Day 4 - Flight to Antarctica

Things move pretty smoothly given the number of people and the early start. We take a bus to the airport and then leave our hand luggage on the bus whilst we go through security - they are bizarrely strict (belts off, shoes off etc) given that they are not even looking at our bags! Nor do we go through passport control which is a little surprising. 

 

A number of other groups soon join us doing a variety of trips on Antarctica. Then after about 45mins we head through the gate and down to our buses which are now waiting for us this side of the airport and drive out to the plane. This is a big Ilushin cargo plane that carries everything on and off Antarctica and it is pretty full with all of us and a lot of cargo. There is a big tv at the front which has a live stream from a forward facing camera. 

The front of the plane

Back of the plane and cargo

 


More scenery

Scenery we are flying over on the large TV.

 

We fly to Ushuaia (in Argentina) first as the Punta Arenas airport is using the busy summer period to carry out some works on the runway which means that we can't take off with a full fuel load so go there to refuel en route. This adds about 2.5 hours to the flight making it about 7 hours overall but soon enough we are touching down in Antarctica.

Coming in to land







Our plane coming in



Despite all the dire warnings, the sun is shining which offsets the cold and the wind so I have a little walk whilst everyone else piles into the waiting vehicles to take us to Union Glacier (UG) which is the main camp here. 



 

UG is pretty impressive and we get taken on a tour before being told to have a quick lunch as we may be flying out to Vinson base camp soon.

In front of one of the mess tents

Camp from the air. Staff tents rear left, guests rear right and dining tents front

Camp from the ground; guest tent fore and staff tents rear

Poor photo but whole camp - work tents on far left.

Inside one of the two mess tents

The food is remarkably good out here which is a very pleasant surprise - I can't say that I was really looking forward to a month on rehydrated food! There I meet Gus who has been here for about a week on a training course and is very complimentary about the set up which is very encouraging. 

The twin otters we are flying in

Annoyingly, I am sitting next to the wing on the plane so I can't take any photos really but there are some great views on the 45 minute flight before we land at Vinson base camp.

Even here the infrastructure is pretty good with a permanent and quite large mess tent. From there we get a great view of the mountain and the summit which is pretty rare from base camp.

VBC from above on the flight in

 

The summit is the peak in the middle which is on top of the ridge

The camp with the mess and store tents in the background

Dragging our gear to our tents

View down the valley

The comfort of the mess tent

We also meet a team who have just come down on day 13 of their trip - they have been very unlucky with a lot of bad weather and were meant to fly out when our Ilushin headed back to PA and so will be very late getting home. The weather forecast for the next few days is pretty good but we are going to be taking things slowly - let's just hope we don't waste all the good weather at base camp and end up climbing in the cold and wind. 

We spend the rest of the day organising ourselves and chatting in the mess tent. There is 24 hour sunlight here so we aren't governed by night and day as such, but rather by the trajectory of the sun (or rotation of the Earth to be more precise!). The sun is pretty low here and the temperature drops significantly when it goes behind one of the nearby mountains - which makes it a good time to be in your sleeping bag! The concept of time becomes rather strained as you approach the poles and so to keep things simple the whole setup remains on Chilean time -  this makes it generally shady in the morning here so we will usually be getting up late to allow time for the sun to warm things up again.

Map of our route - starting from camp at bottom left, up towards the ridge, along the valley to the top of the map, up onto the ridge and then back towards the summit towards the bottom of the map.

 

Food:

Egg sandwich on the plane
Beef stew with couscous, cauliflower and sprouts!
Chicken with pasta in a bacon and cream sauce.