I wrote this on the ship, nearing Hobart:
The last morning. As we were hurriedly getting our stuff together to leave, the people who would be staying for winter were already clearing out the tables that wouldn’t be needed now that there were only 18 people left, and so on. There was a strange sort of Saturday spring-cleaning feel, like when you move out of a house and the whole thing still smells like cleaning products and looks bare like there’s not enough furniture or anything. It was so rushed – since the astoundingly early arrival of the ship the night before, the plan was now to get everyone on board and ready for departure by mid-morning.. I stripped my bed and left the sheets in the ablutions building, as instructed. I barely had a chance to check all the drawers, let alone say a final goodbye to the Donga – probably just as well. The same went for everyone; as a matter of fact one of the guys left in such a rush that he was steaming away on the ship before he realised he’d left his wallet behind, on his shelf, in his donga, in Antarctica. Wallets in Antarctica, of course, aren’t top priority because there’s no need to use them at all. It caught up with him when we disembarked in Hobart, though.
There was no time to say goodbye to anyone; I had to leave borrowed CDs and books in the mess with post-it notes attached as there was no time to find the specific winterers that I’d borrowed things from. So rushed!
Mal drove me and my stuff to the helipad in the ute. To get to the ship we all had to be ferried in the two small helicopters, with a schedule drawn up allocating everyone to a flight, from number 1 to 22, three people to a chopper. We were all standing around in freezer suits – regulation when flying over water, in case of accidents (Lloyd told the remarkable story of how they used to slingload the packs full of personal stuff to the ship, i.e. sling them under the chopper in a big net, and his once fell out of the sling into the ocean en route to the ship) - and the scene needs present tense: the two choppers are going like the blazes – no shutting down of engines, it’s like an emergency evacuation – and just enough time to hug and say goodbye to doc and Rachael and then we’re up – flight 19 of 22 – and I’m in the chopper with Rick, crammed in the back, there’s not even enough time to untangle the headset before we’re on the helideck of the Aurora Australis. I run around to the front door and give Rick an origami ball that I made him – he pulls his helmet off and calls me right over up close and gives me a big hug and we say goodbye properly and then I shut the door and he’s off, there’s air support guys who usher us away right into the hangar where we watch Rick take off with his polyhedron swinging like a fuzzy dice from the compass near the windscreen, and then we’re there, we’re on the ship, just like that, and I’m seeing a view that I first saw from the Aurora after 12 days at sea when Davis appeared between the icebergs and struck me as looking like a true outpost, except that now it’s home, now I know what it feels like to grab the big biological-contamination-door of the SAS building and pull it open every morning, now I know the smell of the mess hall, now I know that hydroponics is the best place to escape for a tete-a-tete, now I know what it feels like to hike the hills behind Davis, and the icebergscape is familiar, and I’ve seen it frozen into the ocean solid and I’ve seen it with waves lapping on the beach. And now it’s so far away… the ship sails away and in no time we are going between the icebergs, past Magnetic island, and the water is full of porpoising penguins and the ocean is solid blue and the icebergs are glaring harsh white in the sunlight, and we’re standing on the helideck again. At Davis they’ve set off the same orange flares that we set off when the Vasily left and then we were standing on the beach waving, and now we’re watching the orange smoke from the wrong side, the wrong side… I’ve got to go back, I can’t leave forever – it strikes me.
There are different faces around – Americans and Indonesians – marine scientists. New voyage leaders, new captain. Same corridors. We sneak around to our old and new haunts. Realise all the people we didn’t have time to say goodbye to. Unpack our stuff into our new cabin. Interestingly my appetite has disappeared as soon as I stepped on board the ship – not from seasickness but rather from memory of last voyage.
The atmosphere of the voyage is utterly different to the trip down. It was like a seachange happened on the last night at Davis – everyone has stopped being colleagues that we interact with closely but professionally – now the ship turns into some kind of cruise liner. We know each other now – there is no need anymore to put in a lot of effort into getting to know people, like there was on the way down. Things are so much more relaxed, casual. I really like it – I get to know people so much more in the days of the voyage than I ever did at base, even though we spent so much time together. Fuggoo’s union meetings – Kat, Dan, Mel, Chris, Anya, Mick and me. 24 hour scrabble with Dan and Joel – learn how to play scrabble properly for the first time – words like qat and waw. We create a voyage newspaper: TWOTA, in tribute to TWID (This Week In Davis). I ask the comms guys nicely and they temporarily disengage the email attachment limit of 15kB so I can email the 1.5 MB file to Ash, TWID Editor, who’s still at Davis. This is at a cost of $50 per megabyte! Chris tells us all about his adventures in Tibet as a field guide; I come to realise that Dan the pilot is now down in history for flying the fourth ever flight from Australia to Antarctica, behind Phillip Law (AAD pioneer), Dick Smith, and the other CASA flight in this season’s pair. He tells about flying courier flights around outback and northern Australia, including ferrying Aboriginal turtle-killing sticks to tribal ceremonies. Mel, field guide at Mawson, shows us pictures of the crevasses they came across near the base there. Anya, seismologist, punctures my blind adoration of Sara Wheeler (Antarctic travel writer) when she tells me that Wheeler’s stories about the British Base Rothera in the book Terra Incognita are flat-out false. Although Wheeler’s story is that she was the only girl there amongst heaps of horrible, Neanderthal-like flatulent men (which really made for an eye-opening story), Anya says it’s untrue – and she should know, because she was at Rothera at the same time Wheeler was, and had to share a cabin with her and her stinky perfume, and had spent several weeks there before Wheeler turned up, and described the guys as totally professional. Also: Anya’s story about a British Army ship dropping her off on some Antarctic island to do research, and then having to sneak back red-faced because they’d forgotten to leave a highly confidential package for her. Turns out it was a humungous crate full of sanitary pads, something like 2 years’ supply (probably ordered for her by a confused man), and the delivery would have cost in the order of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of fuel. Such is the true, untold story of the life of a female scientist in Antarctica.
