27 September--Flying to the Ice, Again!

Half an hour before my wake-up call there is a call saying that the flight is on hold.  We'll be picked up for a 1000 meeting to either fly or to be issued more per-diem.  Stay posted!

On the shuttle out to the USAP building we overhear the news that the flight has been scrubbed until tomorrow.  We're issued new per-diem and, since Zondra hasn't had to return the rental car yet, we assemble 4 of us to do a day trip out on to the Banks Peninsula.  It's supposed to be very pretty and is just on the other side of Lyttleton where we ate yesterday.  Also good since it doesn't involve as much driving as that trip.  Head out to Akoroa, a small town on the far side of the peninsula.  The road leads through rolling grass-covered hills, but in places you can see large snags, stumps, and downed logs of the original forest cover.  It must have been a very pretty place with a scattered forest--and still is.  A few places show what can happen is sheep are excluded.  I see one where there is an ungrazed area between the road edge and a fence line 30 feet or so away.  The result is good regrowth of large shrubs that look a lot like chaparral in California, but no trees.  I wonder if the pasture grasses are introduced, which wouldn't be uncommon.

Akoroa has the distinction of originally being a French settlement.  I'm told that the settlement motivated the Brits to further their own colonization schemes.  But lots of the buildings and streets have French names and I'm told that the local phone book is very strongly French.

We wandered around the island and near evening tried to return to Cheech via  the ferry across the bay to Lyttleton, but it turned out that the ferry was for passengers only.

Back at the hotel we have a notice that we try again tomorrow and that the shuttles will pick us up at 0545.  I'm definitely ready to get on with this.  I hope the weather feels the same.  The C-17 will be leaving a few hours after us with the next group of people.  We've all been prioritized according to how they want to ramp up operations down there, so too many delays could be very disruptive.  I'm told that the Air Force or Air National Guard that operates the C-17 may  have a different set of operating parameters than the Australian firm that is to fly us in on the Airbus.  It could lead to one plane being canceled and the other going in, depending on conditions.  Complexities that no one would ever anticipate!

26 September--Free Day

We are required to take the shuttle back out to the USAP center at the airport to be issued some more per diem.  Zondra and Wesley recruit me to go out to the hot springs and we rent a car for the day.  Zondra is a 4th year returnee and has apparently traveled a lot on the South Island.  She recommends skipping Hanmer Hot Springs as being too commercialized.  Instead we are on our way to Muriua (spelling?) Hot Springs,  It's a Japanese themed hot springs with outdoor and indoor pools, a hotel and restaurant.  It also is an hour further and gets us over Lewis Pass, a bit towards the west side of the island.  It begins raining hard and the classic New Zealand braided rivers have obviously risen a lot and turned muddy, overwhelming the milky glacial color of lower water conditions.  Sort of reminiscent of the rivers coming down out of the east side of the Andes into the Amazon Basin.

The hot springs is a wonderful place, though the water in the warmest pool is not as hot as I thought it might have been and the other two are pretty cool.  A good soak and we talk to several young couples.  One couple is an American and a Ukrainian who've been traveling together since Israel several months ago.  Another is an American student studying in Christchurch with a Kiwi from Auckland studying landscape architecture there, too.  He's had an interesting program designing gardens based on Kiwi, Aussie, Indian, and Indonesian models and had to include at least 10 plants from each area that would survive and thrive in New Zealand.  It takes a bit to get him talking, but when he opens up he's got a lot to say.  They did a project to redesign a part of the Botanical Gardens in Christchurch, but it hasn't been acted on as of yet.

We headed back to Christchurch and along the way stop at a beautiful, long, black small-gravel beach that is almost deserted and which stretches for miles in both directions.  Wow!  Since we have the car until the morning we decided to do a bit more and went across Christchurch to the port city of Lytlleton, which is supposed to be charming.  It is.  Some neat old buildings, probably looking like Christchurch might have looked before they started replacing the charmers with the concrete.  Nice bright colors, friendly people, many of them counter-culture types.  We had been told to go to a fish and chips place while out there and we asked in a video rental store.  We got a great recommendation and sought it out.  Very, very busy, a good sign.  NZ$8 for breaded blue cod fish filet the size of both your out-stretched hands and a pile of good chips.  Both very inexpensive (unlike the rest of the Kiwi meals I've had) and the best fish and chips I've ever had.  While waiting outside for our order we struck up a conversation with a woman who, it turns out, works for the Antarctic Heritage organization, whose mission is to repair and conserve the huts down there.  All the artifacts down there have been rearranged by people over the years and, despite popular misconceptions, are not laid out as they left them.  Even the dead penguin laying on the table at one of the huts was put there by a later visitor who thought it looked good that way.  When they started one of the huts had filled with ice to the ceiling and had to be carved out.  They're now replacing flooring and sealing roofs.

