Guide to Antartica
8 Dec
This remote wilderness is like nowhere else on Earth, which makes a voyage there all the more rewarding, says Simon Calder
To the bitter end of the world. Why?
To discover a part of the planet reduced to its raw elements. “The Antarctic is to the rest of the world as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard: “A precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas.” That description is taken from his book The Worst Journey In The World, which chronicles Robert Falcon Scott’s heroic failure to be first to reach the world’s southernmost point. He and his team reached the South Pole in 1912, one month after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, and perished on the homeward journey.
A century ago no human had visited the South Pole. And even in the 21st century, while Man has successfully colonised the other six continents, settlements in Antarctica remain microscopic compared with the vast bulk of a continent twice the size of Australia: a scattering of small research stations around the edges, with another – the US Amundsen-Scott Station – at the Pole itself, 90 degrees south.
Fewer people holidayed in Antarctica last year than can fill the Dinamo Minsk stadium (and, having visited the grim capital of Belarus, I’d take an over-winter on the Ross Ice Shelf any time). Those 38,200 fortunate folk discovered that Antarctica is the opposite of a land of milk and honey. Man has battled courageously to explore the driest, coldest and windiest continent (it is also the highest, with much of the terrain above 10,000ft). The largest indigenous terrestrial creature that does not fly or swim is an insect one-sixth of an inch long.
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