I don’t know when my love of Antarctica started, but at university I bought ‘Mind over Matter’ by Rannulph Fiennes and since then, I only read books on Antarctica. There is nothing better than finding an early edition of an explorers diary in a second hand book shop. The tricky decision is which book to take, most are incredibly old and tatty. I love reading a book and thinking of the others that may have read the same book. What is bizarre is that I have no interest in the Arctic, I’ve tried to read books about it in the past, but there is a strange draw between me and Antarctica and I don’t know where it’s from. I’m not especially fond of being cold, nor snow, but I get butterflies in my stomach thinking about the first time I step on Antarctica and immediately think back to the early 1900’s and how the explorers felt when they stepped onto an unexplored land, where they would stay for a number of years. In the case of Scott, Bowers, Wilson, Oates and Evans…their final resting place.
I’ve been trying to speed read as much as I can, I love to read the different perspectives of explorers, even though I’m reading about the same journey. I once read in a book that ‘those who ask, will never understand, those that understand, will never ask’. I’ve had some funny looks when telling people about the trip. What is hard to get my head around is that it wasn’t that long ago that we knew nothing about Antarctica. Would I have answered an advert in a newspaper asking for volunteers, to go away for years, to an unknown place and it’s unknown if you would return? We merely have a 13 hour flight to Argentina, but the explorers took months to sail South. How did they feel when they left? How did they feel when they spotted land? What drives you to keep going after you know that the pole was already discovered by someone else?
The trip we are about to take is my dream holiday and the explorers will be in my head every step of the way.
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