Final preparations

So we are now officially on standby, which means that we could get a call at anytime and then we will need to be ready in full Polar gear to travel to the airport for our flight on the the Antarctic continent.

We have spent the last 2 days, packing all our 660kg of equipment ready for the expedition, we had to take over a whole conference room here in the hotel to pack 60 individual day food packs (like lunch boxes) with our 6000 calories per day.

This morning we attended a logistics meeting with the organisation that will fly us onto the ice and will fly us off again at the end (and rescue us should we need it.) Some of the highlights of this meeting were as follows:

The Russian cargo transporter jet (Ilyusian) was meant to fly yesterday to set up the logistics base camp, but as it taxied down the runway the brakes failed and fire engines were called out to cool things down!

Fortunately when the jet has to land on the blue ice runway on Antarctica, it doesn't use its brakes, so the pilots effectively stall the engines to stop the plane, we have been warned that this sounds very unnerving. From 30,000 ft the ice runway is difficult to see (ice surrounded by snow!) so 2 logistics crew use handheld mirrors on the ground to reflect the sun into the pilots eyes so he can get a visual reference on the runway....I don't know why I smile when I think about this statement!

Once we land, we have a day resorting our equipment and then we take another, albeit a much shorter flight on a ski equipped Twin-Otter aircraft, down to our starting point on the coast - Hercules Inlet (if you want a laugh, type the South and West coordinates of our start point into Google Maps or Google earth S79 54.931, W80 07.290 you will have to zoom out to get and idea of scale. The South Pole is at S90 00.000, W90 00.000 for reference.)

We were shown some gruesome photos of frostbite and were told how to diagnose and treat should we be affected. The bit about "Arctic Willy" was a chilly reminder of my new found fear of the cold! To cap it all, the military airport from which we fly is in a state of High Alert, as there are continued issues between Argentina and Chile over a border dispute......no comment!

Other than that I am ready to go, feeling quite numb emotionally - no longer anxious or nervous, I just want to get started. The worst thing now would be a 7 day delay - which has been known to happen.

Oh yes, and another thing. Chile seems to have a problem with Beavers! You know the furry kind......I think I overheard someone in a bar the other evening say that Chile was having a 'plague of beavers' (not sure what the collective noun for a group of beavers is) so they are on the menu in all the restaurants - quite nice actually, rather like the dark meat on a Turkey leg.