Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Everything breaks when it's this cold,' Ed said when I joined them on the lake later. 'You flip
the lid off a tin with a screwdriver, and the metal shaft snaps.'
They were pursuing not Visigoths but cyanobacteria, unicellular photosynthetic organisms gen-
erally considered algae. These bacteria live in sediment in the ice, and the scientists knew they had
them when the core contained a tissue-fine dark layer.
'In certain parts of the lake, it's like a rainforest,' Ed said.
When they went inside, it took half an hour for their beards to unfreeze from their balaclavas.
The day I returned to Wooville, 22 September, the sun rose shortly before seven, and it set ex-
actly twelve hours later. We were halfway there.
∗
It was suggested that we might like to relocate Wooville, to give us a change of scene, and we de-
cided to take up the offer. After a few rounds of discussion we settled on Cape Evans.
Before the two men arrived from McMurdo in a sno-cat to tow the huts to their new location,
Lucia and I broke down our camp so that everything was tightly secured for its undulating passage
over the ice. We were to follow behind in the Woomobile. Our pee flag was so firmly frozen in that
it had to be sawn off at the base. Despite our best efforts, the Antispryte failed to start, and it had
to remain at Wooville, each day heaped with more snow and looking as maladjusted as we knew it
to be.
We made the two men tea in the Dining Wing before setting out.
'What's the news on station?' I asked.
'A circus!' replied one of the pair, a man with a beard like a medieval depiction of Noah.
'The planes are gonna be here bringing the summer folk soon, and all hell's gonna break loose.
Everyone's getting ready.'
'You must have wintered,' I said. 'You're used to peace and quiet.'
'Yep,' said the man, as tea and flat muffins disappeared into the wilderness of his beard. 'My
fifth winter. Say, is that a cockroach in there?'
It wasn't just the station that was changing. Everything was changing off base too. One morning
at around that time we saw our first emperors. The velvet backs of their necks were flecked with
grey, and they blinked at the pale sun as it struggled through the cloud cover among the translucent
bands of coloured light behind Big Razorback.
We loved the new Wooville as much as its predecessor. On one side we overlooked the striped
Barne Glacier, its corduroy-fluted, perfectly vertical cliff sharp against the pearly sky, and on the
other Scott's hut and Wind Vane Hill. At midday on our first morning I asked Lucia to walk out
with me to a berg a short distance from the Barne Glacier. I had just read this entry in Scott's diary
again.
Just before lunch the sunshine could be seen gilding the floe, and Ponting and I walked out to
the bergs. The nearest one has been overturned and can be easily climbed. From the top we
could see the sun clear over the rugged outline of Cape Barne. It was glorious to stand bathed
in brilliant sunshine once more. We felt very young, sang and cheered - we were reminded of
