Paradise Bay
When we entered Paradise Bay, I was filled with a deep feeling which was close to fear: a combination of awe and wonder. We were literally surrounded by a ring of immense mountains, not actually near us, but close enough to be seen through the haze. These mountains were all around us, and it felt to me as though we were in a ring surrounded by godlike judges, or gods. I was reminded of movie scenes like the sentencing of the Phantom Zone villians in Superman II, or the images I pictured in my mind of the Norse Gods at Valhalla or the Greek Gods on Mt. Olympus. All around us were immense, towering, snow-covered rocky mountains, thousands of feet high, with glaciers coming down to the bay and a ring of ice bordering on the water, dozens of feet high at least, maybe a hundred or more. There were icebergs everywhere in the water it seemed, and the ship was gliding slowly through them. The mountains were visible but slightly obscured by the mist, and there was a feeling of veiled power in the settling. Everything was silent except for the ship and the water, which was now suddenly very calm, with no wind.
The continental mountains of Paradise Bay
While we made our way into the bay, we heard a huge booming sound, like a gunshot from a distance. It was an iceberg calving off of a glacier somewhere in the bay. The echos made it impossible to judge where the calving had occured, and there was no sign to tell us which iceberg it was that had just been formed.
Surrounded by mountains
We passed by a ruined Argentinian base, which Lars-Eric told us had been burned in the 60s by a doctor who'd been assigned to the station and didn't want to stay there. He apparently went mad and torched the place. Of course, he was able to leave the station then, but he went straight to prison.