Inbetween

So now I’m actually on the way.

Started yesterday with countless good wishes, small practical gifts or talismans for the journey and said goodbye to my family and friends waving unexpectedly on the street. Thanks to the rail strike, which made the journey unpredictable, I even took a personal cab to the airport.

Now I’m sitting on a plane from São Paulo to Buenos Aires. Below me – hidden from my prying eyes by an airy blanket of clouds – Brazil passes by. I only catch a brief glimpse of the Atlantic coast. This is the second leg of the journey, after the first leg from Frankfurt to São Paulo, almost 12 hours of flying through the night. The third leg will then take me this afternoon from the Argentinian capital to Patagonia, to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, the place that claims to be the southernmost city in the world. A title that the smaller Puerto Williams, located on the south side of the Beagle Channel in Chile, also claims for itself. Be that as it may, both are generally regarded as the gateway to Antarctica. Voyages, nowadays often referred to as expedition cruises, regularly depart from here for the White Continent.

We want to go there too, with our sailing expedition Sailing SOUTH 2024.

After almost two years of planning and preparation, the time has finally come. What was for a long time a long way off and in the stars, for the first year it was not even clear whether it would even be possible to get such an undertaking off the ground, is now suddenly imminent. A dream, an idea has become reality.

It still seems a little unreal to me and it will probably only slowly sink in when I arrive at Fin del Mundo, at the end of the world, looking out over the harbor and the Beagle Channel, the starting point of our trip. Who knows – maybe even when we have cast off and the wind is whistling around my nose as we stand on deck, leaving the city behind us in our wake.

Fortunately, there is still a week left in Ushuaia to arrive, to get away from everyday life, to leave the tension of the last few weeks behind and to slowly immerse ourselves in the journey. The overture, so to speak, before the real adventure begins.
A week in which all the other crew members of the team will gradually arrive, in which we can explore Ushuaia and its surroundings a little, but above all organize the last things, check our equipment, do the shopping, provision and stow away, get together as a team and get our ship, the Selma, ready to cast off for our one and a half month journey to the Southern Ocean.