That last essay-post was pretty exhausting (for both of us probably), so let’s keep it basic today. A couple of people have asked for photos of where I’m staying. The first is the view from the rooftop terrace during an epic thunderstorm recently that rivalled Melbourne’s, flooding large portions of the sububs and making a whole bunch of arterial roads unusable. Absolute chaos for a couple of days. The striking thing about it was that weird green light that you can sort of make out on the horizon, the strangest colour, like being undersea. I’ve never seen such an eerie build up to a storm before. And the tension cranked up and up and up but the thing wouldn’t burst, just these incredible cloud monoliths moving in, all different layers and colours like they were battling for supremacy in the atmosphere. The tension was almost unbearable before it broke, the air felt solid, teasing the hairs out from your arms to stand straight up. The second photo is looking the other way off the roof, highlighting the unique charm and design sensibility of our friendly neighbourhood freeway overpass. Despite being about thirty metres from my window, I generally don’t even notice it. The third photo is the the indoor courtyard (my room is the one off the staircase). Pretty interesting place to live. The picture to the left is the stairs to the roof (I just like the colour scheme). The owner has an interesting chaotic existence, lots of family coming and going, so we’re never sure who lives there and who’s passing through and who is who – there’s his girlfriend and there’s another woman who appears to be the mother of his kid, and the guy who’s maybe her boyfriend but also comes around to work with my landlord, and everyone seem’s cool with these arrangements, which is a testament to them, and then there’s a tribe of other miscellaneous children who come and go with other miscellaneous relatives. They have several giant barbeques a week and it’s generally pretty festive. He’s also a keen horticulturalist, as per the picture below. Several people wanted to see pictures of Nora, too, so here’s a couple. She’s a peach. I doubt I need to explain why I like her.

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“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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“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.

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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“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.

That said, I’m glad they’re not still about. The seals were almost wiped out, but have rebounded well. The whales were even closer to extinction, and are taking much longer to regenerate due to their very slow reproduction cycles and the difficulty of raising a calf to adulthood. Apparently back in the day the seas around South Georgia and down to the Antarctic were positively thick with whales; on this trip we’ve seen a handful in many days of sailing, despite the number of attentive eyes on the bridge. It remains to be seen what effect new threats will have, such as global warming’s effect on plankton and krill, and the effect of dire over-fishing that is still going on. Only a couple of intransigent countries are still going after the whales, but most are still going after the fish, to an extent which is already disastrous in many areas, and the fact that this mightn’t be a good idea has failed to make it into the public consciousness or into policy discussion in any meaningful way.

Still. We had whales today. Five humpbacks, first a mother and calf, and soon afterwards three others swimming together. They were unbothered by our Zodiac, and we were able to amble up to within about twenty or thirty metres and follow their leisurely path. They stayed considerately on the surface for the most part – a spray of whale-spout here, a giant flipper there, a big square head gulping at the krill on the surface, the distinctive curved back and small dorsal dipping up and back into the water, the broad flukes following after it in a lazy curve. Every twenty metres or so the tails would emerge again, a long slow flip upwards before sliding back down beneath the surface.

And then we drove. For two hours or more, in and out of iceberg fields, along glacial cliffs, through water thick with Brasch ice. This is the magic that I came back for. By February, Antarctica has already begun again its long slow freeze. The first signs of sea ice have begun to form, mushy pancake ice floating thin on the surfaces, in places consolidating into platelets. Later the platelets will begin to merge, but only when the water temperature has dropped to -1.8. When it’s winter, and 40 below outside, the water is the place to be.

————————————       ————————

But then there are the big icebergs, the real showstoppers. Frank Worsley describes it far better than I could, in another passage from Shackleton’s Boat Journey:

-

They rose and fell on the heaving sea, drawing deceptively apart, then closing with a thud that would have smashed our boat like a gas mantle between thumb and finger. Castles, towers, and churches swayed unsteadily around us. Small pieces gathered and rattled against the boat. Swans of weird shape pecked at our planks, a gondola steered by a giraffe ran foul of us, which much amused a duck sitting on a crocodile’s head. Just then a bear, leaning over the top of a mosque, nearly clawed our sail. An elephant, about to spring from a Swiss chalet on to a battleship’s deck, took no notice at all; but a hyena, pulling a lion’s tooth, laughed so much he fell into the sea, whereupon a sea boot and three real penguins sailed lazily through a lovely archway to see what was to do, by the shores of a floe littered with the ruins of a beautiful white city and surrounded by huge mushrooms with thick stalks. All the strange, fantastic shapes rose and fell in stately cadence, with a rustling, whispering sound and hollow echoes to the thudding seas, clear green at the water line, shading to a deep, dark blue far below, all snowy purity and cool blue shadows above.

