Euros per person? Hum… a tough question, I guess the site they picked wasn’t worth it as we can see the same thing as on regular landing. The snowshoeing hike was 1.5 hours versus the regular landing 1 hour so we got further into land but scenery-wise it wasn’t much difference. The only priceless moment was at the beginning when the penguins were leading us!