heathen scripture

Note to self. Don’t buy meat-based comestibles at midnight from restaurants that are about to close after perhaps fifteen hours of trading. This may make for Bad Times. Of course, I knew this, but the fourth beer is very frequently enough to roll back a substantial amount of hard-won prior education. The rest of the night was spent alternately trudging to the bathroom and barfing out my window, plus, on a few exciting occasions, juggling the two needs simultaneously. Oh yes. Circus illness. If you’ve ever had to co-ordinate a dual auto-evacuation you will know how carefully managed this needs to be. If I closed my eyes, I could have been back in Bolivia…the whirring of the fan becoming the beat of a chopper’s blades…The Doors playing as a forest caught fire. When I opened them again, I was for once glad the bathrooms here are so small, because you can actually sit on the toilet and lean over the sink at the same time. The next couple of days were a write-off: the brief amount of time I spent out of bad was in dragging myself down to the corner shop at crawl-pace, eating the only thing I could stomach (watermelon), and walking like it was my second day in prison. So, the happy-to-be-back-in-BA post that I was supposed to write a few days back got rather de-prioritised, hence the radio silence that has set in since then.

Aside from those few days, the past month in BA has been pretty much what I wanted it to be. I could perhaps sum it up best by means of a real Homer Simpson moment: looking down while typing to realise I had a bunch of granola gummed together in my chest hair. Ladies, form an orderly queue to the left. You may infer from this that a) I’ve been mostly sitting around writing, b) I’ve not left the house that much, and c) the climate does not require me to wear anything more than shorts. Heat is my friend – that wonderful ability to sit in your own skin at any hour of the day or night.

The heat is thick, close, like it’s dancing with you to a slow song and wants to give you the mother of all hickeys. I sit and type late into the nights, by the burn of an old orange 40-watt tungsten globe, the open door and window funnelling a breeze, but even the movement of fingers on keyboard enough to keep my arms and shoulders damp. Moving up one set of stairs to the roof brings a full fresh sheen of moisture to my face. It’s these long sweaty nights that have me always craving another longneck. The glass in my hands, the cool press of it against my forehead. The chilly condensation building up to mimic my skin. The hiss of it opening, and the sweet-bitter bliss of that first long pull. I sound like a VB ad. But seriously – beer. Every time I eat I crave a beer. When I walk in hot and sticky in the afternoon I crave a beer. Even writing this post is making me want a beer. It’s ironic that I came to the home of cocaine in order to get hooked on booze.

The days are clear and green-gold through the canopy of leaves outside my window. Sitting around writing, with nothing else I have to do, has been a pretty wonderful way of passing time. I’ve also been hanging out a lot with my favourite Spanish teacher, the girl I mentioned some time ago. This has been a surprise – when I headed off for my month of adventuring I had resigned myself to that being the end of that. But she was still here when I got back, and happy to see me, though she reminds me daily that she’s not my girlfriend. Which is ok by me, in this relationship-loathing stage of life. Her name is Nora, she’s a dance teacher, and she’s ridiculously cute. This all makes a good incentive to study, and accordingly my Spanish is astronomically improved. She likes to get stoned and talk to me about metaphysics and religion and the changing states of matter and energy. Try that as a test of your second-language comprehension, especially on a two-roach handicap.

I’m living in another idiosyncratic house: a long open-roofed courtyard with a series of rooms opening off it, and a series of couples popping in and out of them as though it were Hobbiton, or some sort of Cuckoo Clock of Sickening Domestication. There’s a French girl with a Mexican boyfriend, a local guy with a Chilean girl, and a severely ex-pat Australian with a Peruvian girl. Down the back is an adjoined house where the Argentine who owns the place lives with his French girlfriend. The only singles are me and another French dude called Julien.  who spend half our time getting drunk, making loud noises, and generally bitching about how incredibly lame couples are. He spends the other half of his time talking smoochily on Skype to his girlfriend back in France, and I spend the other half of mine with my most assuredly non-girlfriend. “Stop kissing me,” she tells me, “I’m not your girlfriend.” Five minutes later she comes over and starts kissing me.

Julien is the Frenchiest Frenchman ever (sorry Phill): he’s perennially drinking white wine, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, swearing at lines of code on his laptop. He speaks perfect English, excellent Spanish, and excellent German. The three French people stand around and casually speak fluent Spanish among themselves, not bothering with their mother tongue. I feel incredibly inferior, and once again curse our mono-cultural society. I speak categorically the worst Spanish of everyone in the house, and am always being brought up to speed. Speaking the best English feels more does like a character flaw to be confessed to rather than some sort of achievement.

