Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER ONE
The Big White
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from
Ulysses
EACH DAY
was hotter than the last, and I soaked up the November sunshine like a lizard. Two
Sundays after landing in New Zealand I had to present myself at nine in the morning at the
headquarters of the U.S. Antarctic Program in Christchurch in order to be issued my Extreme Cold
Weather clothing. I borrowed a mountain bike and cycled along deserted roads tasselled with silent
shopping malls to the snoozing outskirts of the city where the sun had already burnt the blue from
the sky. The bike had a matching helmet with a tiny rear-view mirror protruding from the side. I
swung up to the entrance of the institutional snow-white building where a sprinkling of fellow trav-
ellers had settled on the low walls and warm grass. I couldn't unstrap the helmet and was obliged to
solicit the help of a vulpine Russian glaciologist.
At nine sharp we were ushered inside to take our places in a windowless room festooned with
posters of icescapes, and there we waited for the last arrivals in the silence of strangers while a man
ticked off our names on a clipboard and scowled like Beethoven. I felt very alone at that moment,
in a strange country bound for a stranger continent. I had come right up to the pane of the looking-
glass, after so long.
The safety video began, optimistically, with Scott's 'Great God, this is an awful place' delivered
in a sonorous thespian voice and accompanying footage of well-clad individuals crashing into cre-
vasses. When it was over we trooped through to the changing rooms. There were three other wo-
men, and our room was bare except for four pairs of tagged, overstuffed orange fabric bag the size
of medium suitcases.
The bags yielded a bewildering array of footwear, underwear, headwear, handwear, eyewear and
unidentifiable items which didn't look as if they would fit comfortably over any part of my body.
At the bottom of one of my bags, underneath an enormous vermilion parka, lay a coiled chain and
a pair of metal dog tags engraved with my name and a long number. I arranged my clothes in neat
piles on the carpet and eyed the others. They were beginning to try things on, so I tackled a pair of
thermal longiohns with a willy-slit at the front. At one end of the room a curtain shielded us from a
long counter to which we returned ill-fitting items to a blue-overalled clothing assistant who would
scuttle away to pluck a different size pair of windpants or polypropylene glove liners from unseen
mountain ranges of gear lurking in the hinterland.
