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.