The sun is up for twenty-odd hours at a go and there is still not enough time in a day! There are icebergs to watch and whales to spot and seals to point at and photos to take and training to do and seminars to attend and emails to write and meals to eat, and on top of that everyone here has many many interesting stories to tell and which I want to listen to — and I have to get some sleep as well, and tomorrow we’ve got to pack already because we could be arriving at Davis as early as tomorrow evening!< /p>

Anyway, there’s the excited-schoolgirl gushing part out of the way, and I ’ll try to keep it on a leash for the rest of this post.

Yesterday I slept in for the first time — I got up at 9:45, which is way past the time breakfast finishes, but most importantly is more than an hour past the time brekky finishes, which means that the cranky galley crew (who are cranky coz they've been up since some ungodly hour of the morning cooking for us) will be finished cleaning up and won't yell at us and chase us out of the mess wielding their mops. So Clare and I went down to fix ourselves some crumpets from the snack-attack corner, whereupon the cranky galley crew hollered at us and chased us out of the mess wielding their mops. I was a bit peeved until I realised that the clocks had gone back another hour overnight and it was only 8:45, and not only could we have slept in for another hour, but we now effectively had to wait until eleven in the morning before we could slink back in and scrounge ourselves some toast.

I loitered about on the deck for a bit. There was a beautiful silver mist out of which platinum-tinted bergs would emerge, slide past the ship as if on a mirror, and recede gradually into the soft wake. It was stunningly beautiful. The thing about Antarctic beauty which has struck me is that it is not only utterly aesthetically breathtaking but completely alien at the same time, and it's fascinating trying to deal with that combination - it's something you do all the time when you're a kid and heaps of things are new to you, but you get out of practice a bit. I find myself looking at a scene where the closest analogies I have for what I am seeing are things like: the tower out of the Neverending Story film; the alien oceans of the novel Solaris; the blinding light of a desert. It is completely new and alien. Photographs do not suffice to convey what it is like. Now, I can pick up a booklet with a photo of an iceberg on the cover that I have seen a million times, and it is suddenly like I am looking at it for the first time ever - having seen it in real life, the photos finally come to life.

The other amazing thing about the ice is the beautiful colours. A floe or berg will gradually have seawater freeze onto the bottom of it, creating a layer rich in algae. This underside is a colour ranging from bottle-green to light yellowish-brown. It is the start of a whole floating ecosystem - krill feed on the algae, and krill are the base of the entire food chain in Antarctica, so icebergs attract birds and whales and become, in a sense, lush floating islands. I read yesterday that krill are the creature with the largest biomass in the entire world. This means that if you collected up all the animals in the earth and sorted them into piles, the pile of krill would be the heaviest - heavier than all the whales, or all the elephants, or all the people, according to this AAD brochure. Amazing! - and kind of hard to believe. Anyway, as floes and bergs travel along they melt gradually from the top down (due to the sun) and erode gradually from the sides in (from the actions of waves) and thus bits break off, or bits overturn, to reveal the brilliantly coloured undersides. This process can be accelerated if, for example, a humungous orange icebreaker were to plough through the middle of it. So the ocean becomes full of white flotsam, ringed with blue due to the clear water, and surrounded by green-yellow chunks and slush. It's lovely.

All this is not to mention the seals, wallowing along floes like huge fat leeches, or the bergs that go past with cliffs that reach up into the low clouds, or the whales that puff and curve slowly beside the ship.

The first official thing on the calender yesterday, by which time we were nicely breakfasted, was Andy's Introductory Meteorology talk, which was really just a perfunctory blurb about the systems of lows that set up around the coast and drive the wind systems, and the katabatic or gravity-fed winds which plough down the slopes and are an entirely different thing altogether, how to avoid being caught in a blizzard, how to do a basic weather observation report (which we are expected to do if in the field, both for general knowledge for the met guys and also for the pilots who will come to retrieve you), different cloud types and what they mean, etc. As usual with Andy the best bit was when he started giving his personal stories about almost dying in different types of weather. This one was about going on a hiking and skiing expedition with a mate in the French Alps and being stuck in a snow cave for a week with only one Mars Bar left, and then trying to ski down to the village in the middle of bad wind. Andy said he was skiing into wind and white-out going at what he judged to be a fairly sharp pace, with his stocks tucked up under his arms and leaning into the wind, when after about ten minutes he looked to his left to see his mate standing there smoking a cigarette. Contrary to what his senses told him he had been standing still in the same spot the entire time. This was a very funny story but still comes second place to the one about taking four hours to transfer himself and three other people from a hastily-built igloo to a field hut that was only twenty metres away, in the middle of a blizzard. When he got to the hut and everyone else was inside, he carabinered himself to the ladder at the side of the building, climbed to the top and let his feet fly out so that he formed a human windsock. He said that he kept that up for a few minutes during which he couldn't see anything because he was being shuddered and buffetted so much. And then he went inside and had a nice hot cup of tea.

