Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
After an hour the temperature rose swiftly from glacial depths to tropical heights, and we
struggled out of our parkas and balaclavas and neck gaiters just in time to feel it plummet again.
The Russian glaciologist sat with his head in his hands for most of the journey, staring at the floor,
while the astrophysicist gazed benignly into the middle distance, serene and untroubled, floating
along like one of his balloons. He was so eminent that he knew exactly where we were at any giv-
en time. At one point he smiled beatifically and shouted in my ear that we had passed the PSR.
Months later I found out that this stood for Point of Safe Return, which means over half the fuel
has gone. It used to be called Point of No Return, but it frightened people, so they changed it.
We picked at our sandwiches and muffins and long-life chocolate puddings in plastic pots. Over
the next months I was to become very familiar with the contents of these brown paper lunch bags.
When we landed and a crewman opened the door, it was as if he had lifted the lid of a deep
freeze. Bloodless icefields stretched away to mountains below softly furred cumulus clouds, and
ice crystals came skittering towards us through the blistering air. The Hercules had landed on the
frozen sea between Ross Island and the Antarctic continent, and along the wiggly island coast land
met solid sea in a tangle of blue-shadowed pressure ridges or the pleated cliffs of a glacier. I began
to readjust my perception of 'land' and 'sea'. Not far off, a tabular iceberg was clamped into the
ice, its steep and crinkled walls reflecting the creamy saffron sun. The sky was a rich royal blue,
marbled up ahead by the volcanic plumes of Mount Erebus, and a paler blue sheen lay over the
wrinkled sea ice like a filmy opalescent blanket. A spur reached from the island towards the con-
tinent, and on a hump at the end I saw a wooden cross, man's tiny mark. It was Vince's cross,
erected in 1904 by Scott's men in memory of a seaman who fell down an ice cliff during a blizzard.
When I looked, it gave me an almost Proustian rush: I had been here so often in my dreams.
Tucked into a hollow between the spur and an arc of hills, and at first obscured, a hundred build-
ings huddled on the ice-streaked volcanic rock of Ross Island.
I was prepared for McMurdo, the largest of the three American bases in Antarctica. It did not
shock me to find what looked like a small Alaskan mining town with roads, three-storey build-
ings, the ill-matched architecture of a utilitarian institution and a summer population of more than
a thousand people. The lower echelons of other Antarctic communities, none of whom had been
anywhere near the place, are fond of parroting diatribes against McMurdo because of its size and
sophistication, by implication asserting the superiority of their experience of 'the real Antarctica'.
I liked Mactown from the beginning, as one is drawn to certain anomalous characters in films, and
my affection for it never faltered.
After a hundred introductions I was allotted a bedroom in a chocolate brown dormitory block.
It was a pleasant room with two beds, two wardrobes, two desks and several sets of drawers, and
it shared a shower and toilet with the room next door. I obviously had a roommate, but she was
nowhere in evidence.
I duly layered up in my multiplicity of cold-weather garments, but when the wind dropped, the
ambient temperature on Ross Island was no colder than a particularly bitter winter's day in Lon-
don. Although the mean annual temperature at McMurdo is minus 17.7 degrees Celsius, in sum-
mer it can rocket to plus eight (it plunges as low as minus fifty in the winter). In those balmy
days of summer when I first arrived the temperature hovered around minus five. It is true that if