A couple of good things on the literary front: a newly revised version of the Jimmy Cuzco poem that I posted a couple of months ago on this blog has been accepted by HEAT, which is pretty much my favourite of what I regard as the ‘establishment’ journals in Australia. So I’m pretty stoked about that. And a poem called ‘Coffee’ has been picked up by Famous Reporter, which is another publication I admire. It was my attempt to write a break-up poem that was more interesting than the average break-up poem. I might post it here if people are interested.

I have read back over this post and declare it to be informative, rather than especially interesting. But there should be more interesting stuff coming shortly. Better stories, amusing things, and essay-ish things on a few issues that have been on my mind, should all hit this page before too long. As long as I stay away from midnight empanadas. Pray for me.

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PS: The truth of the above statement (”should hit this page before too long”) is also dependent on another factor. If anyone has tried to visit Wordplay lately you will have noticed that you can’t. This, I’m told, is because the site is cactus. Which means that we have to build it again. All of it. From the ground up. If anyone knows where to access firearms, my preferred option is to shoot myself in the face. In which case, no more blog posts. Let me know.

Well, thank Christ for that. Antarctica is done and dusted, thirteen posts written, logged, and in the tin. I feel like I just wrote a novel. How do you feel? You can let me know by clicking the Comments button and leaving one. That would make me happy as a monkey. As happy as a monkey with literary ambitions who has been able to quit his job at the organ-grindery after being drafted into that infinite-monkeys-trying-to-write-Hamlet typing pool. As he sits down at his old greasy Underwood, he rubs his monkey hands together with glee.

I resisted the temptation to put lots of photos on the blog, because it munches everyone’s bandwidth and makes the posts enormous. But I’ve culled my couple of thousand Antarctica photos down to a couple of hundred better ones and posted them up on Picasa, where you can scroll through them in a nice handy slideshow format that’s generally quicker to load. Should you wish to see more pictures of icebergs and penguins, please click this link here.

I won’t cover the last couple of weeks today, because we all need a break from autobiographical prose. I’ll tell you next time. Also I have some very disparate things I want to cover in the next few weeks, if and when I get time to write them. Some are serious, some are juvenilia. But for now here are some equally disparate quotes that have entertained me recently, from the retarded to the sublime. Mixed metaphors ahoy.

“They not only will drive you to your destination but will interpret, purchase on your behalf, and then take you to the best restaurant in town—of which there are many.”
Some truly fine travel-writing discussing Venezuelan taxi drivers.

“Some millionaire Canadian douchebag who now competes for Australia because he tantied at the Canuck coach or something won a silver medal in some rich wanker snow game – I say won, essentially fell downhill faster than all but one other – and then sooked it up hardcore on the podium. Running stupidly fast = achievement. Swimming stupidly fast = achievement. Jumping really high, throwing a spear, lifting heavy shit = sporting achievement. Looking pretty and being rich? Not a fuckin’ sport.”
The Soldier ponders the Winter Olympics.

“Once we gave them the upper hand, they really drove the bus through the door.”
South African captain Graeme Smith explains how his side lost to India. Sort of.

“The danger of having a two-Test series is that at the end of two weeks of hard cricket you really don’t have a clear winner. With one-all as a score, you don’t really have a winner.”
Thanks, Sanjay Manjrekar.

“Cuantos musculos tenes que tener para coger alguien?”
“How many muscles to do you need to have to catch someone?” a Spanish game-show host asks a strongman who specialises in throwing and catching people for the entertainment of others. Unfortunately, while ‘coger’ means ‘to catch’ in Spain, it means ‘to fuck’ in South America.

“To insinuate that there has been any secret payment or wrongdoing is a black mark against the AFL, the clubs and the players, and none deserve to be tarred with the sentiment that bubbles below the surface.”
Geelong Footy Club blogger Richie Pace is no fan of sub-surface sentiment bubbling.

“I thought the way he celebrated when he reached his 200 epitomised the man’s persona. There was no running laps around the field, no aggressive gestures, nothing over-the-top. He did what he always does, raised both his arms, closed his eyes for a moment and quietly acknowledged that it had been done.”
Anil Kumble shows as much grace in speech as he did in his run-up, on Tendulkar scoring the first ever double-century in a one-day international.

“It’s a very transient city – expats come and go, locals travel a lot, buildings get torn down and towers emerge in the night – so sometimes it feels like a large hotel.”
Writer Clarissa Tan on her hometown of Singapore.

“The carpet is as ugly as Joe Hockey but twice as absorbent.”
Pat and Aden need a housemate.

“My father is from Hungary, my mother is from Austria, I grew up in Germany, I live in Norway, and I married a Danish.”
Rupert has an interesting life story, and a fetish for baked goods.

“…when i was reading I can see those paddy field on front of ma eyes with a shakness of those old train…”
Reader comment on an article about Bangladesh.