When we got back, there was a notice in the room that the flight was on for tomorrow and the shuttle is set for 0645.  To the Ice!

25 September--Flying to the Ice, Finally!

Everything is packed and we get our early morning shuttle back out to the airport and the USAP center.  WE struggle into our ECW gear and then try to bend over to get on our bunny boots.  It's a hoot!  Everyone sort of walks funny with the big ungainly boots and Carharrt insulated bib overalls.  We are required to wear out full complement of clothes, boots, hats, gloves, goggles and all for the flight.  I got my kangaroo bag to 24 pounds and the carry-on exactly fits with some persuasion from my bunny boot.  Over to the Antarctic Centre for a quick breakfast.  Then I'm issued my boarding pass, weigh in my 2 big bags and my 2 day bags. and sit through a video on what to expect on the flight.

Eventually we get on buses and are taken over to the plane in a separate area of the Christchurch Airport.  I got on fairly early in the process and discover to my delight that the front half of the plane is set up like a first class section of any other airline with wide seats configured 2 and 2 and wit  wide aisles.  The back half is more normal Economy class with narrower seats arranged 3 and 3.  Very luck to have scored that one!

The plane is run by an Australian firm with 3 pilots and co-pilots, 3 flight attendants and 1 other guy.  We are invited to visit the cockpit and look out and talk with the crew.  We're issued substantial bag lunches, but are urged to save some things in case we have to boomerang.  Apparently the record for one set of passengers is to boomerang 7 times before getting in.  Not something I'd relish!

We take off for our 5 hour flight and all goes well.  After 2 hours or so you could began to see the pack ice through momentary breaks in the clouds.  Later we come across the western edge of the Ross Sea and the Trans-Antarctic Mountains.  Huge!  Majestic!  Rising up out of the ice and snow.  Fingers of glaciers poking out from the continent.  The captain announces that we are beginning our descent into McMurdo and the plane stirs.  Everyone hustles to don the rest of their ECW gear.  When we hit the Ice, we need to be able to exit quickly and fully protected so that the overwinterers can load up quickly and the plane return to New Zealand.  But shortly after that we get the strange announcement from the captain that we are turning back, that fog has rolled in over the strip and conditions are not safe for our landing.  Everyone is looking to their neighbors thinking it is a practical joke, but as the time lengthens without a punchline, we realize that he's serious.  The flight monitor shows us turning around and heading back to New Zealand; the distance to destination and from our departure place change, too, and it settles in.  It's a somber lot as we boomerang.
I think everyone is thinking what will happen.  Fly tomorrow?  Will they bump and consolidate us with the incoming C-17 flight?  That's probably full, too, and that should mean that some of them will be bumped to the next C-17 flight a few days after.

As we get close to the coast of New Zealand and are paralleling it, the Southern Alps are cloud covered.  If I'm correct the Maori name for New Zealand is something like the Land of the Long Clouds.  How perfectly appropriate as the clouds are hugging the full length of the summits of the mountains and the clouds are indeed long.

We land again, doff the cold weather gear, and collect more per-diem money for meals.  In town we arrange for dinner and Liz and I go to an Indian restaurant, Two Fat Indians.  Right after we ordered we get hit with 2 aftershocks.  She's on the verge of panicking.  To bolt into the streets or to say in the older building?  Safety says stay but the nerves say flee!

Back to the hotel where a notice under the door greets me and announces that tomorrow's flight has been canceled and we have the day off.

24 September--A Free Day in Christchurch

I woke up at 0200 this morning with jetlag keeping me from getting back to sleep.  That was good because it allowed me to fully feel the aftershock that hit at 0340.  I'm in the 21st floor of the Hotel Grand Chancellor, a very modern and safe hotel in downtown Christchurch.  I suspect that being so fat up allowed the building to sway much more than a lower floor might have done.  I nice feeling to be safely in bed.  In the morning, the news said that it was a 4.6, fairly sizable.

