Early this year, I found myself aboard a Russian research ship, working as a chaperone for an educational programme called Students on Ice, which aims to give high-school students the opportunity to experience and understand the magic of the poles. For two weeks, we journeyed together in a place so utterly remote and distant from the comfort zones we had left behind. Along the way, we each picked up our own treasured pieces of wisdom, but the first lesson from the bottom of the world was a decidedly unanimous one: Antarctica, metaphorically and literally, is the most super-cool place on the planet.
It is the coldest, driest, windiest, iciest continent; with the longest days and the longest nights, the least amount of soil and the greatest amount of freshwater. Ninety per cent of the earth's total ice volume is housed in her reserves; yet, with less than two inches of precipitation a year, she is a greater, more hostile desert than the Sahara. And if all these extremes and contradictions aren't enough, Antarctica is also separated from the rest of humanity by the stormiest body of water in the world - the Southern Ocean.
One part of the Southern Ocean is particularly traumatic - the Drake Passage - a skinny 400-mile stretch between Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, through which 130 million cubic metres of water are squeezed per second - simulating an experience of being strapped in a roller coaster for two days without being given the option to step off. The "Drake Shakes" have been tormenting seafarers for the past 200 years, ever since humans first discovered 'terra nullus' at the bottom of the world. Lucky for us though, the effects weren't life-threatening. Some of us had to reach for sick-bags and sea-sickness pills, while others had to lie strapped in their beds. The more stalwart of our squad stood out on deck in the cold, biting grey air, watching as the legendary wandering albatross followed our ship like a protective talisman into calmer waters. Lesson Two: danger and delight grow on one stalk.
Once we reached within sight of land, everything changed. A blinding whiteness loomed around us that seemed almost cruel, insecure; lording over us with its ice sculpture galleries emanating ethereal blue lights, and its ancient snowy mountains of indeterminable size. It was like falling through the hole to wonderland and landing up in prehistory instead: continental crust, Cordillerean folds, pre-Cambrian granite shields; trenches, rifts, plates. To get a grasp of it, you have to erase every human marker from your mind. You have to imagine a horizon which exists in the circular: 360 degrees of pure, uninterrupted eternity.
And so it happened, that on the first day of the year, I found myself donning three layers of clothing, knee-high galoshes, and a ridiculous red fluffy hat, wobbling off the gangplank into a Zodiac (a sophisticated version of an inflatable dinghy), about to make my first landing in Antarctica along with 30 super-excited, hormonally-charged teenagers.
I want to say, that it was here that I found a beginning. On an island with thousands of chinstrap penguins waddling up and down in thigh-high ice, and rows of moulting elephant seals wallowing and burping in black volcanic mud. Or later, at the old whaler's station on Deception Island where whale vertebrae and skeletons of boats lay strewn in surreal disarray, reminiscent of a Dali painting. Or even later, in Paradise Bay, watching an avalanche tear clouds into an unblemished blue sky. Or following humpback whales for hours, watching them tail and fluke, fluke and tail; the glorious breadth and width of them catching the air in our throats. Or holding a piece of sedimentary rock in my palms - smooth and old and replete with fossils.