This is not a quote, but an article revealing that Nickelback are officially less popular than a single savoury cucumber. The best part may have been Chad Kroeger taking it seriously enough to threaten the pickle organisers on Facebook, thus embarrassing himself in front of 1 470 000 people. Or it may have been the line “Pickles are enjoyed by many cultures around the world.”

Double Entendre of the Day:
“It is pleasure to get you on my boat.”
The Russian skipper gets all gooey in his speech.

“I’d like to thank the Captain for his skill in manoeuvring us all into such wonderful positions.”
Fellow passenger Roger reciprocates.

Killer whales. Killer whales. Killer whales. Orcas! Killer whales! This is what we see today. Killer whales are the coolest animal I’ve ever seen. They’re fast, they’re dangerous, and they’re the smartest suckers in the sea. They have good dress sense and mad skills. Also Orca was the name of the boat in Jaws, which was the coolest movie in the world when I was twelve. Orcas are the last thing I’ve been really hanging out for, and on the last day they come cruising right by the ship. Down a broad channel between the cliffs, a whole big pod of them, maybe a dozen in the middle, then three or four outriders a hundred metres to the right. We spot them from way off in the distance, their distinctive high dorsals slicing the flat surface, and tracking at speed, man. These dudes can move. They’re hunting, hungry – like Jo Hart, no messing about. Straight to the point. Orcas, killing stuff, two syllables! Orcas aren’t French, I can tell you that. As they come past us you can see the markings, the glossy black and clean white patches gleaming as they rise from the water, the keen grins and the bright eyes. A few minutes later, as I pelt round the lower decks alone, a stray orca surfaces not thirty yards from the ship and cruises by, that dorsal far more menacing than any shark’s. No-one sees it bar me and one of the Russian crew. “Kyiller whale,” he mutters to himself reverently. It is our little moment with the sea.

We drop the boats quick-smart, but the orcas, like the Polyphonic Spree, are on their way. But looking for them we do run into a bunch of humpbacks, and get the closest we’ve been yet. They’re everywhere, surfacing and diving. The tail-stem as they dive is thick as a tree-trunk, an incredible corded mass of muscle holding devastating power. Even at its narrowest point you couldn’t put your arms around it, and all of that bulk is pure strength. The flukes fan out above you like branches, and tall as a tree, each one decorated like leaves with a unique pattern of spots and colours. Their breathing as you get close is so loud, great steam-engine huffs, billowing spray up into the air.

I learn something else I didn’t know about whales today – of the 0.5 to 1.5 million minkes estimated to live in the Antarctic, Japanese whalers take only 400 annually. Admittedly it is still a foot in the door to reopen whaling of other more vulnerable species, and higher volume whaling of minkes. But still, at present it’s not any actual threat to the species. Then coming from the other perspective, it also means the industry is not a major or important one for Japan, so a cessation wouldn’t damage their interests. The whole issue is solely about political standing and saving face. It’s interesting to have this new perspective on it.

Sound advice.

I missed  the morning trip to Petermann Island after my late night (figured the all-night sunset was worth the trade), so that’s it as far as exploring goes. Petermann is where Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s expedition over-wintered in 1909. The most interesting thing about this was that they brought a year’s supply of newspapers from the year before, and released one per day, in order to try and keep a sense of normalcy. They also stayed in a cove called Port Circumcision, “because it was spotted on the 1st of January 1909, the traditional day for the Feast of the Circumcision.” The fact that there is a place called Port Circumcision is disturbing, but the fact that there is something called the Feast of the Circumcision is even more so. I mean, really. Ew.

My other random explorer fact goes back to just how goddamn British Shackleton’s party were. After the ridiculously dangerous and arduous journeys first to Elephant Island, then to South Georgia, every time they escaped death they celebrated…by shaking hands. Just like cricket used to be before all that hugging and schoolgirl carry-on. But the clincher is what Worsley says after they’ve completed their crossing of Georgia’s mountains, across perilous cliffs and glaciers, and they hear the whaling station’s whistle, and realised that finally, after two years of exhausting ordeal, they’re finally saved. “For the second time on the journey we shook hands, and I could not refrain from yelling ‘Yoicks! Tallyho!’”

