Sunday January 26, 2025 – At Sea Panama Canal to Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala
Sunday started as usual when we are at sea, with the Captain’s church service, which was followed by Graham Howell giving a talk on the Cabo San Lucas Port of Call.
Although interesting in general, it will not really affect us as Anne’s sister Martita and her husband Eduardo, who live in the area have kindly invited us to spend the day with them, which we are looking forward to doing. The next lecture was George Kourounis, the extreme explorer from Toronto, Canada and member of the Explorer’s Club in New York City (where Anne and I attended a very interesting private dinner with the Editor-in-Chief of the New York Times, a few years ago). He spoke of the two extremes – Ice and Fire. One of his numerous expeditions to the icebergs and permafrost, has been to place GPS tracking devices on the highest part of icebergs to record their travels, usually around Greenland, North of Canada and back down Labrador to New Brunswick where they melt and “die”. He has a great deal of special equipment in case the iceberg rolls over or pieces break off that he is standing on. He goes out with a Zodiac, with experienced back-up individuals and climbs the face of the iceberg and at the top drills a hole in the ice putting in a support for the GPS device, then returns to the zodiac, trying to not deflate it as he has crampons on for the climb. Then on to the next iceberg.
One of the wildest places he has been is in Siberia where two towns vie for the “coldest place on earth”. They have recorded minus 70 C or minus 90 F (122 degrees F below freezing)!
Another adventure which took 2 years of planning and was to be filmed for National Geographic was a trip to the DARVAZA Gas Crater in Turkmenistan. It is also known as “The Door to Hell” or “Gates of Hell” but officially the Shining of Karakum. It is a burning gas field collapsed into a cavern near DARVAZA in Turkmenistan. How it was formed is not fully known but there is a lot of Methane (natural gas) that emanates from the ground. It was first found possibly in the 1960’s or 70’s but in the 1980’s the engineers decided to set fire to the gas thinking that it would burn out in a few days. Now some 40+ years later it is still burning and has become the big “tourist destination” in Turkmenistan. It has a diameter of some 60-70 meters (200-230 feet) and a depth of about 30 meters (98 feet). George decided that the best way of descending to the bottom of this fiery crater was to tie rope lines of Technora (a fire resistant rope) over the top of the crater and then, using a Kevlar harness, went out to the center of the crater and lowered himself down to the base of the crater. His team had full authority to pull him out at any time and he had to get in and out rapidly. He had a 3 minute descent, a 3 minute ascent and enough air in his aluminum fire suit to last a total of 17 minutes. So he only had 10 minutes on the surface to pick up as many samples of “Extremofiles” = life-forms living in extreme conditions. There was a biology specialist on the team who specializes in these life-forms that appear to thrive in conditions that other life—forms would die within seconds or minutes. Some exist at the bottom of the sea under great pressure and next to extremely hot vents from cracks in the earth’s mantels. The objective of the study was to determine whether life-forms can exist in these conditions and if so, what would they look like to see if similar forms exist on other planets. The mission to Mars is to look for the presence of water and life on that planet. George is the only person to have gone to this crater and has been acknowledged by the Guinness World Record. The National Geographic documentary of this feat is called “Die Trying”.
The final lecture of the day, plays off the former one and is Lawrence Kuznetz who spoke of the various , thus far, unmanned missions to Mars, what has been fond and going forward – the first missions to Mars, which are likely to take 3 years. About 6-7 months getting there and the same back and then, due to the orbital status the stay on Mars could be 1 month (hardly worth while when it takes so long to get there and back) or 18+ months there before returning. The work is currently underway to make this happen.
The rest of the day was quiet, but ended with the Captain’s Cocktail Party for the frequent guests, with the winner being a lady with 111 voyages amounting to 2,220 days at sea on Cunard ships.
Roger & Anne Travels 