He’s not exaggerating. Today we see the Sphinx turning in a current, a giant whale mirroring a mate across the lagoon. A berg with a devil’s tail, or the very mushroom he was speaking of. Great cliffs of ice sheer and solid as a city block, higher and deeper and heavier than our ship. It’s beyond my ability to explain the sheer variety the ice can have, and how wondrous it seems. The range of colours and shapes.

I can tell you why it happens though. The berg’s shape and size depends on how and where it breaks off. Tabular bergs break off ice shelves and are utterly flat, their tops forming geometrically perfect lines that you so rarely see in nature. The more jagged bergs tear away from glacial cliffs. Then they wander. Some circle cold seas for dozens of years. And every step of the way, they’re sculpted. The sea, rain, and wind all work on the berg’s surface, prising open weak points. Waves overwash the top. Bergs get grounded, have tide lines worn into them, break free, move on. Then they roll, as the underside is worn away by water and the berg becomes top-heavy. Rolling in all directions, again and again, until the dead-horizontal strata lines point at all sorts of mad diagonals, and sharp-cornered pyramids are formed, assaulting the sky. Each berg’s strata is different, varying thicknesses and colour, sometimes layers of dirt trapped between. Other layers can be bent and curved, and cracks in the ice fill with new water and freeze again, adding another shade to the palette. The deepest colour means the densest ice, free of bubbles, where the concentration of oxygen reflects vivid blue light. Breaking from the glacier, these chunks can be twenty thousand years old – the entire span of our semi-civilised history, floating quietly in the bay.

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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!”

John, Monika and I take off across the island before someone can start telling us we shouldn’t. It’s a strange all-white landscape – the new snow making the ground a clean sheet, the air white with falling flakes and the mist closing out any background.  The island is skinny, a flattish spine between two beaches. Across that plain, the new snow is whipped up in swirls by the wind, for all the world like sand in a desert. The beach is full of fat seals – large males this time – and more whalebones, everywhere these sad remnants. Way back behind us across the white waste a small figure is pursuing us, trying to wave us back, but being pirates we conveniently don’t see them and step up the pace. This is real snow, the drifts thigh-high, then suddenly chest-high when I go off the path at one point. I have to roll flat out of the man-sized hole I’ve made. The surface is firm enough that with some steps it holds your weight. Then the next step just as likely plunges through again with a spine jarring thump, your body never sure if it’s stopping here or three feet below. It’s almost easier to stomp and ensure you break the surface, so at least you know you’re going to fall. Suddenly I realise what “following in someone’s footsteps” actually means. Not just that you’re on the same path, but that they’ve done the hardest work for you. We’re battling through it, breathless, boiling, wet, my face stinging with cold, my glasses eventually snowing up so that I can’t see a thing, but we just keep going. We’re out there, in the middle of something, blood singing through our veins, endorphins flowing, punching a hole in the world, and God it feels good.

Any thoughts of being manly tough explorers are quickly shattered when we go back to the ship for lunch: the truly masculine choice of a shrimp salad or quiche Lorraine. Oh, and with a broccoli brie soup to start. I told you this gig was cushy. It’s hard to reconcile the coddling nature of the trip with its claims to be an ‘expedition’, or with the Antarctic history of which they keep reminding us. To be living luxuriously in a place that has seen such endurance and privation seems in poor taste. It’s the same reaction I get when I see tourists grinning and mugging for photos at war cemeteries or sites of atrocity. “Here’s me at the railway cutting where 12 000 forced labourers died. Two thumbs up! Oh, and here’s me at the Cambodian Killing Fields. Whoo! Click-click. Check it out, those are real human skulls.”

