White desert

Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita : Travels in Antarctica is an engaging book about this most endlessly fascinating of all the continents – difficult of access, extreme of conditions, and full of contradictions.  While researching her book on Chile, Travels in a Thin Country, she had reached Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south, and then decided that she should visit the Chilean presence on Antarctica itself.  Although brief, that visit awakened her to the majesty and excitement of the continent, and she immediately made arrangements to spend more time there.  She made two long trips, visiting many bases, the Pole itself, and travelling in both winter and summer. 

I have been lucky enough to travel in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, briefly on both occasions, and enjoyed extraordinary scenery, stunning wildlife and a very modest degree of adventure (the photographs in this post – and a forthcoming one on Beryl Bainbridge’s novel about Scott’s polar expedition of 1911-12 – are from my own brief visit in 2002).  But Sara Wheeler’s book reminds me how little I have seen of this continent – most travellers from the South American side get no further south than  about 65 degrees, not even in the Antarctic Circle, and about as far from the South Pole as Iceland or Trondheim in Norway is from the Northern one. By contrast, in the Arctic, it is relatively easy to get to 80 degrees north, and not at all impossible to go to the Pole by ship. 

  

Sara went with the Americans to their main base at McMurdo, and from there made a variety of trips out, with naturalists, geologists, meteorologists and many other -ists.  She visited the Pole, making friends and puddings along the way - her recipe for Antarctic bread and butter pudding suggest they ate some fairly extraordinary concoctions at times, when key ingredients were missing!  She went from the American base to the British base on the Antarctic peninsula, where she found them much less welcoming to strangers, especially a woman (with some honourable exceptions).  She met a whole cast of eccentrics, put up with some pretty horrendous living conditions, and seems to have had a great time.  She loved it so much, she returned in the winter, to the continent in its garb of permanent darkness, and she survived that, too - for a couple of weeks alone in a remote hut with an American writer.

This is a very entertaining book, humorous and deadly serious, which captures much of the history and modern human drama of Antarctica, and the beauty, too.

Comments

[glo]

More and more snow here it appears!
I really envy you for your visits on both the white continents. I hope you'll tell us more about that sooner or later.
I love the face of the sea elephant although it doesn't look engaging, but I hope it is not a dead animal (re the red mark on its forehead).

And yes, I confirm that your taste for zeugmas (making friends and puddings) comes from your reading and rerererereading of Jane Austen's books. Here are those I found in Northanger Abbey:
"she meditated by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors" in Chapter 11 - what a festival!
"to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears" in Chapter 11 - a very sophisticated one!
"with fresh hopes and fresh schemes" in Chapter 8 but I am less sure about this one...

[Cornflower]

When is Lindsay going to write a similarly engaging book about his own travels, illustrated with his excellent photographs?