Our Antarctic mission, so paltry compared to theirs but so amazing for us, is done. Churning out of the peninsula, I sit alone on the top deck watching the peaks recede into the distance. The day is Valium-calm. Barometric pressure has been rising slowly for days now (this is good), in an incredibly stable holding pattern. Wind speed is negligible, the thermometer is rising, and there are clear high skies above. Of course all this means slightly less than jackshit to the Drake. The passage back to civilisation is waiting out there off the coast like a billion blue blankets being shaken by an army of cyborg housewives. Even without the luxury of hindsight, I can see what comes next. The Drake Passage will give us what mariners so aptly call ‘a lumpy sea’ – great confused waves moving in contrary directions, their blind snouts nosing together. Every minute or so the ship will lift on a crest and slam into the next with an almighty hissing rush, sending a crash of whitewater over the bow and up to the fifth deck windows. The curtains will again stand out from the wall. From time to time the whole ship will shudder deep through its frame like an old man in a hailstorm. And as we round Cape Horn, me and that proud Adelaide boy Coop will be out on the bridge wing in the wind, singing “In South Australia I was born, heave away, haul away, South Australia round Cape Horn, bound for South Australia.”

For now, though, it’s just a long slow falling away, the sun bronzing the water, the whites of the shore burning whiter than ever. Out to starboard a long tongue of land, covered in smooth-domed snow, reaches out after us. To port and out around is nothing but open sea. Antarctica is fading away from us. Over in the distance a long flat berg is lit up by the late sun like a golden stretch of beach. A handful of others are dotted into the distance, lights down the runway, the final markers to trace out our farewell.

Yoicks. Tally-ho.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“Pardon me and my leaky box.”
Kayak guide Shelli helps clean up.

“Hey, it’s the sun, and it makes me shine.”
The Polyphonic Spree

At last, after days of grainy black and white, the big skyfire finally makes its way down to us. It streams through a thin layer of high fog that cuts the worst of the glare, but still allows through enough warm yellow rays to light up the ice in a riot of contrast and shade. The early glow across the shoreline mountains and glaciers makes me shiver, the way the aforementioned song always does (if you haven’t heard of the Spree, find an album called In the Beginning Stages Of. It’s saved my life more times than I care to remember). I catch a boat with Tim, the tech guy I’ve mentioned before, and we get out into the middle of it. I like his style, no chit-chat, no paranoid faff about safety procedures, just getting on with things. Like a male Jo Hart. Unlike Jo, he’s also rocking a serious moustache.  I mean, one that would make Boony feel like a bit of a girl.

Off past an Adelie penguin colony (the littlest and blackest of the penguins, the kind cartoons are based on), a big leopard seal takes a shine to us. He starts following our Zodiac, close, two metres off the stern. He porpoises in and out of the water, coming up to flare his nostrils in great snorting exhalations, then diving again. We cruise around a few islands. He follows us. We pass through a field of other Zodiacs, four or five of them wandering in different directions. He surfaces, looks around, spots us, and tracks us through them, showing no interest in any of the others. We hammer it half a k across open water to check out a huge berg. Ten minutes later he surfaces behind us, sounding short of breath and looking a bit miffed. He’s stunningly agile and fierce, his reptilian head the size of a bear’s, his body when he dives almost the length of the boat. Slick grey hide and dark spots rippling in the sun as he loops above and below the surface. All up he follows us for well over half an hour, a steady pace behind the boat, his puffs and snorts the metronome to our movement.

The light brings things to life in a way we haven’t seen before. The blues are bluer, whites are whiter. It’s Cold Power day. The high cloud clears, and the sky is so blue it hurts. Half a dozen minke whales shimmer past us and slowly on their way. Everything sparkles with the light – the deep blue water, the fields of bergs off into the distance, the bizarrely-shaped lenticular clouds (only in my trips to Antarctica have I seen these shapes), and the jagged landscape, a series of sudden black-white contrasts, like the fantasy-novel look of South Georgia multiplied out by an unknown factor. Up close, the sunlight makes the icebergs even more stunning. I won’t crap on, as you’re probably supremely sick of icebergs by now, but the pictures might give some kind of indication.

In the afternoon we visit a Ukrainian research station, whose signage makes pirates feel right at home, as well as housing a number of more perplexing signs and items (can anyone explain the image at left, for example?). All up it feels like a school building – long lino corridors with offices opening from them – and I can’t imagine having to bunker down in here for months on end with no sunlight and no chance to get outside. Though I guess Ukrainians know how to deal with winter. And yes, they do brew their own vodka here.

With no fog, at last we can see the evening sky. Everything is orange, purple, gold in the late light. The sun doesn’t set until after 11, and even then only retreats just below the horizon, leaving the sky lit up. It will stay that way for several hours until the sun rises again. Last trip I stayed up all night watching it and drinking gin on my own, then drunkenly climbed the radio mast and howled at the morning sky. This time I make it to 4 a.m. The sky shifts constantly. To the east it glows a deep backlit blue. To the south, purple and violet behind a mountain range, as a half moon rises through thin cloud bands. To the west the sharp and misty mountains look like they’ve been extracted from China, and even at its lowest point, the sunset simmers umber and orange like a dying fire. The best part comes around one o’clock, when the ship is deserted, and five humpback whales come swimming past. Ever so slowly, taking the best part of hour to pass from view. The sound of their exhalations coming perfectly clear across the stillness from a couple of hundred yards, their broad backs breaking the surface, dipping below it, again the lazy flick of the flukes, or rolling sideways to waft a giant flipper in the air. Tomorrow is our last day here. I think it’s a bit lame when people anthropomorphise animals all the time. But it’s also pretty hard not to wave back.