The afternoon is onto Deception Island, an active but mostly sunken volcano crater. A narrow gap eroded in the crater wall means you can sail inside. Just. The gap is ten metres deep, and our hull goes 6.5 below the waterline. The cliffs seem so close you could touch them. They stand hundreds of feet high on each side, along with freestanding columns of rock. All the geography here is similarly abrupt – sudden mountains coming like upthrust fists out of the sea. Cliffs rearing directly up, and then hundreds of feet down below the water, in one unrelenting line. The way the wind smashes gouts of spray through this opening has given it the name of Neptune’s Bellows. Inside, the volcano means the geography keeps changing, new spurs of rock from lava flows, old coastline covered up. Patches of the beach steam with subterranean warmth. The thick smell of sulphur is in the air. This is where we went swimming on my last trip, alternating between the burn of volcanic heat and the burn of extreme cold, until I couldn’t tell which was which. If you have ever stood soaking wet on a rock beach in temperatures of 0 degrees, wearing only a towel, getting pelted with sugar-lumps of rocks by a 40-knot wind, trying to balance on one leg so you can get your pants back on, you will understand that this experience isn’t necessarily one I was keen to repeat. Anyhow, with Captain Timorous at the helm it was never going to happen this time around.

Deception is a great white plain, giving a kind of Arctic tundra vibe, then scooping up to vertical at the crater walls. “Lost in the blinding whiteness of the tundra!” You can climb the walls to another gap called Neptune’s Window, to see where the cliffs mash the waves far below, the water polishing the flotilla of icebergs going past, and allegedly, beyond the mist, the mainland of the Antarctic continent. The Window, Paul the geologist reckons, will one day become another entranceway. In the other direction, punctuating the plain are the remains of yet another whaling station. “It’s nice to see the stations getting more and more derelict,” says my uncle, and this one definitely is. Decay moves slowly here, but it’s advancing resolutely nonetheless. There are the rotting timbers of the small boats, the gaps and shadows, the contrast with the snowdrifts that have built up inside. There are the buildings slowly folding themselves back into the earth. The massive tanks rusting and subsiding into mud, timber drying and flaking away. Slow, achingly slow, but there’s no doubt that this patient island will take them eventually. Here, as everywhere else, we’re only in transit.

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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.”

John’s wife Monika is from the Czech Republic, and has one of those completely endearing accents that makes everything she says sound charming. “The government wants you to have more babies,” I tell her after reading a newspaper article. “Vatever government vant,” she says in her best Eastern Bloc monotone. The rest of the time she’s far from monotone, being possibly the happiest person I’ve ever met. We had a teacher at school called Ms Thompson who was as irritating as a bathtub full of fleas, always going around saying “Wonderful! Marvellous! Two thumbs up!” But Monika’s is a different, non-annoying type of enthusiasm. “Zat’s fantastic,” is her catchphrase. The difference, I suppose, is that she seems completely sincere, and is bold enough to seek out things that actually are fantastic. The two of them quickly become my main troublemaking companions.

Daniela the Argentine, on the other hand, is well-behaved and nice to everybody, and says this compensates for my general standard of behaviour. Between the two of us we achieve balance; without us the universe may spin off its axis. Rosie is English, wandering around with a giant furry microphone that looks like a captive badger, recording things for the BBC. Her door provides great amusement too, given that between herself (Rosanna Wynn-Williams) and her cabinmate (Jo Hart), we have the longest and shortest names on the ship on the one label. “Jo Hart!” I take to bellowing in a staccato tone. “Jo Hart, no messing about! Straight to the point, two syllables, who needs more, what are you, French? Jo Hart!” Fortunately Jo Hart doesn’t seem to mind.

“Guys!” Monika says whenever we are together. “Ve are five pirates!” I’m not sure why, aside from being on a ship, but eventually the appellation starts to fit, a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we join Coop in getting up the noses of various staff members. They have a tendency to treat everyone like ten-year-olds, and people like us don’t respond to that very well. As some of the group come and go from a room, Monika sings: “Ve used to be five pirates, but not anymore. Now ve are three pirates…” It’s amazing what will entertain you at sea. My favourite line is when she’s asking me about spoken word. “So,” she says, “you are like a stand-by comedian?”

