Here I am waiting in Denver International for the first of 3 flights to get me to Christchurch, NZ via LAX.
This is the first thing you see after your 13.5 hour flight deplaning in Auckland, and it either means welcome, or maybe more like those yellow signs coming up the back way to the Grand Canyon- Friendly Indians Behind You! After all, the Maori killed more that their fair share of Japs during the Second Great Misunderstanding 60 odd years ago.
After a seemingly mile long walk outside to stretch the legs from the International Terminal to the Domestic one, I was happy to note that the British Commonwealth weather appears to be constant throughout the world, regardless of latitude or longitude.
My room in the Hotel So, as in so where is the rest of the room? The whole thing measured maybe 11 feet square.
Cathedral Square, the middle and heart of Christchurch.
This picture says it all.
This could be the High Street in many an English town, except for the palm trees (not pictured).
The ubiquitous Bailies, where many an adventurer to the land to the south ventures for one last taste of something that wasn’t frozen for transport via ship or cargo plane.
I put this one in for Lissa.
South Pacific flora with English weather.
Sumner, a suburb of Christchurch. That’s the Pacific Ocean!
Two new friends that showed me around, Curt and Christine.
3:30 am cattle call, which is actually 9:30 am the day before in Denver. Today we fly to the ice.
A famous visitor at the CDC (Clothing Distribution Center).
Beyond these doors, you are asked all the normal airport security questions, only this time by the NZ military. Bomb sniffing dogs and the lot.
The white bus to the C-17 after one more x-ray of your gear.
Showtime. We were also issued earplugs for the flight.
This flight is called a Winfly (winter flight) and features mostly cargo with humans stashed on the sides of the plane in jump seats. Being a military plane, I did notice several signs and controls for Halo drops, which are High Altitude Low Opening parachute drops for the Special Forces. Full oxygen masks are required for those. We’re just civilians, so we get to actually land using the wheels and everything.
Our stewardess was a Sgt in the NYANG. The in-flight movie sucked. There wasn’t one.
Some of our more important cargo.
About an hour and a half out we where allowed to go up the stairs to the cockpit for the views. You can’t see it through the windshield, but the continent was visible in the distance.
Icebergs.
The Ice begins.
We’ve landed. It was a very strange experience to wait for minutes on end with the engines howling mutedly through the earplugs, changing pitch as the pilot adjusted his approach which you couldn’t see through any of the 6 portholes strewn throughout the aircraft. The landing felt normal, although we landed on the Ross Ice Shelf itself. Throughout the flight, the pilot had the heat on keeping the C-17 at a comfortable 70ish degrees. About 20 minutes out this was shut down. Once we had taxied to a stop, we were told to wait until transport could pull up. They began unloading cargo immediately out of the cargo ramp as we waited. You could see your breath 2 seconds after they opened the doors.
The true Antarctica Experience begins. I liken it to landing on the moon. With your earplugs still in and all of your ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear on, you grab your orange carry-on bag and climb down the short military issue gray C-17 stairwell. Your white moon boots crunch on South Polar ice and you listen to yourself breath steadily behind heavily tinted goggles and a balaclava designed to contain your body heat. Everything is starkly quiet and it’s just you and the cold with some vehicles barely visible through the ice strewn wind. You walk past the first vanguard of emergency vehicles to your ride about 200 yards past the plane. They have a huge bus with tractor pull sized enormous tires called Ivan the Terrabus (unfortunately not pictured).
Inside Ivan.
My new home for 6 months looking back toward the airfield too far to see under these conditions.
Walking to work at 7:30 am my first day.
An airfield rescue vehicle parking at the Fire Station.
Honestly, most of the people that get to the bottom of the world spend most of their time working at whatever jobs they have been hired/assigned, to the tune of 6 day, 9 or 10 hour days with 2 breaks and a lunch, always undercut with the knowledge that you are actually There, and It can kill you if you don’t follow a healthy dose of common sense mixed with teamwork, which in a very personal way can make the experience outside of work all the more interesting, and perhaps even apt. The jobs here are a studied application of drudgery, boredom, and waiting to get back to civilization (this nugget from some of the old hands) for a well earned and deserved vacation in maybe New Zealand or Australia or the Cook Islands, just to name a few. And yet there are people returning here year after year to go through it all over again. When I got back to my dorm room after work, we were at weather Condition 2 (3 is “normal”, and 1 means you do not leave whatever building you are in), the temperature at -24° F with winds gusting at 24 knots bringing the wind chill to -49° F, ice in the air making everything a hazy blizzard. As I write this now 3 hours later, the winds have picked up a tad into the freight train sounding range (still condition 2), where our building (number 166, but everyone calls it Hotel California) with windows that have withstood this normal occurrence for decades actually conduct the cold so that it feels like a light breeze while you are doing your laundry.
Hotel California with Observation Hill beyond. The rooms are overall heated comfortably, but there is nothing like a “Southeaster”? to put it into some sort of perspective.
Building 155 where I work.
Since I’ve run out of pictures, I will sign off for the time being. I will either update this blog or create another one as needed to keep you all up to speed as time progresses.
