The plane C-130 is Hercules, very impressive. You reach this small bus, and you see this aircraft monster and you enter the back. Then you sit next to each other in these longitudinal seats. And then the exit for seven hours travel without a small snack, a lot of sounds around you, sitting for the first time until I saw a little antarctica.
You see these wonderful ice shelves from the small windows you have there. The first thing you see when you leave is ice everywhere. You are really new to this environment, and sometimes feels like being on another planet.
There is an Italian resort there, and we had to be for a day. But what we have learned very quickly, in French, we say Antarctica is not prognosticThat is, “not predicting Antarctica,” because the weather is unpredictable. So instead of being in one night, we were almost weekly.
This station is just a logistics; It is not that people want to stay, and all those who stay there will enter others from the coming. The real challenge is for people who work there, so they want us to leave us as soon as possible. But the weather is not so severe, you can’t take a plane and go inside. You have to wait until the weather is almost stable, and the rider says: “I’m ready to fly,” because it has the last word.
I had a problem with my data before, and I was trying to connect to the internet. There, “it was like the 90s internet, you know, beep beep beep. Sign in and finally, after two or three hours, I said, “Okay, I need to log in to your account to download your things. Please provide your phone number. That was a double verification, and it didn’t work, of course, there is no phone service. So I couldn’t enter my data for double check.
In the end, we took a plan. This is smaller, the BT-67 desert plane, which comes from Canada to fly from Antarthics and then go to Canada at the end of the season. This plane ride took four hours. It is a pressure plane. You make sure you put all your clothes, because you are ready to go to Concordia, because 30 Celsius is removed. We were super fear.
The first dizziness after landing Concordia was the vertigo. When I didn’t know I didn’t know, you are 3,200 meters from sea level, so you feel a bit of altitude. After four hours in this small plane, you see the plain of the white, and nothing else, you go down to Concordia.
From a distance, you see the station. This station seems so small, literally there is nothing around, no mountains, nothing. And you have little work in the stomachAs we say in French, like butterflies, you know, “Wow, that’s what it will be for a year.” We went down to the Concordia station and spent a year when the crew and came out of the station, he was waiting for us and made us very well received. We entered within the station, sometimes we were afraid of high altitude diseases. They want to make sure that no one wears a heavy thing, that we do not do physical activity. They told us, “rest in the coming days.”
The station is made of two torses, with 18 faces per tower. It’s basically white, with a little orange, and that’s it. You enter a tunnel between two towers. You remove your boots and let all your things leave there. It’s pretty small. Then you can go to the left, which is, “a quiet tower.” Inside, you have bedrooms, labs and hospital. It has three floors. The middle floor is dormitors, and the upper floor are laboratories. Keep quiet is called “quiet tower”. Then we go to another tower, from the right to the entrance. It has technical things. On the second floor, there are movies and video rooms for sports room. At the top you have a living room, eating area and kitchen.
In five minutes, you have spin your new home. It’s very impressive because you think, “someone hadn’t had anywhere in the middle he had to do the first steps.” And that is incredible. So many people go to Antarctica nothing. We will come here, and we have the luxury to protect this building from this environment.
It is outside this world to be there. We have seen many photos of Antarctica, and we probably read a lot of books, but you’ve never been to the middle of Antarctica, which is very different. There is no life, no birds, no trees, there is nothing but ice and wind.
The version of this story appeared originally Fit.