Traditional pirate ensemble

Rosie is here to follow up on family history. Her father David was a microbiologist who undertook ten separate research trips to the Antarctic. He was the expedition leader of the 1990s mission investigating whether bacteria living in rocks in the McMurdo Dry Valleys could indicate that there had been life on Mars, and whether it could be the source of life here. The story made big news, and I remember being intrigued by it at the time. Strange how things circle back around in life. The most fascinating bit for mine is that he was using a Raman spectrometer to (get this) scan rock for microscopic pigment traces that would indicate the presence of fossilised bacteria up to three billion years old. The fact that this is possible just blows my mind. He was also working with NASA to develop a miniature spctrometer to attach to the Mars Rover and look for bacteria on Mars. Sadly he died young eight years ago, but what he achieved was remarkable. You can read more about him here.

It’s an interesting bunch. Aside from the pirates, I also get along well with an older English couple who turn out to be Liam Watson’s parents (the ToeRag Studios chap who produced The White Stripes’ Elephant).  They stand out among the otherwise inoffensive and gormless British retirees. After dinner tonight there are two lines of people coming from opposite directions merging to get up the stairs. One of the most English of the lot, Gerard, is craning his neck back at a map of the world on the hallway wall. “That must be an Australian map,” he says in an intensely posh accent. “I’ve never seen one like that before. Look at that. Ha! It’s got Australia in the middle!” He chuckles condescendingly, then turns around and almost headbutts  Coop, coming from the other direction, who has positioned himself firmly in Gerard’s way and drawn himself up to his full five-foot-six. “What was that, mate?” says Coop.

********************************

Here’s a poem for you, about the last leg of our getting-to-Antarctica voyage.

Elephant Island Fog

It’s like being in a snowdome, he says
and as much as we can’t speak Russian
we can speak the language of shrugged shoulders
and the unstated obvious.

The boatman’s overalls move independently
despite the wind
which doesn’t.  The rattling sound
is descent and crescendo in one

and when the anchor chain hits green water
it exhales rust
in the shape of a jellyfish.

In this absence of sound
and this fluctuating radius
it’s not clear why the elephants hang back
why the islands are hesitant.

But still the day is the second word of this stanza
and the sun is a story we remember;
there is only the chain, umbilical, one hand upon it
and a shout from the bow that will never bounce back.

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.”

The real kicker, though, is that the text seems almost congratulatory towards the whalers, and excited by just how impressive the industrial process really was. At one sign, “The distance from here to the white post is 34 metres, the length of a blue whale brought to Grytviken. This is the largest whale ever recorded.” And then blithely,  “It was killed in 1916.” You would imagine that the biggest whale ever seen would be an object of awe and respect; instead it was cut up for meat.

The literature says, “One image of whaling is the cruel, ruthless slaughter of wild animals. Another image is of hard-working men making a success of an industry in a remote, desolate corner of the world.” This just doesn’t sit right. Coming back to Joerg’s comment, I could praise Germany’s invasion of Russia as an example of men working hard in a remote and harsh environment, or describe the Holocaust as an impressive technological achievement, but I don’t think either of those comparisons would be greeted too enthusiastically.

The comic relief is provided by flatulent elephant seals, who figuratively lighten the atmosphere while doing the exact opposite in a literal sense. They lie around in great clusters, each one shifting sporadically to rip out the most tremendous burps and farts you’ve ever heard. You laugh and flinch simultaneously. Comedy aside, elephant seals are epic. Aside from being massive, they spend ten months straight at sea feeding, then haul up on land to sleep, moult and get it on elephant style. They can dive nearly two kilometres straight down to chase squid. They’re seals, for Chrissake. And satellite beacons have shown them swimming literally thousands of kilometres a year, from Georgia to the Antarctic to South America and everywhere in between.

The next day at Gold Harbour, our last in South Georgia, is perfect. One of those calm, flat mornings when the sun off the water looks like the flattened-out foil from an Easter egg, glinting in all directions. Where you feel that all is right with the world, and your boat driver looks like some kind of noble hero standing at the tiller. The landing site is stunning: a broad lagoon with a glacier tongue extending down into it; a long curve of stone beach covered with thousands of penguins, a ridge of shale hills dotted with seals. Sheer rock cliffs shoot up from the lagoon, topped with a glacier crown. Our Dear Leader and his top lieutenants are ridiculously obsessed with caution. They’ve already warned us about tsunamis, and when a few small bits of ice fall off the glacier, his Second-in-Command shrieks “Get off the beach! Get off the beach!!!” as a six-centimetre wave creeps up to tickle our gumboots. So I escape the kindergarten mentality and head for the hills. From here, the bizarre grandeur of the landscape is revealed, changing from the Himalayas to the Caribbean in half a mile, with a stop-off at the Serengeti courtesy of the massed wildlife in between. Even from a mile off you can see the carpet of penguins covering the beach; and from here the gold-blue water looks inviting enough to swim.

