SNOW Alps 25-26 web - Flipbook - Page 106
group expeditions. An afternoon hike around Port Lockroy
– whaling station, then British Antarctic post, currently the
U.K.’s most southerly post office – is nixed on account of busily
breeding gentoo penguins. Instead, the post office comes
aboard, complete with stamps and a little red mailbox. As
expedition leader Brendon Kleyn explained after the earlier
organized frisson of a group polar dip, where, one by one the
willing jumped, tethered to the ship, into the -1 Celsius water:
“We start with plan A. In Antarctica, we often end up on plan M.
And sometimes plan Z.”
One morning, as we wait for a weather window to kayak
around Mikkelsen Harbour, I chat with Gigi, an engaging young
snowboard instructor from Ushuaia, the funky Argentine
outpost that welcomed many of the 80,000 travellers who set
foot on Antarctica in 2024-25 alone. Ushuaia is also a famous
annual haunt of many World Cup ski teams, in search of
summer snow at the resort 20 miles from town. When she’s
not teaching during the Southern Hemisphere winter, Gigi is
an expedition guide, at sea for two months at a stretch during
austral summer.
Her long dark hair lashes across wind-flushed cheeks, the
acid-yellow of her jacket vivid against a steel-grey sky. Together,
we watch albatross dip and dive for krill – permanent nomads
of the sea, coming to land only to breed, I learn.
Photo courtesy of Leslie Woit
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