There was a lot of activity down in the streets but unrelated to the earthquake.  A clothes store was giving away $100 of merchandise to the first 1,000 people in line and the line just got larger and more festive as the day grew brighter.  Downtown Christchurch is a bit down at its heels and there seem to be a lot of young folks out clubbing and hanging out.  Lots of alcohol, lots of young rowdies.

Went out to the Botanical Garden fairly early.  What a neat institution!  Loads of great bedding plants with gorgeous color in the early Spring weather.  Magnolia trees in full bloom.  The camelias were a little past peak, while the first rhododendrons were only starting to bloom.  There were redwoods, both coast and giant redwoods.  Interestingly there was also a Dawn Redwood, a tree that previous to the late 1940s was only known from the fossil record until discovered in a remote area of mountainous western China.  That was really cool to see it there with its needles off and waiting for Spring to advance a bit more.  On one side of the Gardens there is an long stretch of woodland with hundreds of thousands of daffodils at the peak.  They started planting their extra bulbs there in the 1930s, sort of an early guerrilla gardening attack.  Over the years they have planted something like 400,000 daffodils, and a lesser number of grape hyacinth.  The effect is staggeringly beautiful.  Again, no wonder the city was known as the Garden City.

Afterwards I went into the museum on the premises with a very special exhibit of photos from the Scott and Shackleton expeditions.  The Scott photos were especially beautiful and large format, maybe 14 by 18 inches.  I said something to the docent about how sharp the photos were after enlargement.  He said that they weren't and that they were the original prints that had been presented to the King after each expedition; this exhibit was the first time that they had been let out of the UK and would be retuning right after the exhibit ended.  They also had the original flags that the King had presented to each expedition and which had been returned to him afterwards.  Very impressive!

We needed to go back out to the airport to be issued with our ECW gear.  We tried on each piece for size and tested zippers and laces to make sure each piece was polar ready.  No replacements down there should something not be right!  The fun part will now be rearranging our carry-on and kangaroo bags for the flight.  The carry-on has to fit in a standard box and the kangaroo bag has to be less than 25 pounds.  We will be very close to the rated payload of the Airbus 319, outfitted with extra fuel tanks for the 4,100 km flight tomorrow.  We learned later the next day that we were within 100 pounds of that limit!  Close!  Our big bags will be coming down with the first C-17 on Tuesday the 28th and we need to plan our two smaller bags accordingly to have what we'll need for a few days.

Big day tomorrow!

23 September--Arrival in New Zealand

We landed in Auckland early morning on the 23rd, tired from the flight and little sleep.  Went through Immigration, picking up another stamp in the passport.  We have permission to be in New Zealand for up to 1 year.  What an idea! 

Then it was on to Customs, declaring the beef jerky, dried cranberries and cinnamon, as required.  That shunted me over to Biosecurity for inspection.  New Zealand has famously strict requirements to limit or eliminate the introduction of pests.  It's a bit late.  The horse is already out of the barn.  They have succeeded in remaking New Zealand into a miniature England with all of the domestic crop and animal species, with all of the foreign huntable species and rats, with all of the Monterey pine plantations and English garden bushes and shrubs.  But it's certainly laudable and maybe reflects a late dawning maturity over the wonderland that they inhabit and a desire to protect it from further inroads.  My good friend Mike Rettie's stories of blasting opossums from the veranda while drinking gin and tonics when he was here in the 1970s is a good testimonial to the horrors unleashed by foreign pests. 

So they inspect the foodstuffs and I pass.  Other people had to show their boot bottoms to have the lugs cleaned out and their tent bottoms to make certain that there was not grass stems or mud that might harbor soil organisms.  Good for them!

We had a wait for the flight to Christchurch and had a beautiful flight down along the spine of the two islands.  The Southern Alps on the South Island are majestic, covered with new snow.  A late and cold Spring (opposite seasons in the southern hemisphere) apparently led to loss of 10,000 new lambs.  The drive into town from the airport is very pretty with long stretches of white flowering Japanese cherries along the roads.  In one of the parks we passed, there were masses of daffodils--the first bulb of Spring--flowering.  Someone had a great deal of foresight to have envisaged this and carried it off.  Christchurch has been known as the Garden City for good reason. 

