Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The balloon was now ten feet in diameter, and as I held the small styrofoam box attached to the
bottom, Kathy opened a pair of metal doors and stepped on to a platform.
'I give you life!' she shouted as she flung her balloon away, and we watched it float peacefully
off into the blue, like an Ascension.
'It looks like a condom,' said Nann.
At that moment, a voice crackled over the loudspeaker.
'We have seen black dots on the horizon, assumed to be the Japanese,' it seemed to be saying.
'God!' I said, imagining that the Second World War was about to be re-enacted on the ice sheet.
'What the hell's that about?'
'It's an expedition coming in!' said Nann gleefully, pulling on her parka. 'Let's get out there, to
see 'em come in.'
On the way she told me that a Japanese called Susumu Nakamura had skied from Hercules Inlet
on the Ronne Ice Shelf. He had covered 775 miles, and it had taken him thirty-nine days, four of
which were rest days. He was accompanied by a navigator and three television crewmen on snow-
mobiles.
Japan had first involved itself with Antarctica in 1910 when Nobu Shirase set out from Tokyo in
the
Kainan-Maru
(Southern Pioneer). He reached the Ross Ice Shelf, which he thought looked like
'a series of pure white folding screens', and marched 160 miles inland before sailing over to the
Bay of Whales. There his team stumbled upon the
Fram
, which they thought was a pirate ship. The
Norwegians, in turn, were horrified by the wanton slaughter of seals perpetrated by the Japanese,
and when they were invited aboard the
Kainan-Maru
to drink tea and eat slices of cake they said in
hushed tones that they wouldn't have got halfway to Antarctica in such a crummy ship. While in
the Bay of Whales Shirase and his men unloaded their stores from ship to shore wearing tradition-
al Japanese straw boots. 'We wound our way upwards', said the expedition report, 'like a string
of pilgrims ascending Mount Fuji. It was without doubt the worst of all our trials and tribulations
since the moment when we had left our mothers' wombs.'
It was difficult, as a Japanese in those days, to venture on to the world stage. When the
Kainan-
Maru
stopped in Wellington the
New Zealand Times
referred to the men as 'a crew of gorillas'.
Japan none the less went on to launch scientific expeditions to Antarctica and was an original sig-
natory of the Antarctic Treaty, the international agreement protecting Antarctica from exploitation.
The second Asian country to sign it was India, which in 1983 became the first developing nation in
Asia to become a full Treaty member. India's involvement in Antarctica had emerged largely as a
result of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of his country's global position several decades
previously.
Susumu skied up to the Ceremonial Pole, his cheeks 'burnt as black as lacquer', as the
Kainan-
Maru
expedition reported theirs had been. A single tear froze as it emerged from a corner of his
eye. After handshakes all round (anyone would think they were English), the party began unfurling
corporate flags for the inevitable sponsorship photographs, and later we saw all their small yellow
tents pitched in the distance.
The frostnipped faces and frozen beards reminded me of other images of exhausted men at the
end of punishing journeys across Antarctica. The point of these treks appeared to be to see how
