En Patagonia: Chapter One

 

I left Antarctica on the 29^{th of} January 2024: My 6^th season at Rothera coming to its scheduled end. The five-hour flight across the Drake Passage to Punta Arenas passed in its predictable way. There’s the pre-flight announcement from the captain - briefing us on the emergency exits, safety equipment, and kindly reminding us not to poo in the toilet if we can possibly avoid it. Then it’s eyes wide open as we take-off from Rothera – taking in the place that has been our home for the past however many months. The thought crosses my mind that there is no certainty that I will ever see Rothera again – but even if certainty could ever be attained, there’s only so much you can take away with you when you leave. In many ways, it is a place that only seems to truly exist when you’re there, and the second you land back in Chile it can already seem like a distant sort of dream. It’s not that life at Rothera is not real, it is just so different from the life and from the world that we (and the majority of our friends and family) are so familiar with. It is something that I have written about before – the difficulty of finding the words to adequately describe the Antarctic experience. Or perhaps it is the difficulty I face in trying to justify and explain some of my feelings and emotions associated with the place. It is such a privilege to have had the opportunity to spend any time there at all, let alone six consecutive summers. So, I worry slightly that I will be seen as ungrateful, or defective in character, if I admit that my overarching feeling upon leaving was that of relief, and that I was, once again, somewhat burnt-out. This is something which I have got better at managing over the years, but perhaps due to the intensity of life on Station, and the introvert nature of my character, I wonder if it will be possible to ever eliminate it happening completely. But with all that said, and with all the need I felt in my soul to be anonymous and autonomous again, I was leaving Rothera with a head full of happy memories and with a heart full of friendships both new and old. I knew that after a period of decompression I would enjoy spending time reflecting on the season, but for now it was time to try and re-adapt to life outside of an Antarctic Scientific Research Base.

Something I found massively helpful from last year was to spend a bit of time travelling rather than heading straight home. To be surrounded by icebergs one moment and to be landing back at London Heathrow 48 hours later is quite the jump – and taking a few weeks in South America seemed to help soften the blow. It’s the things which you simply don’t have to consider at Rothera – you don’t have to go shopping, you don’t have a bewildering array of choices available to you, and you don’t have strangers walking past you on the street. Of course, it is some of these things that we actually crave the most – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we take to them all that easily when we are presented with them again! It is not entirely inaccurate to describe life at Rothera as institutionalised! Last year I went travelling with my friend Matt. We took three weeks and made our way up through Chile, from Punta Arenas to Santiago by bus, stopping at various places along the way. I fulfilled a dream of sorts by visiting Torres del Paine – we spent a fantastic day there with perfect weather and marvelled at the views that almost seemed too perfect to be real. As can sometimes be the case with dreams they do not end when we think they might – and this firsthand experience of the breathtaking wonder of Patagonia only served to fan the flames. I was already dreaming of crossing the border and exploring the Santa Cruz Province of Argentina. It’s hard to say exactly when these dreams of Patagonia first began – I know at least that it was long before I started coming South with the British Antarctic Survey. I do remember though that the first I ever knew of it was simply the name – and for some reason, even then, the name Patagonia conjured thoughts and images of some mythical, some magical faraway land. I also remember saying to myself when I was a little older and had by then seen some pictures of the place, that it was somewhere I wanted to visit someday. Truth be told though, I’m not sure that those words ever had any belief or conviction behind them then. And the reason that I never even investigated the possibilities of such a trip when I was in my late-teens and post-university years (when many of my peers were off travelling) was because I never had the self-belief and confidence in myself for that to be a reality then. Even the things that I was most passionate about, and the things which I had a talent for, created a huge amount of anxiety and apprehension in me. I used to play football for Manchester City, but I would get so nervous that I would go for a 10km run in the morning before a match to help keep those nerves in check. And when I had finished my undergraduate course at university, I went on to study a MSc degree in the Sociology of Sport. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the course that I wanted to take, and I even had vague designs on pursuing further studies in this with a potential view to a career in research and sports writing. But after only a couple of weeks I swapped to a different MSc degree – one which did not require me to stand up in front of the group and make weekly presentations. I simply could not do it. This was not a case of your average stage fright – I would be in floods of tears at the very thought of it, and it affected every waking moment of my life. So, it’s not perhaps surprising to learn that a trip to South America at that point in time really would not have been given any consideration at all. But I think that that is ok – it’s ok to have ideas or the spark of a dream even if we are a long way from being ready for it. We have become so used to living in a society and in a world where everything must be instantaneous – instant gratification, instant validation, and we forget that things take time – time to develop and time to grow. And looking back, I knew that my younger self would never believe it – that I was on a plane out of Antarctica with another three weeks in South America stretched out before me, and this time I would be travelling alone. There was a small amount of apprehension about it, but above all I was looking forward to arriving in Punta Arenas – looking forward to wandering aimlessly through the town, marvelling at trees, and green, and flowers again, and sitting in Wake-Up café with a nice coffee and my book. Argentina would have to wait for a couple more days.