A friend emailed me yesterday with a link to NASA's instructions for dealing with psychotic astronauts in space. It turns out there are detailed, written procedures that say the astronaut's crewmates should "bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary".
As long as the duct tape is stored in my sledge and not Tony's, we should be fine.
Also, spotted in the 'travel tips' section of this month's Wanderlust Magazine:
In Antarctica, take a walking pole (or two). Conditions underfoot can be treacherous.
Wowser. I'm not sure how this expedition passed me by, especially as Tony and I were in Greenland that year, but it's something very special indeed: in July 2005, three young Norwegians, Niklas Norman, Trygve Nakling Kristiansen and Carl Gustav Rye Florence kite-skied from the south coast of Greenland (Narsaq) to the north (Qaanaaq) in an amazing 21 days. That's a total distance of 2,300km. Their average speed for the last nine days of the expedition was an incredible 210km/day, with their best day being a world record distance of 442.7 km in 24 hours.
The contrast with my next expedition, SOUTH, couldn't be more marked. Tony Haile and I are setting out to walk 600km further than this expedition, and we're expecting it to take us three months longer than it took these guys to cross Greenland using kites.
The video is a great example of how proficient people (Norwegians especially!) are getting at using traction kites to haul sledges over huge distances in polar conditions. A lot of people ask whey we're not using kites in Antarctica this year (SOUTH will be an entirely human-powered expedition, and if we're successful, the longest unsupported polar journey in history).
The answer is that kiting hasn't even entered our minds. The two disciplines of 'manhauling' and kite-skiing are now so far removed from each other that you might as well ask an Olympic rower why they don't windsurf, or why a marathon runner doesn't use inline skates. Walking when we could be using kites might sound foolhardy to some, and the idea of expeditions aimed at athletic rather than academic endeavour certainly seems anathema to many. I was encouraged, therefore, to read that Fridtjof Nansen described his brand of polar expedition (he was the first to pioneer small ski teams pulling lightweight sleds, more than 100 years ago) as "the sportsman's method".
That's not to say that kiting hasn't entered my mind for future expeditions, and this video has certainly set a few ideas bubbling away… Well done Niklas, Trygve and Carl Gustav!
Apologies for the silence – the blog has taken a back seat for a bit. Life has been pretty crazy for the past few weeks, and I've just finished a fortnight-long tour of schools around the UK, speaking to nineteen schools (often two or three in the same day) to promote the Ice Edge competition.
I think what I had to say was well received, but the range of reactions I saw was amazing; from being fixed by the indifferent glare of the inner-city Liverpool teenager with stripes shaved into his eyebrow to spotting the Belfast girl hiding behind her scarf when I talked about the polar bear Pen Hadow and I encountered in 2001. I ate school dinners, drank overbrewed tea and signed autographs with chewed-up pencils. Schools are, I decided, simultaneously the toughest, and the most rewarding audience a speaker could ever hope for.
Speaking of rewarding, the best experience of the fortnight came on the very last morning, when I spoke to the wonderful Dyffryn School in South Wales. Not only did I experience the warmest welcome of any of the schools I spoke at (amazingly, some schools didn't even offer me a cup of tea after we'd travelled halfway across the UK to speak to them) but the pupils there had also already produced some fantastic work towards the competition, and they seemed both enlightened and passionate about the environment. One piece of work, by Alex Hollet, nearly brought tears to my eyes. He'd spent days making a giant Arctic scene, contained in a huge white-painted box. There was a poem written on the lid, and the title of this post comes from two lines of his work:
We drive our cars and that seems neat.
Have we forgotten we've got feet?
You can see more photos of Alex's work here (and a zoomed-in version of the poem here).
Somewhere in amongst all the talks I managed to move to a new flat in Parsons Green. I'll post some photos of it soon.
Last up, a few other things I've been meaning to share:
- Rosie Stancer's 2007 solo North Pole expedition. I've been harbouring a secret desire to head North alone again this spring, but couldn't find either the sponsorship or the time to do it in the style that it deserves. Rosie is a great friend of mine, she's been training like a maniac, she's one of the most driven people I know, and she deserves to pull it off. I can't wait to follow her progress.
