Tea in the Library (33 page)

So this was all in a day's touring in Antarctica. As I hung over the rail on the viewing deck for hour after hour, snapping a ridiculous number of photographs and gazing awe-inspired, I saw mountains that made even the Himalaya seem moderate, and ice and snow as far as the eye could see, often in dazzling sunlight. It was summertime, after all. On the Antarctic Peninsular, that usually means temperatures of about minus 5 degrees up to highs of about 3 degrees Celsius. Occasionally wind made it seem a lot colder, but the days were often quite balmy
—
relatively speaking. Being in Antarctica was a huge dream come true for me, and the trip had been in the planning for a long time. No, I wasn't exactly Mawson or Scott, or even Shackleton 
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this was no grueling adventure. I was on a cosy ship with skilled crew and expedition leaders, and a bunch of elderly American tourists, albeit of the more adventurous kind. Oh, and a cheerful group of Portuguese doctors, too. The expedition staff were Australians and Canadians
—
“Canadians know ice”, one of them told me, explaining why there were so many of them. I was well-looked after and assisted in my personal adventure each step of the way. Almost.

I loved just watching the extraordinary world around us as we cruised along. I adored the abundant wildlife
—
humpback whales swam about the bow of the ship like dolphins. Penguins dodged through the water like flying fish and massed on promontories and rocky foreshores. Seals could be spotted on ice floes and the sky teemed with birds. The wildlife was uniquely unafraid of us, presumably because of their protected and un-hunted status. When I did venture out on Zodiac trips, it was absolutely worthwhile. A humpback swam by our little inflatable, its eponymous hump surfacing just a few metres away! We moved up close enough to a family of seals on an ice floe to almost smell their fishy breath. Huge towering greenish icebergs, with their surfaces gouged into fantastical grooves and waves and patterns filled the bay. I joined the “photog-raphy Zodiac”, which means we spent 20 minutes circling the same iceberg until every photographer on the boat had had their fill. Bliss, as far I was concerned.

When we went ashore, the penguin colonies were a huge attraction. We were drilled to mind the rules about keeping our distance from the penguins, but if you sat on a rock for a few minutes, you'd be surrounded by cautious but curious birds in no time. Everyone took too many penguin photos. How could you not? Is there a more photogenic animal anywhere? At one beautiful bay, the Gentoo penguins dived among the “bergy bits”, chunks of ice fallen from the glacier, which littered the foreshore. They roosted on top of the hill, squawking and flapping to protect their young (two per penguin father) from the circling skuas (these birds eat baby penguins, apparently). They formed little “penguin highways” from the foreshore up the hill to the colony, following each other up and down on the same track until a groove was worn into the snow. Here, I climbed a snowy hillside trail, to revel in a view across the bay and down onto the glacier face. I'm not very good with snow
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I'm from Australia 
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but the slope here was mild, and the trail was broad, and I very much enjoyed the climb.

One reason I had chosen to take this tour with this particular tour company was because they offered the chance to actually camp out on the Antarctic continent. This was a huge attraction for me! Not everyone on board was quite as keen, but a reasonable number of people decided to give it try. One evening after dinner (we didn't attempt eating on the continent) we took the Zodiacs over to land, climbed up to the top of a snowy ridge, and dug ourselves little cra-dles in the snow. We put down a rubber mat, a sleeping bag inside a bivvy sack, loaded on very piece of clothing we had with us, and settled for the night. Of course, it didn't go that smoothly for everyone. A few things blew away into the bay. Some people changed their minds and wanted to go back to the cosy ship, moored invitingly in the bay in front of us, with its lights winking in the gloaming. But I was thrilled to bits with the experience. Actually sleeping on the Antarctic Continent! Wow! Penguins scuttled about down on the foreshore. It didn't actually get dark
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just a couple of hours of deeper twilight
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but I was so swaddled in clothes and bags and beanies that I actually slept quite well. We had to be careful to ensure minimum impact on the environment, which is one reason we didn't take food, and next morning we shoved snow back into the little holes we had dug, packed up and went back to the ship. You might be wondering about the toilet arrangements. I won't describe them, but suffice to say they involved a plastic drum named “Mr. Stinky”.

So far so good. I had coped with the seasickness, the wobbly ladder down the side of the ship, the proximity of very large sea mammals, climbing on snow, and Mr. Stinky. I had also managed to suspend worrying about the shop at home and the ultimatum from the management. This wasn't too difficult once I was up from my sick bed and reveling in the visual beauty and the new challenges. I am quite keen on trying things that push me out of my comfort zone a bit. I have always found that, in the end, I grow and learn and feel a glow of achievement. Things like driving on the wrong side of the road, flying in a small plane, public speaking
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or, I don't know, opening a bookshop? For everyone the point at which the boundaries are pushed will be different. There are plenty of people who would read that list I have just suggested and be puzzled that everyone doesn't do those things every day. But my personal boundaries are what they are, and I like to push them occasionally. I like to learn and grow and try new challenges. Not all the time, of course, but sometimes. In Antarctica, I had pushed quite a few personal comfort zones, in traveling there on my own, coping with the wretched seasickness (which from past experience I was quite well aware would happen), and then getting involved with the excursions. I was feeling good, and proud of myself.

