It was a normal day. The captain phoned. The ship was about to leave. I panicked. I grabbed my unsigned travel insurance application form. I cancelled my dental appointment. I unzipped a travel bag and threw in my laptop, a digital camera and any electrical cable in sight. I tried to think what else I would need. Warm clothes. I chucked a beanie into the bag. Discman. Books. Too hard, too little time. Scene change. I'm on the ship on the outside deck. I'm leaning on the railings next to a guy and girl and we're looking for icebergs on the horizon. Instead there are only huge splashes of waves, as if meteorites are crashing into the sea. Somehow I end up underwater in the clear blue-green nothingness and am rescued by a strange sentient fish-thing with a cartilage fin. I cling to it and it surfaces next to the rusty red hull of the ship.

All night long we were hunched over the desk, Michael and I, and the magnetometer was in pieces on the table in front of us in a confetti of diodes and resistors all colourful and striped like candy. We didn't stop for food or drink or rest, and when we spoke it was low murmered instructions and replies. We worked until I woke up.

The three of us who have caught the ship to Davis Base step onto Terra Antarctis. The land is green and grassy except for a flat, square, tent-sized dirt patch dug about thirty centimeters into the ground. There are beautiful white flowers and one daffodil cropping up around the edge of it. A white wooden sign staked into the ground says 'Davis'. I meet the two people who have been staying there all winter, a guy and a girl. I unpack my laptop and find a power point recessed into the dirt, but find I haven't brought any of the right cords. The wintering guy says: we'll just take the boat later and go back and get some from a shop. I am amazed it is possible to do that and ask him how long it will take. He laughs and says: oh, only about fifteen hours.

I am on the ship going to Antarctica. It has been built by the John Hunter Hospital, a fact that does not seem at all strange, and in fact clarifies why the sleeping quarters look like hospital rooms with their metal-beds-on-wheels and their lemon-coloured walls and stiff, starched sheets. Not only are all the people I work with on board, but so is my actual office. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, walks in. He is the new PhD supervisor for the guy at the desk beside me. As Feynman walks out I say, "See you around, Dick - uh, Richard - uh, Dr Feynman - uh, PROFESSOR Feynman." The door shuts behind him.

The ship stops. I realise I haven't been looking out the window the whole voyage, and in the meantime we've reached one of the sub-antarctic islands which turns out to be covered in thick jungly forest. The sky is thunderous and spectacular. We are all told to get out onto the land while maintenance is done on the ship. I borrow some guy's digital camera and photograph the bruised-orange sunset and the lightning gashes across it. The wide-angle zoom on the camera is so amazing I can see past the normal periphery of vision when I'm looking through the viewfinder. This is how I am given a split-second warning of the vicious native tribes whose camp was concealed around the corner, and who are racing in to attack us with their spears. No one is hurt except the guy who owned the cool digital camera, and his head is taken clean off. So I guess I get to keep the camera now.

Back on board, I realise I haven't been recording the voyage very well. I start photographing the poignant small details about life on the ship, including a shot of the hospital-bed in my room with the drip stand next to it.