Travel Reference
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shore and a bank of pressure ridges strewn with Weddell seals. I found the entrance and stood re-
dundantly in the lobby, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.
A tall, athletic figure burst through a door.
'Are you our passenger?' he asked brightly, and as I nodded he stretched out his hand. 'I'm Ben,
the co-pilot. Pleased to meet you. You must be a very important person.'
I wondered, as I shook his gloved hand, how such erroneous information had made its way into
the system, and what the consequences might be when everyone found out that I wasn't important
at all, but this was no time for petty worries. Within ten minutes I was reaping the fruits of the
misconception, wedged into the back of a smart orange-and-white Squirrel helicopter emblazoned
with the ItaliAntartide logo next to several bulging cardboard boxes and three ice axes. On the oth-
er side, a mechanic was fixing me a headset.
With only a very shaky idea about where I was going and with whom I was travelling, and no
idea about when I might return, if ever, we took off over the frozen Sound towards the Transantarc-
tics, the sky a brilliant blue and sunlight flashing off distant glaciers. I caught a glimpse, in those
first few moments, of what I might learn in Antarctica. The world seemed freshly made, and the
future cast all its terrors away on to the timeless snowfields. First, however, I had to learn about
Antarctic weather systems.
The Italian Antarctic programme leased three Squirrels, four pilots and an air mechanic from a
New Zealand company, and the five non-Italian-speaking Kiwis spent the austral summer at Terra
Nova Bay supporting the science programme. Two of them were already there. The other three,
my companions, were looking worried. After we had travelled about fifty miles a low bank of
cloud appeared on the horizon ahead. Over the headset I heard them weighing up our options. The
weather reports sounded gloomy, and we hadn't even reached the refuelling depot yet. The pilot
decided to return to Scott Base.
Back we trooped into the pale green buildings, disrobing in the boot room and settling in the
galley to drink tea until the weather changed. As far as I knew, they might have been talking about
minutes or months. The Squirrel team used Scott as their base on that part of the continent, and
they had metaphorically put their feet up. Embarrassed about walking into a base and drinking tea
without having the smallest idea who lived in it, I introduced myself to a very nice man in a Bat-
man t-shirt who immediately invited me to stay for dinner. During our meal I was horrified to meet
the displaced Claudio, but he was beaming like the Cheshire Cat. I began to think that perhaps I
had done him a favour.
At seven o'clock in the evening the pilot proclaimed that the flight was off for the day. The
Squirrel had to be flown back to McMurdo, there being no tiedown facilities for overnight parking
at Scott Base, so I hitched a lift home in it. All three of the crew came on the five-minute flight,
so I offered them a drink before they headed back, leaving my bag strapped deep in the net on the
side of the helicopter as I hadn't the heart to ask them to retrieve it. The plan was that, after our
drink, they would return to Scott Base and telephone me in the morning, when they had weather
information, with a revised departure time.
The Southern Exposure was a regular American bar with a shuffleboard, a popcorn machine, a
video screen and no windows, so it was dark all the time, neatly reversing the environment outside
