The plane was chock full of supplies for the Antarctic. Bottles of compressed gas but also a huge quantity of beer. I sat facing a 75 cubic feet of Guinness, one of only 10 or so pallets. We sat on the plane for what seemed hours, before being told that one of the engines wasn’t behaving properly and we should go back to the terminal. Where we sat for more hours, watching the sun slowly rise and being entertained by a New Zealand documentary series called “Ice” by Marcus Lush and Jam TV. It was actually pretty good. We watched the entire season of it. Until the air force liaison officer came out and said, that the plane could not be fixed and we should all go back to our hotels. We’d been sitting around for 8 hours by this point. I wasn’t too unhappy though, It was a chance for my luggage to catch up.
Back at the hotel we were told, we had ten minutes to get back to the airport (about 20 minutes away) as they’d fixed the plane. So after a mad rush getting buses etc we were back at the passenger terminal. I was slow in getting back into my ECW gear and as I was leaving the terminal to get onto the bus, in rolls my luggage from Los Angeles! Fantastic!
A fairly quick (or so it seemed) 5 and a half hours later and we were landing at the white-ice Pegasus airfield about 15 miles from McMurdo. It was pretty grotty weather though, low cloud, blowing snow. After another hour or so on the bus back to town and another hour or so of briefings (and so begins the bureaucracy) I actually started to see people I knew and friends of old. Its funny after 10 years of coming to Antarctica it is more the people I am keen to see than the place, some may think that’s maybe a bit sacrilegious – and I look forward to seeing some new parts of the continent, but Mactown is Mactown is Mactown.
Today (the 30th of December) was Icestock, the McMurdo version of New Years. NSF and Raytheon (the contractors who kinda-sorta run the place) move holidays around so that New Years day will actually be a work day. Sunday is the one day off here, so holidays (such as Christmas, thanksgiving etc) are moved so that they occur on either a Monday or a Saturday so that only one day off is needed in addition to the Sunday. People work hard here. They play hard too – you give them two days off and you get things like Icestock happening.
This outdoor music festival starts late (as people have been partying in to the wee hours the night before) and involves dancing in the mud, manic costumes, amateur bands (some of whom sound amateur and some of whom most definitely do not), a monster chili cook off and various other goings on. Sometimes it is warm (a couple of years ago it was +12C (54F)) and sometimes it is cold (as in today – snowing, -11C (+12F)). How the banjo player of the bluegrass band managed such talented picking in leather gloves in those temperatures I do not know! Most of the guitarists had bluish hands by the end of their sets. I liked a band that played uber funky disco covers, they got the crowd up and dancing in the mud.
The room I am in (6 bunk beds with other folk from Polenet) overlooks the Icestock “pit” so we could sit and watch out the window or go and enjoy the show pretty easily. It was nice to get in out of the cold occasionally. Tomorrow will be spent getting ready to go out to Patriot Hills. The team is obviously pretty ready for some more work. We’ll see how it goes.
All the best
Mike