Double Entendre of the Day:
“Ah, and up here are some chicks. Would anybody like two shag chicks?”
Jacques hooks us up a rare Antarctic shag.

Tonight I stay up late drinking with the pirates out on the top deck. It’s a weird experience, having to put on every item of clothing you own in order to go for a beverage. Trying to hold a glass while wearing thick polar gloves. I like drinking gin in this climate – I have a bottle I bought in Stanley, and sitting out on the outside tables at night, it stays a nice even ice-cold temperature without the need for ice. A permanent martini.

I wander into the cabin late and tipsy and go to clean my teeth. (This is going somewhere, don’t worry.) Each bathroom has two doors, one to the cabin on either side. It makes for an interesting competition with your neighbours about who can lock the other out the most times. Various bets have already been made across the ship, and tallies are being kept. Tonight I neglect to lock the door to the other cabin. It’s late, and I’m not doing anything controversial in here. But of course soon enough it opens to reveal one of the gents from next door, clearly still half-asleep. He hits the light switch on his side, turning the light off, is apparently too bleary to notice this, then promptly hops in and shuts the door. I, with a pair of boxer shorts and a mouthful of toothpaste, am now locked in a pitch black room about the size of a cupboard with a gent in his fifties dressed only in a pair of jocks who has very little sensory perception or ambient awareness and the apparent intent of urinating on something in the very near future. “Ubb… hewwo?” I say.

The next day is one of the best of the trip. I go for a boat cruise with Jacques, the Québécois ornithologist I mentioned earlier, who’s the best of the staff on board. Aside from knowing his shit backwards and sideways, he’s hilarious to listen to. Not just the accent, but the pauses and emphasis he puts on each syllable. Not “two shag chicks” but “two…shag…chicks”, in thick Francophonic tones. He also looks like a happy garden gnome – little, barrel-chested, bearded, rosy-cheeked and always smiley. We cruise along the base of massive cliffs, birds nesting in the rocks just a few feet away, thick plates of lichen growing up the rock face, vivid green gouts of malachite crystals bearding down through the cracks. Then there’s the most amazing iceberg I’ve seen yet. Any one of the hundreds so far could be picked up as is and plonked in a gallery as a sculpture, and would sell for millions. But this one – this one looks like frozen flames, like a crystal elven palace, a fairy kingdom, the central spires standing separately within an outer chamber, then all sorts of alcoves and windows and even a tunnel that shoots straight through the outer wall, missing only a drawbridge. The surface is rippled, pocked with the movement of bubbles. The colour is denser, passing light through rather than reflecting it off. It dapples and wavers in deep blues and greens, pulsing from deep within the cracks and fissures.

From there we follow an awesome array of glacial cliffs with inset caves, large leaning columns, strewn all about the place like some giant-child’s blocks. The water is thick with cold, moving slowly like sugar syrup, coagulating into thicker pools amongst the rash of small Brasch ice from the glacial falls. We go into a dead-end fjord, and then there’s this wonderful moment when we cut the engine, and no other boats are around, and suddenly there is complete, devastating silence. And I realise what it is about this place. Every place I’ve been, in civilisation, there’s never actually silence. Even when all other sounds stop there’s a background hum of electricity, the pumping veins of towns and cities. A high-pitched whine that you don’t normally notice. But here, and for the first time in my life, I’m aware of…nothing. Actually nothing. There is no wind. The water is taut as a hotel sheet. We sit and watch tiny white Antarctic terns swooping and diving, flitting so neatly on their delicate wings, cutting acute angles in mid- air, and then plunging sporadically into the water in search of krill, a sudden cessation of movement and a sharp drop through the surface, from all heights and angles, a snap as they break surface tension, and then a re-emergence to resume their place as though nothing had happened. Their flight and occasional chirps only emphasising the scope of that stillness.

As we fly back to the ship, the boat smacking hard as a skipped stone over the flat surface, I can feel that this is another of those catharsis moments. The last few years have been emotionally draining, a series of incidents, and I’ve often been heavy with self-indulgent coddled-Western-kid depression. But in this bracing wind, with the spray kicking up and the cold burning my wet skin, I can feel all that old bullshit being stripped away. This is a moment to hold. Even today there’ll be other adventures. There’ll be hiking a great hill and tramping up and slipping down and then seeing the whole Peninsula spread out before me like a picnic blanket. There’ll be bombing back down toboggan-style on my arse, and getting told off by someone or other because having fun is too dangerous, and laughing my arse off and going about my day. But here’s the thing: no matter what happens, no matter where I end up from here, I reckon I can always go back to the bow of that boat, Jacques grinning at the tiller, cold cracking my skin, and smiling so hard that it feels like I’m breaking my face.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“You know how to do it. But you just sit there and do nothing with it every time it comes to your mouth.”
Monika explains why John can’t speak Spanish.

