South Georgia is also breathtakingly beautiful, with high, glacier-draped peaks and some of the highest wildlife concentrations on the planet.

For the first stop at South Georgia our small ship anchored and a naturalist went ashore in a Zodiac to check out the landing conditions. Soon he was surrounded by aggressive Antarctic Fur Seals that were attacking him from all sides while he fought them off with an oar. He decided that this wasn't the best place to land.

Then we stopped at another small bay where the Antarctic Fur Seals, though intimidating, weren't so numerous. The male seals gave off a musk scent so strong that I initially found it hard to breathe.

I climbed a hill where there was a colony of Macaroni Penguins. This colony wasn't in the open like the Adelie and Gentoo colonies of Antarctica; instead, the nesting pairs were scattered among clusters of eight foot tall tussock grass (think of pampas grass) and were much harder to observe. They were at the stage of incubating eggs, which the parents take turns doing while the mate is fishing for squid and krill.

The most astonishing thing about a Macaroni is its gaudy plumed head. There was a male fashion style in 18th century Italy in which hair was brightly dyed and stiffly pointed out around the ears (think Dagwood Bumstead!). Englishmen who returned from Italy with this hairstyle were called "Macaronis." The old song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" referred to this hairstyle ("stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni"). So, of course, the feather style of these penguins reminded sailers of the Macaroni dandies of Europe.

There are an estimated five million breeding pairs of Macaroni Penguins on South Georgia - one of many reasons that this virtually uninhabited and wonderfully wild island was deemed a "living Eden" by a popular PBS series.