It’s a beautiful clear day, and it’s hot. We’re dressed for the Antarctic while Georgia hits  17 degrees. As we hike, the clothes get discarded bit by bit – waterproofs, jumpers, thermals – until I’m getting round in a pair of rolled up trousers, gumboots, and a pair of aviators. My shirtlessness surprises Jacques, a French-Canadian ornithologist on the expedition staff. “My goodness!” he says. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” (Imagine this in a heavy French accent, it’s funnier.) “The fact that this could happen in South Georgia is incredible. If you want proof of global warming, here it is. I must take your picture, for evidence.” I like to think that it’s really because I’m looking H-O-T-T, but I agree, and he snaps me, shirtless in shades, standing next to a forty-metre glacial cliff. “Look at this,” he goes on, gesturing  to the wide lagoon far below where the Zodiacs are black blots on the beach. “Even fifteen years ago, none of this existed. The glacier covered everything, these hills, the lagoon, all the way to the sea. And now look where it is. Soon there won’t even be a glacier on those cliffs. And see what happens,” he says, shaking his head and looking back at me. “As soon as the ice recedes, the apes move in.”

Much like Flava Flav, all of this was iced up until the mid-90s.

Later that day we pull away towards Antarctica. The landscape as viewed from the sea is incredible, especially as the sun dies to a richer gold. Mountains, genuine mountains, jut straight up out of the ocean. No time for intermediaries. The range stands in one thin line, one long narrow razorback. Along its length the glaciers come down in shining rivulets, the fields of snow stand clear and fresh, and the fact that interior decorators use forty-six different shades of white stops seeming so absurd. The naturalist Niall Rankin described it as a section of the Swiss Alps dropped into the sea. Between the peaks are scarves of mist, casually draped, and refracting fields of spray whipped up by the wind. Some peaks are almost obscured behind the diffusion, some are clear-cut as a polished parang. It’s a true fantasy landscape, for all the world like something out of Narnia or Middle-Earth or The Neverending Story. Falcor wuz ere.

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…

Seals. Ah right. And suddenly it seems much less sinister. The seals play amongst it in their dozens, popping up and submerging like cute furry periscopes. They’re clambering up the rocks too, and as the Zodiac rounds a point to hit a slightly clearer patch of water, the scene unfolds. Along the shore, the water literally looks like it’s boiling with seals. They are everywhere. They zoom out of the water toward the Zodiac, their doglike faces alight with curiosity. They lollop alongside, and then away. They bark. They snuffle and whine. They chase each other, intertwine. Their eel bodies glisten in the dull light, slippery and sinuous. As with the sleek penguins porpoising in and out of the water, it’s amazing how something so cumbersome on land becomes so elegant with a simple change of element. They climb up onto the kelp mounds, fly out of the water to scrabble for purchase on the rock, bark their prowess at the sky, then plunge into the sea again. Everything they do seems built for fun, not pragmatism. They slip out of the water unnecessarily every five yards. They add tricks to their repertoires: full-body leaps above the surfarce; half-pikes; 360 rolls with a little fin-clap thrown in for flourish. A species almost wiped out by good old commercial harvesting, they’re back, and it’s glorious.

Prion Island is off the coast of South Georgia, a strange place if ever there was one. This long narrow island is essentially a mountain range poking up out of the sea, with a tiny strip of flatland around the coast. Described as sub-Antarctic, it’s cold, isolated, and mostly uninhabited, save a government official and a few hardy souls who look after a museum down here. The Brits have laid claim to it for many years, and it was named for King George (original, no?). This morning we were on the mainland, at a place called Salisbury Plains. The name is suffocatingly English, but it fits: the place is a huge expanse of green grass up to the hills, absolutely swarming with about a billion king penguins and a hundred thousand seals (I just made those numbers up).

No headguin.

Dear Penguin. If you are the size of a seal, it’s time to admit you have a problem.

