Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'What do you think about life on Mars?' I asked Al, still wielding his hammer.
'It'd be a hell of a field trip,' he said.
David and Sasha were lying on their bellies in a sunny spot, smoking and looking very Russian.
'This is why the Soviet Union collapsed,' said Imre, waving an arm in their direction.
David was interested in microbial adaptation. 'If you had been living in Russia for past five
years,' he said, 'you believe in the adaptation of anything.'
The helicopter was due at four, but it was after eight when we finally saw the Battleships spiral
away below us. We had covered feminism (this was not a success), religion (Imre said, 'I know
there is no God'), the Nicaraguan debt crisis, and methods of avoiding frostbite while taking a
shit. Sasha had done a Russian dance. We finished the second thermos of hot water with the famed
spiced ciderbags 'Containing No Apple Juice', and ate fig rolls containing figs like shrapnel. There
was talk of putting up the tents. Imre nodded off. Al strung out the antenna and tried to radio his
girlfriend, who was working in a national park hut in New Zealand. This failed. Sasha said, 'Try
another girlfriend.'
Everyone was coming in from the field, and the Crary was swarming with burnt faces and duct-
taped parkas. Tribes of the dispossessed were a feature of the Crary. Boots formed queues outside
offices, thermal jackets draped themselves over chairs in the lounge and picked-over ziplocks of
trail-mix littered the kitchen. Over at Scott Base, the mad microbiologist, his hair still shooting
upwards like the flame of the Olympic torch, had been to the top of Erebus to collect his high-tem-
perature microorganisms. He peered down his nose over his glasses and thrashed his arms around
as he told me about it.
'I've been in the tropics, and all sorts of places, but I tell you, up there on Erebus it was like
hell.'
I began the ineffably sad task of returning my kit to the Berg Field Center. Afterwards, I sat
glumly in the office. The icebreaker had finally struggled in to McMurdo, and it was squatting on
the Sound opposite the station, a trail of cracked ice like a runway behind it. Everyone took a great
deal of interest in this bright red thing from the outside world. Few in Antarctica were ever inter-
ested in actual news from home - world events were like 'noises off' - but a concrete reminder of
life on the other side of the glass, such as the appearance of a ship, that was something else. In the
old days the arrival of the ship was the major event of the season. The Australian Charles Laseron
was Mawson's assistant biologist on the 1911-14 expedition, and in his rumbustious account of
the experience, called South with Mawson , he records that when the ship arrived news from the
outside world was conveyed to them in the following order. One: Australia had lost the Test. Two:
the Titanic had sunk. Three: the Balkan War had been waged. Four: Scott was spending another
year on the ice.
The captain of the shiny red icebreaker invited me aboard for a couple of days, and he sent a
helicopter over to fetch me, which was very decent of him. Thirteen miles offshore, stationary op-
posite Erebus, the Polar Sea was a regal scarlet vision casting its crenellated shadow over the sea
ice. It was a Coastguard ship with a crew of 131, and it had just come from the North Pole. We
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