February 20 and we are the most southern ship in the world!

We stripped off our life jackets and headed out for the hut or simply to wander.

Hello - we are under there somewhere! I resorted to using my new camera (Lumix) because my trusty iPhone turned up its toes in the cold. I tucked it inside all that ‘stuff’ and later it revived, poor thing.

This is all original stuff and left just how it was found albeit cleaned up a little.



Now this? This is seal blubber. Actual blubber from the early 1900s preserved in the cold all this time. They used it for various things including cooking and light.

The hut had stables attached (see at the side). Here poor ponies were housed. How Scott ever thought that they could survive in the bitter conditions of the Antarctic I can’t imagine. Animals were brought along on these expeditions as transport and food! Ponies? what madness. They died of course.

Having passed Cape Royds on Ross Island with a promise to return, we headed to Cape Evans where an expedition hut from the 1900s still stands. This is the site from which Scott and a couple of his expedition party left for the South Pole tragically never to return. It was a dark and bleak promontory.

The shell of the hut has been rebuilt but what remained inside is as it was left, including the meteorology station, 100 odd years ago.  Such privations we couldn’t imagine. We felt like intruders picking our way through the remnants inside and out of the Cape Evans hut.

The ice sculptures on the beach were crazy - carved by wind and sea they looked like weird mushrooms from a crazy magic mushroom dream.


Satellite image of Ross Island showing the two hut locations we visited that day. Towering behind that dark smudge east from the Capes, is the infamous Mt Erebus. It was to loom quietly in the background for a number of days.  Awesome.

Later that day we returned to Cape Royds with the hope of landing in order to visit Shackleton’s hut.  A landing was possible but it promised to be rather rough followed by an even rougher climb over a rocky ridge to reach the hut; access to the hut was limited because it was adjacent to a protected penguin colony. Although I was very interested in Shackleton, I didn’t go ashore because the climb to the hut looked a bit too challenging for me.  Turns out it was rather precarious; one passenger fell amongst the rocks and had to be rescued by our wonderful Russian sailors. Lindsay came back to the ship rather shattered after having raced ahead of the group to get help and in the process strained his already compromised rib muscles - and that’s another story. Times like this I become very aware of my less then ideal fitness levels. Next time ...... I’ll be better prepared physically!
We had a very late dinner that night.