Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
So I had no role models - I didn't know any travellers. I followed my instinct. On the last day
of the camping holiday in Paris I woke up in our small tent, in which we had inexplicably been
joined by a pair of stertorous Finns, and I didn't feel sorry that it was over. I felt as if it had only
just begun.
Seventeen years on, when I reached the South Pole, I had got as far, geographically, as anyone
can go on this earth. In retrospect, it seems like a natural conclusion to all the places that preceded
it. It was as if one great long journey was coming to an end, and I looked over my shoulder at the
miles that had unravelled since the tent in Paris. There were none I wished I hadn't covered. Yet
there was a payback; the attrition of which climbers are so aware. I wanted freedom more than I
wanted a partner or children, and on the road I was free. Back at home, increasingly, it seemed a
tough choice to have to make.
In Antarctica I met many people who were struggling with this dilemma. The pressures of sep-
aration had always been present on the ice. During the first Operation Deep Freeze in the fifties
the enlisted men used to hold Dear John parties when the mail arrived. At the Pole now, letters
were strange and obsolete artefacts of the past, replaced by electronic mail. Email was as much
a part of life there as food and drink. The problem of long-distance relationships, however, could
not be solved by technology. One individual told me his girlfriend had just dumped him by email.
On station anxiety was concealed behind a mask of humorous resignation and encapsulated in the
apocryphal email message they had pinned on the wall of the computer room: 'Yours is bigger, but
his is here.'
I was thinking about this as I stepped out of the science building and was accosted by my new
friend Nann. She was a large woman from Chicago who looked as though her hair had been ar-
ranged with a blowtorch, and she had her own reason for making the journey. She had come to the
Pole to get away from her husband. Her responsibilities as general factotum on station included
cleaning the toilets, and she called herself a porcelain engineer.
'I'm going to see a balloon go up,' she said. 'Come along, why don't you?' With that, she took
my arm and pulled me along.
The balloons released each day by a meteorologist called Kathy captured atmospheric data
which could then be used to compile weather records. It happened to be the summer solstice, but it
was hard to celebrate the longest day at a place where day never ended. In the inflation room at the
top of the balloon tower Kathy spread the translucent fabric over a large table and began pumping
it with helium.
'What happens to them when they're up there?' I asked.
'Sooner or later - depending on the type of balloon - they expand so they can't hold the pressure
within them any more, then they burst and come tumbling back to earth.'
'Which is your favourite type of balloon?' I asked, shouting over the loud hiss of helium.
'Well, size matters,' she said.
'As in all things,' interrupted Nann.
'The bigger balloons take more preparation, go up more slowly and gracefully, and you feel
you've accomplished something. Could you give me a hand getting this out?'
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