Then … (you knew this was coming, didn't you?) there was a shore excursion where I got just a little too confident and pushed a little too far outside the comfort zone. We had gone ashore to visit a Gentoo penguin colony, and I'd done the wobbly ship's walkway, and the leaping into the sea to wade ashore, and I was feeling cocky. The colony we were to visit was up a snowy incline
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been there, done that, I said to myself, with way too little forethought, and up I started.

Have I mentioned that I'm not very good with snow? This particular slope was
much
steeper than the previous hike. It zigzagged up the hill, where others had blazed the trail, and I had walked up two or three zigs and zags before I looked back down
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and froze. I immediately decided that I was going no further, I would sit on a convenient rock and regroup, and then descend. The sitting on the rock part went OK, but I just could not contemplate the descent without horror. I was quite convinced that if I stood up and faced downhill, I would tumble down. The fear was quite paralyzing. So much for the brave adventurer.

Now, there were plenty of people about. Indeed, as I sat glued to my rock, others were cheerfully trudging uphill, waving hello as they confidently and competently ascended. So not only did I feel scared rigid, I also felt stupid. But then that feeling was mitigated somewhat by the fact that others began to join me. Before long, there were three or four of we frightened souls sitting at the junction of a zig and a zag, perched on the rock or plopped in the snow, wondering how the hell we were ever going to get down, and
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almost as mortifying
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how to pretend to the others that we weren't really such incompetent cowards. One lady sitting with us was blessed with a husband who had no trouble at all with the slope. When he came by, I thought he would gallantly rescue her. But all he did was urge her to get up and keep going because “what was the problem?” She was practically crying with fear. He went on up and left her, presumably planning to fetch her on the way back.

One member of our little troupe of people
way
outside their comfort zones was a big guy named Don,who was a squid fisherman from Newport Beach, US. He had been the life and soul of the ship's dining table. Now he was cracking jokes as he sat, dressed from head to toe in vivid yellow waterproofs, stuck on the side of a steep snowy slope in Antarctica, with several basket case women. You have to hand it to him. While we were sitting, we watched a Chinstrap penguin (who really shouldn't have been there, because this was a Gentoo colony) work its way laboriously up the slope, making its own ‘penguin highway' to the top. This distracted us for a time. When the penguin reached the people highway that our group had made when zigzagging up, it found a nice cosy indentation, and decided to sit there. So now we had a large yellow fisherman, several ladies with no head for heights, and a sleeping penguin.

About this time, our eccentric group was noticed by Dutch, our fearless expedition leader, who walked up from the foreshore to investigate. As he ascended, he noticed the penguin, and stopped, because the rules are that you don't approach the wildlife too closely. He enquired about our problem, and we told him we couldn't get down. This seemed to puzzle him, as of course he could keep his balance on the steep slope, and found it hard to believe that we couldn't. His solution to the situation was to tramp out a new route through the snow, skirting the penguin widely, say to us “there you are!”, and then head on up to the rest of the group. Since the new trail was no less steep than the old trail
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in fact, possibly more so
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we were no better off.

Now, I don't know about the others. They may have told this story to their friends when they got home and it may have seemed quite different to them. But I was so far out of my comfort zone that I was close to hysteria. Because of the people around, I really didn't get into the mode of trying to figure things out for myself. Apart from an attempt to slide down the trail on my bottom
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thwarted by the penguin
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I didn't really try to use my own brain to solve the situation. I just waited for someone to rescue me, and grew increasingly distraught that they didn't seem to be doing that. Then Don began to be funny, and I dissolved into hysterical giggling. The amusement arose from Don's efforts to get the penguin to move, without breaking the rules about annoying the wildlife (or at least not letting anyone see him doing so). He began by surreptitiously throwing bits of snow at it; and this was followed by cat imitations. Would penguins be afraid of cats? Probably this has never been tested. I can report that this penguin was unmoved by either tactic. Don's stream of wise-cracks was probably intended to keep up everyone's spirits, which it sort of did, but being extremely amused and extremely scared simultaneously was very weird.

The end of this sorry tale is that our plight was noticed by the staff on the shore, and they came to rescue us. People came back down from their trek to the top and assisted us. I was escorted down the hill by Alexei, a Russian sailor, on whom I leaned quite mortifyingly. I just could not keep my balance on that slope. But bless Alexei, or I'd still be there.

When I reached the shore, I sat apart for a while on a rock, and watched two penguins strutting and diving, put my head my hands, and tried to keep a sense of perspective. Sorry to say, I was not successful. When I made it back to the ship, a motherly American lady asked me how it had gone, and I dissolved into tears. I spent the next two hours hiding in a wing chair in the ship's library, trying to stop crying, and speaking sternly to myself, to try to regain my composure. I had certainly pushed outside my comfort zone, and had not coped. Moreover, plenty of people found the situation that had scared me to be perfectly easy and do-able, adding severe inadequacy to the mix of emotions. The incident provided me with plenty to reflect upon.