The driver points out places where buildings have been torn down due to extensive earthquake damage and there are streets that have been closed due to many buildings threatening to fall down.  Many chimneys in homes have fallen and there are blue tarps covering the gaps.  The damage seems to be confined to the older buildings of unreinforced masonry.  Decorative details and gargoyles have fallen.  It's a shame because these are the most interesting buildings in the downtown area and to lose them is a shame.  Christchurch has already had many of them replaced with soulless modern concrete highrises and this can only accelerate the process.  But maybe the new ones will be architecturally more interesting than these 1980s and 1990s towers of bland.

22 September--A lost day

This is the day we lost in flying over the International Date Line.  There's a hard concept for the kids and the kids in us to wrap our heads around!

21 September--Orientation, Part 2

Sorry about the delay since last posting, but there were issues with connectivity from the 21st until the 25th.  This is catchup.

We continued the orientation, with some good presentations on their waste reduction and recycling programs.  By treaty there can be nothing disposed of here on the Ice and eveything must be shipped back for recycling.  So were have a duty--one I think is only the right thing to do, here or back at home--to generate as little waste as possible and to recycle what remains.  But by noon we headed off to the Denver airport for out flights to Los Angeles and onward.  Some flew out at 1600 and others at around 1900.  Spent some interesting time getting to know more of the folks.  I'd always thought that I was pretty well traveled, but there are folks who really put my travels in a new light.  There are the most interesting people shipping out!

The flight from Los Angeles left at 2310 hours for a grueling 13 hour flight to Auckland.  Coach class, but managed to change my ticket to an aisle seat, so it wasn't too bad.

20 September--Orientation, Part 1

Today was spent in the Raytheon Polar Services Company's headquarters.  Actually, it's not a company, it's a program of Raytheon Technical Services, the director took pains to explain, but what the heck.  There had at one time been plans to make it a company and the name sort of stuck.  Late in the day he assembled all of the Centenial staff and all of us in the big auditorium to hear the news that Raytheon's contract has been extended for another year, expiring at the end of March 2012. 

All the normal sort of orientation things that you'd expect, plus a self-paced tutorial on computer security.  Also issued money to cover expenses for the time until we land on the Ice: $220 each.  For many people the most valuable thing was to get to know more of the people we'll be working with and rooming with for the next 5 months.  There are definitely a lot of much larger than life characters among the returning OAEs ("Old antarctic Explorers").  Tales of practrical jokes of years past.  More tales than I can recount of off-season travels: Nepal, Guatemala, Cuba, Thailand, China, etc., etc., etc.  Making me feel quite the stay-at-home and very domestic.

Tomorrow's agenda has a morning of more orientation and then our us ride to the Denver airport (DIA, which, when taken as an acronym, must have already been made into some sort of humorous zinger.



The hallways of power at RPSC in Denver



RPSC in Denver



19 September--Day One

Kathi and I were at the Day's Inn in Tempe last night.  Luckily, the hotel's lack of hot water in the shower and toilet that didn't want to flush were not harbingers for the rest of the day.  We had a light breakfast at Einstein Brother's Bagels and went to the airport.  Sad, very sad, goodbyes for the next 5 months.

The flight went uneventfully (anything else is not OK); the logistics of getting my bags and finding the pickup point for the hotel shuttle bus went perfectly and without any grief.  Some of the others had bags considerably larger than mine and a few had smaller ones.  Aboard the bus, most of the people were Raytheon folks, most of them newbies (FNGs, pronounced fingees in these parts; don't ask what the initials stand for in polite company).  Shuttle Bob was probably assigned to shepherd us through this part of the process.  He's a very voluble and friendly guy, a perfect choice for our greeter.  The others are a friendly mixture and each has qualities it will be interesting to learn more about over the next 5 months.  One is a young woman from Sandpoint, Idaho who's worked as a river guide on the Lower Salmon and hope to work the Middle Fork next year.  So that's an obvious affinity.  Another guy will be working in hazardous materials.  [Note: I later find out that this includes even the smallest drops of fuel and they must be dug out of the snow and dirt and bagged.]  That's nice to know that NSF takes that sort of environmental care very carefully.  A returning woman from the kitchen staff was talking about wanting to start serving a vegan hummus with Guinness but didn't know whether Guinness is indeed vegan (I googled it and it isn't; it contains isinglass, a byproduct of fish scales that's used to floculate the yeast from the brew).  The few non-Raytheon people were sort of at a loss to know what this was all about.

