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The aircraft is a Hercules C -130, super -impressive. You arrived on this small bus, and you see this monster plane and you enter the back. Then you sit next to each other in this longitudinal seat. And then it is a seven-hour trip without a toilet, with some snacks, lots of words around you-you are sitting for the first time not seeing a bit of Antarctica.
You can see these great snow shelves from the little windows that are there. The first thing you see when you move away is ice everywhere. You are really new in this environment, and sometimes it feels a bit like being on another planet.
There is an Italian station there, and we were supposed to stay one day. However what we learned very quickly is that in French we say, There is no prognostic in AntarcticaMeaning, “There is no forecast in Antarctica” because the weather is extremely unexpected. So, instead of having one night, we stayed for about a week.
This station is just a logistical; It does not mean hosting people and those who live there prevent others from coming to it it is a real logistic challenge for people working there, so they want to leave us as fast as possible. However, the weather is so unwanted that you can not just go with the aircraft and internal. You have to wait until the weather is stable and the pilot says, “I’m ready to fly,” because it has the final word.
I still had my data problem in advance and I was trying to connect to the Internet. There, it was like the Internet of the 90s – you know, Beep beep beepThe I tried to log in, and finally, probably two or three hours later, on a computer, I reached the point where it said, “Okay, I’m going to log in to your account so please please please give me your phone number please give me your phone number. I’m going to send you an SMS to log in to you.” It was double verification, and it was not working because obviously, there is no phone service. So because of this double verification I could not access my data.
Finally, we took a plane. It is a small, a baseler BT -6767 aircraft, which comes from Canada to Antarctica and then returns to Canada at the end of the season. It took four hours for the aircraft to ride. This is a non-pressed aircraft. You have confirmed all your clothes to be ready to go out to Concardia, as it is about minus 30 Celsius. We were extremely scared.
The first thing after landing in Concordia was this dizziness, Vertigo. What I didn’t know when I arrived there is that you are 3,200 meters above sea level, so you feel a bit of height. Four hours later on this small aircraft, where you only see white flatness and nothing else, you come down to Concordia.
From a distance, you see the station. That station seems to be so small because there is nothing literally around it – no hill, nothing. And you have this little StomachAs we speak in French, like butterflies, because you know, “Wow, it’s going to be my house for a year.” We came down to the Concordia station, and the crew had barely spent a year and now leaving the station, was waiting for us and welcomed us very warmly. They got inside our station because we were sometimes afraid of high-high illness. They want to make sure that no one is carrying anything heavy, we are not doing physical activities. They told us, “Stay quiet the next few days.”
The station is made with two towers, with 18 faces for each tower. It’s basically white, with some orange and this is what. You enter through a tunnel between the two towers. You take off your boots and leave all your things there. It’s quite small Then you can go to the left, which is the “quiet tower”. Inside, you have a shepherd, laboratory and hospital. It has three floors. The middle floor is the dormites and the top floor is the laboratory. It is called the “quiet tower” to keep it calm. Then we go from the entrance to the other tower to the other. It has technical things. On the second floor, there is a video room for movies and sports rooms. At the top, you have a living room, eating area and kitchen.
Within five minutes, you have traveled to your new home. This is extremely impressive because you think, “Someone had to make it in the middle. Someone had to take the first step.” And it’s simply incredible. So many people go to Antarctica with nothing. We arrived here, and we have the luxury of staying this building to protect us from this environment.
So far outside the world. We saw a lot of pictures of Antarctica and we probably read a lot of books, but you were never in the center of Antarctica, which is quite different. No life – no birds, no trees – literally nothing, nothing but ice and wind.