Disillusion #1

I know I write very little on my blog and I want to apologise for that.  I decided against group e-mails so that the ones too polite to decline do not need to constantly delete unwanted spam; but now I let the few people, who are actually interested in my Antarctic adventure, go to my blog only to find no news.  

Well I want to assure you that despite my few words, I experience this adventure very intensely.  The landscapes and weather is absolutely awesome and I still feel extremely fortunate to see this place.  With the winter's night fading I can drink these landscapes in with a new thirst for it's pristine beauty.

One thing I do regret, is the naive expectation of a blood bond being formed between the 10 in our team.  To spend 14 months practically alone on the fifth largest continent where support from outside is mostly impossible, one would expect some catalyst for such a bond.  If you think about it objectively, however, you probably won't have such high expectations of the the outcome, when 10 random people get on a boat to Antarctica.  Therefore I admit my naivety.  

On the other hand, I do not want to sound too negative.  We have a very good team and we function more than adequately.  After 7 months into our journey a lot of friendships have formed and what do you know, maybe some will stay friends for many years to come.

In my defence I also find it understandable that one can be swept away where "exotic" words like expedition, Cat train, sastrugi, ice shelf and team member are frequently used.  But what I realise tonight, with a little chuckle of course, the reality without the sugar coating is that despite the extreme "life or death" location I have colleagues, a supervisor and a boss….just like anywhere else.

Above: "The sun's return" - Braam's relief as the sun starts creeping higher over the horison.

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Snow bath

I recently had my birthday on the ice. Quite a good one I might add; thanks to good teammates who pulled out all the stops with a dinner that would beat 90% of the restaurants in SA; thanks to family and a girlfriend who sent gifts with our team leader, which was a nice surprise; thanks to some of SA's fine wine farms who sponsored our team with a few bottles of wine and lastly thanks to the weather clearing after about a week of storm for me to get my SNOW BATH....

If you read our newsletters you are probably up to speed with the tradition at SANAE that you have the privilege to climb in a freshly dug hole in the ice and being covered by the snow. It was quite an exhilarating experience.

With age comes the unfortunate reality that new things to experience becomes less. I am not talking in spiritual realms where we believe the best is always in front of us, rather physical experiences that we can encounter. The build up to the snow bath had this rush of doing something for the first time. The apprehension of being faced with the unknown causes a certain amount of adrenalin in our blood and this obviously made the experience more memorable.

Here are some photo's of the whole experience:

After the initial shock of the cold, your skin becomes rather numb and you almost start believing you will be able to survive in this cold, when I got back into the base, however, my skin was blood-red which tells what my body thought of that idea.

Frostbite

Just when you think you figured-out or mastered how nature works you sometimes get a little reminder how fragile we humans are... in the greater scheme of things.  A week or so ago we needed to bring something in from outside and seeing that it would only take 30 seconds I thought I would run out in my base clothes grab what we needed and run back in.    That in itself was not a terrible idea but what I did not anticipate was the effect of touching ice-cold metal with my bare hands.  I picked up what needed to be moved and after maybe 5 seconds decided to rather put it down but in that short time the damage was done.  I later learned that I helped myself to a minor degree of frostbite.  This is what my hand looked like after a day or so:

Initially it did not feel as if anything was wrong but later it felt like I burnt my hands on a hot plate.  It stayed like this for a few days before by skin started blistering as shown below:

At the moment they are 99,5% back to normal, with some spots still peeling.  I think the lesson learned is although the difference between summer and winter temperatures does not sound dramatic, (say from -20 to -30 degrees) those 10 degrees have a big influence on our bodies.

Sunday evening service

Windless nights with aurora rocks!!