I want to share my favourite piece of prose that I’ve read in…I don’t know. Years, perhaps. Frederick Cook was the American surgeon onboard de Gerlache’s Belgica expedition of 1897. It was a multinational crew, with Belgians, Poles, Romanians, and the Norwegian First Mate Roald Amundsen, who would of course years later be the first man to reach the South Pole. (I almost wrote ‘Fist Mate’ there, but that has an entirely different connotation.) De Gerlache’s was the first expedition to stay in the Antarctic over winter, after becoming trapped in the ice. I’ve already told you something about leopard seals, aka sea leopards. So here is an excerpt from Cook’s account of the voyage.

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A few nights past a sea leopard interviewed the meteorologist, Arctowski. The animal sprang suddenly from a new break in the ice onto the floe, upon which Arctowski had a number of delicate meteorological instruments, and without an introduction, or any signs of friendship, the animal crept rapidly over the snow and examined Arctowski and his paraphernalia with characteristic seal inquisitiveness. The meteorologist had nothing with which to defend himself, and he didn’t appear to relish the teeth of the leopard as it advanced and separated its massive jaws with a bear-like snort. He walked around the floe, the leopard after him. The seal examined the instruments but they were not to its liking, and as to Arctowski, it evidently did not regard him of sufficient interest to follow long, for after it had made two rounds the seal plunged into the waters, swam under the ice and around the floe, and then raised its head far out to get another glimpse of the meteorologist. Thinking that the creature contemplated another attack, Arctowski made warlike gestures, and uttered a volley of sulphureous Polish words, but the seal didn’t mind that. It raised its head higher and higher out of the water, and displayed its teeth in the best possible manner. Now and then its lips moved, and there was audible a weird noise, with signs which we took to be the animal’s manner of inviting its new acquaintance to a journey under the icy surface, where they might talk over the matter out of the cold blast of the wind, in the blue depths below.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“So I hope that you all enjoyed your first humpback experience.”
– Rupert again.

“Can you imagine the nads on the guys who did this in covered wagons?   Pioneers, Brian! We share their spirit!”
-          Stewie Griffin, on driving across the continental United States.

You can multiply this by twenty for the guys who first explored the Antarctic. Agreed, they were mostly commercial sealers and whalers who for nothing more than money initiated the near-extinction of both species over the next century. But to get here in the first place, they must have been swinging sets of nuts so ponderous they needed to carry them round in a hammock. All other lands ‘discovered’ by Europeans already had residents, who were either driven away or swallowed up. But no-one lived here, no-one had been here, no-one knew anything about it. Even today a substantial portion of the waterways remain uncharted in terms of depths and hazards. But a couple of hundred years ago there was literally nothing, just a handful of stories and then the few rough charts of some of the pioneers. Around the Antarctic Peninsula is an absolute mess of islands of islands and channels, most of them choked with sea ice and bergs. To navigate blind through an area like this, in tiny rickety wooden ships, with only sail and oars to rely upon, in water cold enough to kill you in a minute, with rudimentary medical knowledge and absolutely no emergency recourse should misfortune befall you – I cannot comprehend the daring that it took to venture here. There was no GPS, no radio contact, no emergency beacons, nowhere to call mayday, little chance you’d survive a sinking, and even less chance of rescue if you did. In fact, not only was there no way for these ships to call for help, but a lot of them didn’t even tell anyone where they were going, because they didn’t want competitors to find their hunting grounds. They left in secrecy and returned the same way. If they went missing their chance of being found was nil.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
[While on her hands and knees behind a couch] “Just wiggle it around, Woody, then push it in hard. It gets a bit loose sometimes.”
Annie and the aptly-named Mr Wood fix an errant monitor.

Welcome to Antarctica. We arrive here in the early morning and the weather changes with the speed of a fingersnap. “And then there came both mist and snow / and it grew wond’rous cold,” wrote Coleridge, and indeed it does. The temperature spikes downward like the Icelandic economy, and as we prepare for a landing on Half Moon Island the snow starts coming down. Gentle and wandering, weather that’s not quite sure of itself, travelling sideways on the wind to start piling up in gaps and corners.