A few days into the trip, the ship was rife with gossip about which people were being spotted in other people’s cabins, snogging on beds while cabinmates worked at the desk a metre away wearing headphones, for example. I came down with a major, major dose of Ship Lassitude and was lucky if I could wake up at 4 pm in time for League of Gentlemen. In the end I gave up on even that and just let my body clock drift until day and night were totally flipped. I only attended one meal a day – dinner (if lucky). So much sleeping. Appetite gradually came back. I didn’t spend that much time outdoors, in total contrast to the voyage down. Apart from a few isolated icebergs, the oceanscape wasn’t as spectacular as it was at the start of summer. I ‘borrowed’ 120 gig of MP3 music, copied from the radio station at Davis (shh).
I get some emails from the winterers at Davis. They say that things are spookily quiet at base. On the 15th we start swapping email addresses… it’s one of the little things that makes Hobart seem so close now.
The marine scientists pulled up a CTD (a kind of rig containing a ring of bottles, that gets thrown over the side of the ship, sinks to several km depth, samples the water, and gets pulled up) and found a bizarre creature of the deep hanging over it. It looked like an octopus made of puffy seaweed, or perhaps like a tangle of green sausages entwined at a central point. It looked like a plant, but smelled fishy and pulsated in an alienesque way. It was hideous. No-one knew what it was – some kind of egg sac? Photographs were emailed to the experts around the world but they didn’t know either. The AAD tech ‘support’ accidentally deleted my entire email account when I returned to Hobart (thanks so, so much, bastards) so I can’t show you a copy of the photo I had in my inbox – sorry. Apart from that, the marine scientists (who had done the round trip on the Aurora Australis) didn’t really ever give us any formal info about what they were doing. Kat, on the other hand, gave us a slide show of her work in the Groves, which was wonderful and beautiful.
Things everyone’s talking about now - what family they’re flying home to, where, Chris going to Tibet, Dan going hiking for 3 weeks in the hills in Victoria, talking about whether we’re coming back down next year, how different things could be next year and in the future if the airlink comes in, so you can just fly to Antarctica as a passenger (this year it was just the pilots, so the plane could be used for transport down there), or if they install mobile phone towers (yes, no kidding). We talk about what will be nicest --- getting a private room in the Old Woolstore! Grass, coffee. We concoct rehabilitation guides to the real world.
I don’t want to go back – I will arrive in Newcastle on Monday morning which is the first day of my last year of uni. That means that in that first week I have to (a) work out what subjects to do while simultaneously (b) attending subjects and (c) moving out of home and (d) getting some kind of income to do so and (e) finishing the reports from this summer and (f) cleaning up my work computer and wrapping up from my job from last year and (g) studying for the exam that’s a hangover from last year… let me stay on the ship and go back down to Antarctica!!!
The stars, the dark, the blue of the ocean… sailing in cabin D10 with the window wide open. The galaxy, the aurora Australis out the back of the ship --- almost hugging Sam in bliss when the green ribbons licked across the sky; that kept him amused for the next few hours.
I have so many friends here. The time on the ship has been amazing – surrounded by amazing people, amazing stories every time we sit down – no time to do anything else but soak up, soak up.
Tomorrow we have to clean up and then we have cabin inspections at 4 p.m.; we have to hand the last bits of our kit back at 2 – goodbye freezer suit and sorrels.
Hobart… I don’t know, I don’t feel that it’s going to be such a shock. Things I haven’t seen for four months include: grass, any living plant except for hydroponics, things that move under rocks, any living animal or spider, insects, rain, night time, stars, children, elderly people, advertising, crowds, t-shirt weather, money, mobile phones, television --- but all these things are things I’ve lived with for 25 years previously so they can’t take that much time to get used to, right?
Repatriation will be like leaving Davis, I think – done too much in a frenzy to be able to dwell on it. I think it will be jarring and stressful but I will do it.