It was two days dull sailing to get here from the Falklands. The ship and the crew are Russian (though the expedition staff are all Westerners), so the best entertainment is reading all the Russian signage. The only other interesting thing has been an on-board vendetta to stop me going around in bare feet. But apparently they can’t just ask me outright. They have to come up with reasons. The hospitality guy Andy says “I have to ask you to wear shoes in the dining room. The serving staff could break a dish, and you could walk on it.” I’m sure I could avoid broken crockery, but it sounds at least semi-plausible. So I start wearing shoes – in the dining room. Nowhere else. Then, “It’s best if you wear shoes,” says Rupert. “Having bare feet is… considered rude in Russian culture.”  My suspicion that he just made that up is compounded when his 2IC Annie comes up not five minutes later, before I’ve even had a chance to leave the room. “We need you to wear shoes on board,” she says. “There’s broken glass in every room on the ship.”

Let’s just think about that for a second. There’s broken glass in every room on the ship. “Well, that’s very efficient,” is all I can think of to say. You know when someone tells you something so patently ludicrous that you’re thrown too much off-balance to challenge it? I have one of those mouth-breather expressions on my face, and before I can pick up the thread she’s bustled off to do something else. Every room? It’s certainly thorough. I mean, it’s a big ship. There are a lot of rooms. And especially considering it’s vacuumed daily. They must have a squad who comes through after the vacuuming and sprinkles broken glass. But so many questions. Does that include hallways and deck areas, or just enclosed rooms? How much broken glass do they have to bring with them for the purpose? Is it pre-broken or do they break it onboard? And what’s the purpose? Is it solely to ensure that people wear footwear, perhaps? Or is there a grander plan behind it? A superstition? A religious form of self-flagellation? I can only hope that time will tell.

Today is Australia Day, so me and a few other Australians turn up to dinner in singlets and shorts and make a point of swearing a lot. This is as close as we can come to pinning down Australianness. It reminds me of a vox pop segement on A Current Affair or somethin a couple of years back on Australia Day: asking people to define Australian culture. And all that anyone could come up with was, “Weeelll…….we like a barbie. And we love a few beers.” Drunkenness and meat. I enjoy both those things: without them my university days would have been very empty. But…a barbeque and a beer is not a culture.  It’s lunch.

Tonight is macho enough to warrant the singlet. Somehow I end up in a conversation with Tim (the ship’s logistics manager and a sailor of some thirty years) and Paul (formerly a geologist with oil and gas companies) about all the dodgy situations they’ve encountered in helicopters. Inch-perfect landings on iced-up rock ledges above sheer drops, then bunny-hopping it off the edge to get it airborne. Arctic snowstorms with no visibility. Rope drops and rappelling down in the middle of the night. I contribute as modest an amount to this conversation as may be expected, but my nodding is first-rate.

Then Rupert gives a talk about ice diving, something he’s done a lot of as part of research programs. This pursuit is incredible – strapping up in a complex drysuit, drilling through a couple of metres of sea ice (including once when a Coastguard chopper made a hole for him with a .50 cal machine gun), then dropping down into water that would normally kill you in a couple of minutes, to swim around underneath the sea ice. With the lack of pollution and sediment, the visibility can be a couple of hundred metres. It sounds incredible. Scary too: in the Arctic you can look up to see polar bears swimming between the floes; in the Antarctic you can get checked out by massive leopard seals.

He mentions a story I first heard back in 2004, of a diver who was killed after being dragged down by a leopard seal. For some reason this story has stayed with me very vividly ever since. And it’s confusing – partly I feel guilty, like I’m getting a perverse enjoyment out of it a la True Crime Stories or something like that. But I can’t shake it off. It was notable because it was such a fluke – the only seal fatality on record. They’re big predators, but people are supposedly too big to be in their target range. As it was, the diver’s body was recovered intact, but drowned. The detail that strikes me the hardest is that her dive instruments recorded she was dragged down to 70 metres before the animal came back up. And something about that just hits me right in the heart. At 70 metres ambient light has already begun to disappear. 70 metres below the surface, in such cold dark water, and so far from anything like home, seems an incredibly lonely place to die.

Anyway, I’ve just depressed the hell out of myself writing that paragraph. So now I’m going to go and remind myself that leopard seals are generally harmless, and that leopard seals are pretty cool too. I’m going to achieve that by watching this video. You should too.