The Red Lion Hotel is a very nice suburban high rise, complete with Sleep Number mattresses and free Wi-Fi, making possible this posting.  Hard to know exactly where this is in relation to Denver or the RPSC complex.  For that matter, it's hard to even know what city it might be in if you didn't know what was on your ticket; it's architecturally indistinguishable from every other Red Lion and from every other late 90s or early 21st Century hotel. 

Dinner with the group at 1830 (reader: you'll have to get used to 24 hour time telling) and shuttle to the RPSC complex at 0700.


First dinner at the Red Lion in Denver



18 September--Almost Time to Go

The bags are packed and loaded in the car.  All the doubts and misgivings must necessarily recede.

Sorry for the poor attempt at the blog yesterday.  This should work out better and I'll start to get photos uploaded in the next week or so.  Thanks in equal parts to those of you who pointed out the problems with yesterday's posting and to those who patiently did not.

12 September 2010—One Week to Go

One week to go before I begin the long process of finally heading to The Ice.  It’s been a more than 3 year process to realize this dream of going to work in Antarctica, the Cold, Dry, and Far South.  The dream began with my good friend George Aukon who has gone down there now for parts of 6 seasons. 
I like to tell people that our friendship began in a driving rainstorm in a former sugar cane field in Costa Rica in 1991.  What drew hundreds of us to the Reventazon was the vision of Jib Ellis.  Jib had started Project RAFT, Russians and Americans for Teamwork, in the waning days of the Soviet Union to help bridge cultural differences and make peace a more likely state.  The idea was that by putting people in a raft on a river, people would of necessity need to get along well enough to successfully navigate upcoming rapids.  George and his fellow team members from Team Riga had left the Soviet Union as Soviet citizens and had arrived in Central America as citizens of a free and newly independent Latvia.  We sat in Team Riga’s large tent in the rain and tried to communicate in broken English and fractured Russian.  Afterwards I helped bring George and his family to Flagstaff, as well as helping bring Vladimir Gavrilov and his family to California and recommending him to Dick Linford and Joe Daley who own Echo, the Wilderness Company, at the time a large whitewater river trip outfitter with operations all over the West. 

Over time George became an American citizen; after working at several jobs he began working for Raytheon at McMurdo Station as a radio technician.  During his first season the American icebreaker under contract to clear a channel to McMurdo was unable to break through the ice and a Russian icebreaker was called in.   But a Russian- and English-speaking liaison was needed to coordinate the channel clearing and George was the natural choice.  To his great surprise, many of the crew members were men he had served with in the Soviet Navy in the Arctic, including in the vicinity of Novaya Zemyla, one of 2 Soviet nuclear testing sites.
I began applying for work with Raytheon in 2008 and was encouraged, but as things dragged out with no final decision made, I was torn between teaching, which I loved, and working in Antarctica, which I wanted to see.  With my school needing to know if I would be returning, but no decision on the job on The Ice I was in a pickle.  To be fair to my principal I felt I needed to tell him that I would not be back and that I would be retiring after 23 years.  Expecting a job offer at any time, I went with that decision and retired.
In hindsight I should have seen that I had interviewed horribly and had poor chances.  Time stretched impossibly long that Summer until I finally found in August out that there had been a hiring freeze by Raytheon and the National Science Foundation during that season of $142 oil.  The interview must not have helped either.   It was too late to rescind my retirement and return to teaching.  The position had been filled.
The last 2 years have been an interesting interlude of taking French and German classes, doing presentations on Colorado River Basin and Western water supply issues for Elderhostel, and getting back into river guiding with the Air Force’s Fort Tuthill Outdoor Adventure Program at first and this Spring with both with them and Grand Canyon Youth on the Lower Colorado River from Diamond Creek down to Lake Mead.  Fascinating!  New rapids forming at points never before seeing whitewater.  All the while the idea of Antarctica was receding further and further from my mind.

But George Aukon entered the picture again and he spoke to several people in the Denver office and things heated up this Summer with a number of inquiries on different jobs.  While in the Loire valley with Richard and Roselyane Ouillie I had a 1-hour interview for the Vehicle Operator position that I was eventually offered while we were doing our house exchange with William and Elisabeth Dosik in Paris.  Dealing with the paperwork, filling out forms, and faxing things took a good long time from the visit but has obviously paid off.  Landing back in the States I needed to get an immediate blood and urine test in Portland.

17 September—Leaving tomorrow. The beginning of the adventure.