The Zodiac ride in is a motherfucker. The sensation as the boat smacks from wave to wave is like trying to rollerskate over a wildebeest stampede. Spray wets your hair, so the wind slices through your head as cleanly as a teaspoon taking the top off an egg, in the granddaddy of all ice-cream headaches. I stoically refuse to put my hood up, mainly because I’m worried I’ll go arse-backwards over the side if I let go of the rope. So I come into shore with one eye full of salt water and a rictus of a grimace like half my face is paralysed, a wet skinny Sylvester Stallone. “Adrian!”

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“I need to move back so I can fit it all in.”
Rosie takes a photo.

Everyone has their names on their doors, and this is my favourite door on the ship. The one with the aforementioned Mark Hastie-Oldland / Lucinda Strickland-Skailes combo was pretty good too, but Coop takes the cake. Coop is the most Aussie guy I’ve ever met, the physical incarnation of that annoying old cliché about loveable knockabout larrikins. He is so Aussie that his name is Coop Cooper. Who needs first names?

We have to make our own fun on this boat, and a few of us band together for the duration. John and I argue over whether cyclists in Lycra are totally lame (I’ve already told you my thoughts here) and then make up over Tenacious D. “This is not the greatest song in the world – this is only a tribute.” The Fox played a ripping (and ripped) cover of that song in BA back in November, at about 5 a.m. after the kind of epic smoking session I hadn’t experienced since I was seventeen. “I was really stoned after that third joint,” he said the next day, “so the twelfth one was probably unnecessary.”

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“Good morning. There are still high winds and swell, so the outside decks will remain closed. But we are doing excellent speed, so the trip should prove enjoyable.” Later: “We’ve continued doing excellent speed all day. We’ve come down a bit just recently for dinner, but we’re still doing very good speed now.”
Rupert calls in from Party Central.

I can just imagine this. The Russian captain up on the bridge, racking up huge lines on the instrument consoles, or the back of an atlas of nautical charts. Motioning us in with a broad grin. “Komm! Ve are doink yexcellent spyeed!” Cranking out 180 bpm industrial tech over the PA system. The first officer picking random locations on the chart to head for because they have funny names. The radio officer on the mic, having a long double-time D&M with a confused Chilean coastguard station about his childhood and how his relationship with his parents just, y’know, had like a really strong affect on him and that. Spotting objects on the radar panel that turn out to be misplaced rocks of meth. The cooks brewing up pots of 1-4B and Ribena in the galley. Doing pills on the bridge wings, talking to the passing albatross. I just feel like we really have some kind of connection, know what I mean? Like, we can’t even really talk properly, cos he’s a bird and everything, but we’re like, the same kind of spirit, and he’s watching over me.

Then, looking over the main map of the ship’s features, I start to notice a whole lot of other fun entries dotted around the ship. Read this list and then tell me there aren’t some serious munter parties happening on board the Akademik Sergey Vavilov.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“we were being literally blown onshore…”
F.A. Worsley, Shackleton’s Boat Journey

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Seasickness is the hangover you didn’t earn. Drinking has always had its own punishment built in, a sort of inherent finger-wagging propagator of Catholic guilt, telling you that you know you did something wrong. As Doug Stanhope says in protesting against vice laws, “Every vice is a punishment in itself. You smoke: you get cancer, you die. You don’t need a ticket on top of that. You gamble, you lose your money. You watch too much porno, it diminishes your taste for the kind of girls who might actually fuck you.” And it’s true. But with seasickness you’re thinking, “Who did I stab? What did I do?”, as it twines itself into your body for the duration. A low greasy nausea that creeps through your insides like a parasitic vine and holds on.

I’m on a boat and, it’s going fast and, if I had a nautical-theme pashmina afghan, I would use it to tie myself to the bed. The sea is a heaving ugly mass of wet slate. The wind picked up overnight to a Force 11, and the sky is as grey and remorseless as Soviet architecture. Everything outside seems to have been reduced to the one sickly shade. We’re lucky, in a way. On my last trip a Force 11 storm gave us twelve-metre swells. This time they’re only five to seven metres. But still – when a ship as high as a six-storey building plunges seven metres down and fifteen degrees to the side, it’s the kind of ride where you just have to hang on. Even with the stabilisation system on full, there are times when the curtains stand out perpendicular to the wall, and all night objects scurry back and forth in the desk drawers like anxious mammals.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
“As we were supposed to fly out of Basra, a lot of shooting started near the airfield. So, it was just me and six military officers in very close confines for the next sixteen hours. As you can imagine, the sketchbook didn’t really have a chance to come out.”
Military artist Mandy Shepherd describes her experience of the war in Iraq.

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There is no place lonelier than the middle of the ocean. It’s late. Real late, and the whole ship sleeps, except for the one half-open eye of the bridge, which burns like a nightlight through all these hours. But aside from its dim red glow the ship is a desert. And beyond it, a desert of a scale like no other on earth.