Kat gave a seminar on her work after that. She collects rocks from very remote locations in East Antarctica and analyses the decay products in them which form from exposure to cosmic radiation, and hence allow her to date how long they have been exposed on the surface (i.e. not frozen at the bottom of a glacier). This then gives an indication of at what time the glaciers have been at what heights, and she can follow the rise and ebb of glacial action over the last million years or so. It must be amazing to be able to stand in a place where few if any humans have been before, and know that any largish rock you see on a bare, exposed mountain ridge last moved under the force of a glacier a few hundred thousand years in the past.

And then: we all gathered in the mess for the induction of first-time expeditioners. To cut a long story short it kind of went like this: galley crew in strange costumes, petrel-poo rubbed into expeditioners' hair (= flour and water mixture), vegemite on the faces, ice down the back, kiss the dead fish, kiss the feet of King Neptune and the Queen, things degenerate from there, general pastings occur, heads dunked in buckets, large amounts of laughter, the one American expeditioner paid pennance for his entire race by being doused in Coca-Cola, and then a lot of people jumped into showers. And then they put on a ripper BBQ out on the trawl deck, which is the low, open back deck where you watch the wake of the boat and are almost level with the water. We stood around with beanies and beers and burgers and these massive sheer cliffs of bergs were going past us very, very close, with their tops in the mist and birds circling them. The guys on the bridge were steering the ship close to the bergs to give us a great show, and the captain came down and hung out and it was good. Surreal, brilliant, and good. The beers were in an esky but it could well have been to keep them warm.

Afterwards, people dispersed to the bar, lounge and mess to warm up. I played some Antarctic scrabble (nerd!) (every word had to have something to do with Antarctica - 'bloopers' was one word that was used that was quite relevant in light of the aviation debarkle) and then I taught some origami and uploaded some of my photos to my computer and went to bed. Way too late again.

Oh: I also signed the Voyage Book, which is kept on the bridge and has the names of every expeditioner on every voyage of the Aurora Australis, as well as bits of artwork and cartoons drawn by people along the way. I flipped through and found the names of some of the people I work with, as well as the signature of my favourite author Nikki Gemmel, who had done a kind of cartoon summary of some events of her voyage, which confirmed my suspicions that many of the events in her fictional novel were transplanted straight from real life. Interesting how she records the people and events fondly in the voyage book and then they become harsh criticisms and attacks in the novel. Must have been fun for the people on her voyage to read.

Which brings us to today. We had helicopter training today - we got to go in the hangar and climb into the choppers and have a good look around. I WANT ONE. I have never been in a chopper before and I am very excited. My entire day has been tinged with gold ever since I sat in the front seat and imagined looking down at Davis from a very great height. Since the guys I will be going out in the field with are (1) larger than me, which will make it difficult for them to get into the small front seat, and (2) have done this trip before, I reckon I have first dibs on the panoramic front-seat location for the trip! Woooo!

After that, it was just a normal day really - a few more whale sightings, another logistical meeting sorting out the mess that is the science programme in the absence of the aircraft, a seminar by Lloyd and Andrew about the Space Science group and Lloyd's time spent at the remote Russian station Vostok in 1997 (this was one of the most amazing talks I have ever heard - get him to tell you about it next time you see him), hanging out at the bridge, taking a photo of one of the crew in front of an iceberg so he can show his mum, diverting course to avoid a glacier tens of kilometers long and so big it's got its own name (B 15D) and takes up most of the horizon... As I said, all routine.

For the last few days the ship has been flying the Jolly Roger. I don't know who hoisted it, but it is certainly illegal and a case of 'we're south of 60 degrees and who's gonna stop us!' It is fantastic, standing on this huge orange behemoth that is smashing through the ice, and viewing the landscape past the skull and crossbones.

Today I found out how the ship is steered. Ian, who was at the helm, showed me; I expected some large dignified teak wheel of the sort that is turned by a man in a woollen roll-neck knit sweater sucking at a pipe. Instead it is a tiny joystick about as long as my little finger that he has to tweak side to side with his thumb and index finger! Ha! Ha!

Apologies for the big slushed-together mash of cynicism, blathering, gloss and gush that is this post.

We should be sleeping on the Antarctic continent tomorrow night!

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