Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cards strung along the arched ceiling, their messages long since forgotten. The gas fridge was full
of water samples and food was stored on the floor.
Two Kiwi scientists had arrived that day from Lake Vanda in the Wright Valley, which was next
along from the Taylor. Clive ran a quasi-governmental environmental hydrology institute in Christ-
church. He was acute and articulate with very clear eyes, and his colleague Mark was amiable and
quiet. The pair of them had known John for more than a decade, and it was a great reunion.
'I wish I still had my old hut,' Clive said, looking round the Jamesway. The original Lake Vanda
hut had been pulled down, and in its place Clive had been given a freezer-box style modern ver-
sion from which any trace of personality was erased like a palimpsest at the beginning of each new
season.
We ate a pot of bean stew, drank a case of beer, and then a bottle of bourbon appeared. Two wo-
men graduate students were working at Bonney at that time. One of them, a tall, feline individual
called Cristina, was the target of a good deal of teasing, to which she retaliated in kind. John's
favourite story was that on her regular trips down to base Cristina had begun stockpiling free con-
doms from the McMurdo medical centre. It wasn't that she needed them in Antarctica, she said,
but that she never knew when they might come in handy at home, and as they were free - hey,
she was a grad student. Arriving back at Bonney one day she had stepped out of the helicopter,
dug her hand in her pocket to retrieve a glove and inadvertently brought out a handful of condoms
which sprayed all over the helipad, whipped into the air by the blades and settling gently over her
shoulders like confetti.
Clive had disappeared outside for ten minutes. 'Look,' he said when he came back in. 'We
should drink this whiskey with glacier ice,' and he deposited an extremely large and alarmingly
blue ice cube on the table. John took to it with an ice axe.
'What do you think?' asked Clive, after we had added chunks of glacier ice to our mugs.
'Delicious,' I said.
'Lake ice is more delicious,' said Ed, who referred to water as 'liquid ice'. With that, lake ice
was fetched, and a treatise on the relative merits and properties of each type of ice hastened the
disappearance of the whiskey.
The conversation moved on to drilling into the lake. Penetrating ice, yards thick, to get at
the water below it posed interminable problems in those temperatures, and scientific minds were
much occupied with it. The stories and their permutations were endless - about copper coils car-
rying heated glycol, about instruments freezing, about the advantages of hand drills. The four
men shared a deep sense of the absurdity of their situation, floundering around on frozen lakes at
seventy-seven degrees south. It was obvious that they all could have gone on yarning for ever.
John suddenly turned to me.
'What's your impression, then? Of Antarctica?'
'Well,' I said slowly, 'I have a million impressions.'
'Don't you have one overwhelming impression?'
I thought about that.
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