Cruise companies offering Antarctic vacations and trips seem to want to keep James Cameron happily employed with more subject matter for more ship sinking movies similar to his 1997 blockbuster Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Photo copyrights - M. Meyer/Adventure Life.

CBC News, Canada, reports that an Antarctic cruise ship - the MV Ushuaia, carrying 122 passengers has started to take on water and leak fuel ater it ran aground Thursday. Admiral Daniel Martin told local television a nearby passenger ship was on its way to the stricken Panamanian-flagged vessel, called the Ushuaia. He said the ship lay some 300 kilometres southwest of Argentina’s Marambio military base on the Antarctic Peninsula.

FYI, according to this profile of the ship from Adventure Life, the Ushuaia is a steel hulled, ice-strengthened vessel built originally for oceanographic research. She was recently converted to passenger voyages. Navigation and communication equipment has been newly upgraded and cabins were refurbished to provide comfortable accommodations for Antarctic passengers.

The 122 passengers should thank their lucky stars for the fact that she’s an ice-strengthened vessel. Otherwise they’d probably be being researched right now by James Cameron for his next film…

CBC News article also adds that a year ago, 150 crew and passengers escaped unhurt after their ship hit Antarctic ice and went down. I checked up on that, and apparently, that one too was a cruise ship, and it hit an iceberg a-la the Titanic. In Nov 2007, the Explorer (owned by Gap Adventures) collided with an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands, south of Argentina and went down in 20 hours. The 154 crew and passengers were found floating on lifeboats in sub-zero temperatures by the Norwegian cruise ship MS Nord Norge which took the stranded passengers and crew on board.

In other news, you never know what’s behind the mirror at these hostels in new Zealand.  A sicko voyeur who also happened to be the owner of a backpackers hostel at Tarras, near Wanaka in New Zealand was found to have been taping female guests taking showers, by means of a camera which was installed behind a two-way mirror, which was hooked up to a recorder in his bedroom.

Central Otago hostel owner Phillip Anderson (age 44) had been doing it for over a year, and apparently out of a guilty conscience, he then destroyed all the tapes and the camera, but kept a 2 hour ‘highlight’ video which had footage of 15 women showering, which he apparently enjoyed watching along with a friend (who happens to be a convicted sex offender).

He’s now doing 150 hours’ community work and nine months’ supervision after pleading guilty to possession of an intimate visual recording.

Posted on December 5th, 2008 by Thomas
Filed under: News