Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Go on José, tell her!' said Chuck.
José cleared his throat.
'Actually, I married my Harley Davidson,' he said.
I choked on the last cashew.
'Oh, really?' I said, in an English kind of way. 'Who performed the, er - ceremony?'
'Owner of my local bike shop. He does it a lot.'
This information was almost more than the human spirit could bear. Fortunately an empty fuel
drum chose that moment to fall off our trailer and roll over the ice sheet, and after we had dealt
with that, the topic was forgotten.
A fresh one, however, was looming.
'You know that Captain Scott,' said Too Tall in my direction as the bourbon went round again.
'Was he a bit of a dude, or what?'
I had just begun to grapple with a reply to this weighty question when Chuck, his face puckered
in concentration, chipped in with 'Hey, is that the guy they named Scott's hut after?'
'No,' I said, quickly grasping the opportunity to divert the conversation away from the dude is-
sue. 'That was Mr Hut.'
It took us eight hours to get back, and then I had to put up my tent. It was snowing lightly, and I
was too tired to dig out the igloo. I chose a place at the back of camp, facing the horizon. My metal
tent pegs weren't deep enough, so I hijacked a bunch of bamboo flagpoles, and after the bottle-
green and maroon tent was up I collapsed into a deep sleep.
When I woke up, a face was hovering a foot above mine.
'Hi Woo,' it growled. 'Didn't want to wake you.'
'This is a funny way to go about not waking me,' I said as the face drew closer.
∗
They were using explosives to find out what the ground was like under 6,000 feet of ice. 'We're
not particularly interested in ice,' someone commented breezily. Because of the inconvenient ice
cover, most Antarctic geology can only be studied by remote-sensing methods like seismology.
This involves setting off explosions, bouncing the soundwaves down through the ice to the earth's
crust, and recording them on their way back up.
Before they could be detonated, the explosives had to be buried, and twelve itinerant drillers had
been travelling around the ice sheet within a 200-mile radius of CWA boring a series of ninety-foot
holes. They began each hole using a self-contained unit which heated water and sprinkled it on the
ice like a shower head. This unit fulfilled a secondary function as a hot tub, and we got in four at
a time, draping our clothes carefully over the pipes to prevent them from turning to deep-frozen
sandpaper. This was a task requiring consummate skill. A square inch of fabric inadvertently ex-
posed to the air could have excruciating consequences.
Five members of the drill team were women, and in the hot tub one day I found myself next to
Diane, a lead driller. She was tall and willowy with long hair the colour of cornflakes. I asked her
how long she had been away.
'Thirty-five days,' she said. 'And my feet were never dry.'
