..and not forgetting my home country... With enormous thanks to Jen and Ross for a truly fabulous few days at Brodie Castle, and to Lisa, Lorraine and Bonnie for giving me several great excuses to explore - and even go out in - my home town for the first time in, err, more years than I care to remember... [View Full Entry]

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... I couldn't resist sharing these with you too... [View Full Entry]

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Sitting in a Caffé Nero in London’s financial district with its faceless traffic of suits and double-decker buses, passing the afternoon between lunch with an old college friend and dinner with a former skiing buddy, I feel that Namibia was an eternity ago, a gazillion planets away… I guess it’s not too surprising. The two months since I returned have been hectic, not only in the sense of time-consuming, but also emotion-sapping - sometimes agreeably, sometimes not. Most of my time has been spent in Edinburgh engaged on tour of duty as a quasi-Florence Nightingale for [View Full Entry]

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Travel isn’t just about places: about exploring every last inch of a new country, a new area, a new city; about scheduling a dawn-to-dusk (and beyond) itinerary of things to do and places to see to check off The List; about comparing dining/sleeping/shopping/entertainment experiences with the reviews in the guidebooks. It’s about sitting on Cindy’s veranda in the late afternoon light of a Hobart summer as if the thirteen years since we last met had evaporated, our conversation constantly spinning off at tangents until we can’t remember - and it doesn’t mat [View Full Entry]

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There is something reassuring in the effort still required, even today, to visit Antarctica. Yes, day-long scenic flights from New Zealand and Australia have been an option for the well-endowed of pocket for a while, and now equally well-heeled tourists will be able to fly in to Australia’s Casey Station. But this does not get you to the incredible sights, sounds and silences that we had been lucky enough to experience. Only days and days on board a well-provisioned and expertly-navigated ship could do that. But it’s a long schlep even to the Antarctic Circle, and we were delig [View Full Entry]

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When I started writing up this trip, I envisaged three blogs, one on the trip south, one on the Ross Sea, and one on the trip north. If you’ve followed the last month’s scribblings in any detail (or simply kept an eye on the blogs’ titles), you’ll know this was a somewhat optimistic initial assessment. Everyone who has been before says it takes a surprisingly long time to absorb and to digest fully a trip to Antarctica. The intensity of experience in a short space of time in the context of the long, tough journeys there and back, however mild the [View Full Entry]

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If stepping ashore at Cape Adare was magical, walking down the gangway and straight onto a vast plain of snow-covered sea ice which stretched away to the distant foot of the Campbell Glacier was breathtaking. We’d spent the first few hours of the morning on the bridge or out on deck watching incredible scenery unfold around us. As we breakfasted, the ship rounded Cape Washington and the simple magnificence of Mount Melbourne, and entered Terra Nova Bay. In the distance were the ice cliffs of the Campbell Glacier’s tongue, and beyond that the peaks of the northern end of the [View Full Entry]

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“Exploration is the physical expression of the intellectual passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore…” (Apsley Cherry-Garrard) I celebrated the second anniversary of my leaving the rat-race of a City legal career by setting foot on the Antarctic continent for the first time. I woke that morning to see land outside the porthole for the first time in six days. The cliffs of Cape Adare drifted in and out of sight through the mist and falling snow. On ice floes between the ship and [View Full Entry]

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Breaking through the pack ice into the Ross Sea was far from a foregone conclusion. Aurora’s previous trip in January had not managed to do so, and we spent an extra couple of days battling this ice ourselves, venturing as far east as the dateline and using helicopters for recce flights before we found a path through. Once through and into the Ross Sea’s polynya, a recurring area of open water, our battles were far from over. Fast ice around the coast would challenge our attempts to approach some of our desired destinations sufficiently close for either Zodiac or helicopter [View Full Entry]

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To set the scene… Our trusty vessel, the Marina Svetaeva, was an ice-strengthened 1989 Polish-built, Russian-registered 90-metre passenger ship, recently acquired (previously leased) by Aurora Expeditions. While not an icebreaker, she was, effectively, only half a grade away, and we can certainly now vouch for her ice-bashing capabilities in the careful hands of her skipper, Kapitan Gena, and his Russian crew. In addition to the forty-odd crew, there were about twenty mainly-Australian staff and lecturers to look after our gastronomic, intellectual and logistical needs, from co [View Full Entry]

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