Thoughts ⇌ Jason

We finally got our weather window after about five days of weather delays which we spent exploring Punta Arenas, so we took off on our Russian chartered flight. The airline was DAP, which specilizes in complex or adventure flights. Their seat back brocure showed them doing helicopter research excursions on the Antarctic contintent etc.

Cath booked these flights on our behalf and at one point before taking off Cath remarked, "This will probably be the most expensive 2 hour flight you'll ever take. Each one way ticket was $3k USD."

Our flight's destination was King George Island, slightly north of the main Antarctican peninsula. A common launch point to the rest of the continent.

Our plane

Our plane was a BA something. I've never even heard of that company, but I'd guess the four turbojets are for redundancy and a boat load of thrust to get off short gravel runways like the one we were headed to.

Antarctica from the sky

After two hours of nothing but water and clouds, we finally descended towards an alien landscape. No buildings, roads, or other signs of human touch were visible.

Oddly, this felt vaguely familiar, and eventually I placed it. This was reminding me of many sci-fi novels I've read in my past. Specifically, the bumpy shuttle rides explorers take down to uninhabited planets. Never thought I'd have that triggered by a terrestrial experience.

Buses

After landing, we walked down a set of stairs to a bus, which I've done before in previous flights in my life. But the really odd/disconcerting part here was:

Landing on a muddy gravel runway. (surprisingly not much louder than a normal runway, but that might be a function of this plane's tires)
Not a building in sight. Where is airport? Where are the buses going to go?

It's like taking a highway offramp into a lake. Or an escalator to a grassy meadow. Does not compute.

Bus to the beach

Funny story: I sat next to Mike on the bus ride. And we start bumping down the hill along the gravel road. And as you can kinda see in the video and pictures below, we are passing forklift trucks, huge stockpiles of avgas in 55 gallon barrels, and a Sikorsky helicopter doing tethered pallet deliveries from boats anchored off the beach.

I couldn't help but be strongly reminded of the famous intro sequence of the game Half-Life. This was an older computer game which made a big impression on me as a kid. (a great Half-Life documentary is here if you want to learn more). In that game, you are a scientist entering a research facility, and the game opens with you riding a tram as it winds it way through the facility and you see all of the hustle and bustle of the facility and it's strange oddities around you.

The funny part here being that Mike earlier in his career co-founded the company that made Half-Life. It was just one surreal moment in what would be a continual stream of them for many days to come.

Counter-rotating helicopter

Counter-rotating main rotors balance each other so there's no need for a tail rotor.

I think you can see a church on the hill. It's got some kind of history (maybe check the wikipedia link above if curious), but we chose not to visit it so we could get on the road. And you can see some of the facilities here and there. I assume these are for the few people living/working here.

Half-Life Barrels

Mike here said something to the effect of: "and they said barrels weren't realistic!" (I guess this was some criticism Half-Life got upon release?)

Landing on the beach video

Here Toughy says hi, then Steve walks by (with a good stunned expression on his face that all of us were feeling after finally arriving to Antarctia). Then Nikki, Cath, Jason and Doug are visible here and there.

The other folks around the beach are there to board two other Russian-run boats which were also loading up at this time. It's still unclear to me if the heavy distribution of Russian and Ukranian boats and passengers was normal or just a sampling anamoly. And if the former, then why?

But we'll see more of them in this blog in upcoming posts.

On the beach 1

On the beach 2

Boat tour part 1

Getting on Icebird, we got our assigned bunks and our safety briefing. Here's a brief two part video tour of the boat and some of the characters involved. The one person I forgot to point out in the galley was Alex, AKA "Chef" as he preferred to be called. He was also (surprise!) our chef for the duration of the trip. He's made us a great number of delicious dishes. Some of my favorite are the traditional Russian borscht (a stew) and central asian plov (amazing lamb and rice dish).