Blue Ice: Travels in Antarctica by Don Pinnock

Arja Salafranca

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Blue ice: Travels in Antarctica Author: Don Pinnock Publisher: Double Storey in association with Getaway magazine ISBN: 1770130136 Format: Softcover Length: 245 Pages: 224 Price: R175.16

Why would anyone choose to visit Antarctica? It’s a landmass where summer temperatures rarely rise above zero degrees Celsius and where you’re kitted out with special clothes that include inners, outers and a middle layer. It’s hardly a holiday camp.

And yet there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in travel writer Don Pinnock’s mind that summering in Antarctic was top of his list. It meant missing Christmas with his family and being away for a number of months. It meant going with the South African SANAE team and mucking in and helping when necessary, digging out blasts of ice and so on.

His first experience of being on the ice continent makes for vivid reading:

The cold is shocking. Breathing through my nose causes the cloth of the balaclava to ice up almost immediately, limiting the airflow. But if I breathe through my mouth, my lungs feel as though they’re filling up with thorns. Clouds seem to be exploding out of the low sun and shooting over my head. I trudge … over dry snow. It’s like walking on squeaky polystyrene balls.

But Antarctica has fascinated him since he was a boy, when he was inspired by his grandmother and a vague, unproved idea that she was related to the explorer Sir Robert Falcon Scott. The veracity of the claim was never proved, “but it ensured that I grew up knowing where Antarctica was and that heroes came from the continent”.

Heroes certainly come from this continent, and Blue Ice is neatly divided into chapters on these heroes, interspersed with Pinnock’s own experience of the place. From James Cook, who was part of the first crew to cross the Antarctic Circle and may have sighted ice fields in 1775, to the famous Ernest Shackleton, who endured a near-disastrous exploration in 1916, Antarctica is full of tales of adventurers lured to the continent in search of wealth and other peoples.

From Blue Ice Image courtesy of Don Pinnock

Pinnock’s own time was spent writing in the SANAE 4 base, exploring parts of the continent with members of the research team. Today nations send teams to the ice continent to understand the nature of global ocean currents and weather patterns, bird life on the sub-Antarctic islands and ice shelf, as well as to study Antarctic animal life, which includes seal, fish, algae and seabed communities. The ozone layer was first discovered over this continent, and research continues. The state of the environment and global warming are also discussed in this book, but while Pinnock does not dwell on this, he certainly makes readers aware that global warming and the rising of the sea levels can have dire consequences all around:

Antarctica feels eternal, but it is not. Ice is hyper-sensitive to any rise in temperature, especially one which can transform it from a solid to a liquid state. And the earth is warming up … temperature rise in the southern regions is causing problems for bases around Antarctica’s perimeter.

In addition to being a superb chronicler, Pinnock is also a top-rate photographer. His pictures make this icy continent come alive in the high-quality pages of this book. There are photographs of white ice, frosty and looking like chunks of cake icing; the blue ice of crevasses; ice that is silver-tinged, looking like waves of an ocean; and ice streams, undulating patterns of ice glimpsed from helicopters while adelie penguins tipping daintily across the frozen surface. And of the “sun dogs”, the illusion of three suns rising yellow in the sky, distilling the beauty and diversity of the natural beauty of the continent.

Feeling as though he hasn’t quite got to grips with the continent, having spent so much time with others at the SANAE base, Pinnock receives permission to spend a few nights in an isolated caboose (a sort of hut). He’s not quite alone, however, as he is given a babysitter in the form of Beneke, a good man who nevertheless seems to spend most of every day (and night) snoring away in blissful oblivion. Pinnock notes that being on this continent does strange things to your sleep patterns: some sleep every three hours, others are up till the early morning. But here at last Pinnock is alone, and attempts to understand something of this vast, isolated, mostly uninhabitable (and uninhabited) continent. He writes in his diary:

Time passes here in no-time space. I can measure it on my watch, but it seems to make no sense. Daylight lasts so long – 21 hours – and there is nothing to indicate its passing. No lengthening of the shadows from trees or buildings.

Pinnock returns home after months on the icy continent. It’s late January and darkening winter is approaching. The 80-odd South African research team members are going home, leaving just a skeleton staff of a handful of people. You can only imagine that those in the winter team must be made of strong stuff and have plenty of inner resources or be pretty easy-natured to survive a winter in an isolated base with just a few other people.

Travelling changes you, and time in such a strange, surreal place must affect you tremendously. I would have liked to read more about Pinnock’s personal journey and about these changes and realisations. The Antarctic is clearly an awe-inspiring continent and his book cracks open some of the mystery of this icy place. Some of his descriptions are truly beautiful and you feel that perhaps he is only just starting to come to terms with his own feelings about this vast continent just as it’s time to leave.

What really marks Antarctica is its simplicity. All metaphors or analogies are trashed by the enormous singularity of its interconnected ice sheets. Driving over the flat white surface, everything outside the cab merges into a visual zero, a mind-blanking minimalism. In the deepest moments of meditation, Buddhists seek to enter the clear white light of the void, the ultimate state of nothingness. I’m driving through it.

Click here to read Arja Salfranca's interview with Don Pinnock

LitNet: 31 January 2006

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