BEYOND | ANTARCTICA
www.letstravelmag.com
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Phil and the Captain’s Choice team operate a specially formed business unit for these trips called, predictably enough, Antarctica Flights. Since 1994, and beginning with just one experimental charter, the concept has taken off like wildfire with five departures now offered, one each from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. The Sydney New Year’s Eve departure, complete with jazz band, is certainly the pick of the pack. Melbourne has the privilege this year. In the early days of aerial exploration, these risky expeditions were fraught with all manner of dangers. Now, with modern satellite navigation, radar and jet-powered aircraft, the most dangerous thing you will do is take a taxi to the airport. Despite several well-publicised events, air travel is still among the safest forms of transport anywhere – significantly less hazardous than crossing the road or riding a bicycle. Our journey began, not in some windswept hut on a foreboding, snow encrusted shore, but in the Qantas Club lounge toasting our imminent adventure over the frozen continent, the planet’s coldest and driest landscape bar none. The 12-hour, 10,000km return journey spends a generous three to four hours over the Ross Sea region, an area seldom visited by tourists of any sort, air or seaborne. The first glimpses of this frozen land are heralded by increasingly dense formations of ice. Starting with solitary icebergs slowly migrating north toward oblivion, these are followed by motley fleets of floating ice. Some ‘vessels’ just large enough to transport a few penguins while others deserve their own postcode. Our first much anticipated sighting of land consists of a few scattered peaks of raw and hostile rock jutting through a dense low cloud cover indicating the Admiralty, Transantarctic and Queen Maud Mountains which form a high barrier to the west of the giant Ross Ice Shelf. As we fly further inland toward the South Pole, the cloud cover slowly abates revealing massive glaciers extruding out from between the mountains toward the sea. Somewhere
beneath us is Cape Adare, the famous landing and jumping off point for so many Antarctic missions of the early 20th Century. This is the domain of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen and we try – hopelessly – to imagine what it must have been like to haul sledges and packs over the murderous crevasses and treacherous icefields as these men fought the elements and their own wills in the quest for the South Pole. We sit transfixed at our windows watching the rolling panorama beneath us. Some ogle the massive and unimaginable geological formations, others ponder the travails of these early explorers, while the rest dream and conjure shapes within the patterns of sea ice, like gigantic frosted water lilies on a pond that stretches to forever. A sea that many, including the multinational Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, believe should become a protected reserve. Others, including New Zealand, want to expand commercial fishing into the region. Why? Because the huge, 500 million sq. km. Ross Sea basin contains one of the last relatively undisturbed, unpolluted and unexploited oceanic regions. Valuable toothfish populations and 95 other profitable species may extend under the vast permanent sheet hundreds of metres thick. At least 10 mammal species, half a dozen species of birds and over 1,000 invertebrate species also exist in the immediate area. In 2007, a monster 500kg squid was captured in the Ross Sea. Makes you wonder what else lurks in those mysterious depths. In a fitting departure, we overfly several of the bases that dot the shore including the expansive McMurdo US base and its attendant airfield, scraped out on the ice with at least three C-130 Hercules and other aircraft ready for action. NZ’s Scott Base is nearby and rather insignificant by comparison. A telling reminder that, despite the isolation, man’s hand is poised to make another critical decision about the future of this highly sensitive and most beautiful part of our planet. ➜ www.antarcticaflights.com.au