Steaming away from South Georgia, hanging out my window, I’m looking back and feeling like the only man alive. The wind has been picking up steadily, and with it the sea, in great lumpen swells that push their shoulders into our starboard stern. But the real magic comes from the moon, which is following us on the same line as the swell, and a strange other world comes alive with its touch. The waves make an ever-moving landscape of hills and valleys, wallowing their way towards the edge of vision. There are only two shades in this world. Where the moon hits, it picks its way among the wavelets, it runs its fingers down the sharp edges of peaks, it dodges each trough only to splay a flat palm on the face of the next approaching rise. The patches of night are as black as a tar pit, and might well have dinosaurs buried deep within them. But the other colour… “That silver, he said, and that silver, he said, and that silver is streaming and silver is steaming…” those patches are true silver, slicing into your eye, fierce and clean, so bright you can almost hear the ring of metal as they shift on the water. No-one moves, no-one breathes. This is a true witching hour, and I’m waiting for a giant to pluck me from the window.

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Double Entendre of the Day:
Christine:    There’s a strong wind and a lot of chop, so you’re going to get a . . . . . . . . . . . . lot of sea spray.
Rosie:          Let’s all keep our mouths shut so we don’t swallow a whole load.

With all of my historical study, it seemed I was always having to think about killing. Even now, a friend tells me she’s living within sight of the Gleiwitz radio tower which marks the starting place of WWII, bringing to mind choice details of that little fracas. South Georgia’s history is entirely based on killing too, though here it was in the form of whaling and sealing. Almost as soon as Captain Cook’s discovery became known, whalers and sealers started making their way here, and even further south to Antarctic waters and islands. Both species of prey were almost wiped out, to the point that both industries eventually collapsed, the last base closing in 1965.

Whaling is the story of the day. We visit the abandoned base at Stromness, where Shackleton first made it back to civilisation from being lost in Antarctica (we’ll talk a bit more about him another time). Then on to Grytviken, another station that has since been restored as a historical site and part of a museum complex.  The reality of it, though, is incredibly depressing. It’s a site of industrial slaughter, after all. All the machinery is on display, with information boards walking you through the process: how the floating carcasses were moored here, dragged up this ramp by chains around their tails, peeled of their skin “like a banana” by way of steam winches, all the fun details of exactly how they were cut up and boiled down.  The oldest guy on the ship is Joerg, an 80-year-old German who moved to the States after the war. He stands quietly for a long time, then gravely says, “It’s like a genocide.”

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Double Entendre of the Day:

Zodiac driver Di slips while climbing aboard and has to roll into the boat.
Bob:       “That was a nice entrance.
”Di:         “Yeah, you should see some of my entrances.”

“It’s a living thing… dooby dooby doo… it’s a terrible thing to be eaten alive by.” This may not be exactly what ELO said, but it definitely applies to giant kelp. All around Prion Island, and all around the rocky islets that are littered along its coast, the sea has come to life. Masses of brown tentacles snake out in every direction. But it’s the tide that makes the picture complete. The swells lift and drop the kelp with every rise and fall. It seethes, it squelches, it slithers. It genuinely looks alive, some science-fiction monster of decades past, rubbing its tentacles together in anticipation of its next meal. In fact, for the geeks among us, it’s extremely reminiscent of a Zerg Subterranean Creep Colony. (For others, Wiki ‘Starcraft’.)  And then, as you watch more closely… more subtle movement. Eyes. Heads. Jesus Christ…

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So after World War II, the whole world was going, “Come on, Europe, give these countries back. Come on, we just had a bloody war; let’s give ‘em back. Britain?”

“What?”

“What’s that behind your back?”

“Oh, that’s … India, and a number of other countries.”

“Give ‘em back.”

“Oh, all right. There’s that one there, and there’s that one…”

“Falkland Islands?”

“No, we need the Falkland Islands … for … strategic … sheep purposes.”

– Eddie Izzard

The general consensus is that wars are terrible. But we forget they can be pretty funny too. And the Falklands War might just be the funniest of the lot. For starters it involved Argentina, who are about the least warlike nation you could propose. It also involved a nation who I can only think of in terms of pathetic ‘90s cricket teams: mention Britain and I just see Michael Atherton poking around for four painful overs before edging to second slip. Which isn’t really fair on Scotland or Wales, but there we have it. Then there’s the fact it happened in 1982, and shit,  everything that happened in the ‘80s is absurd to the point of hilarity. My birth included. So it was a war with hilarious haircuts and post-disco music. And it makes that Argentine victory over England in the ‘86 World Cup all the more relevant, doesn’t it? But the funniest thing of all is what they were fighting over.

The Falkland Islands.

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