The Longest Day

"One o clock melts into two o clock melts into morning

In this never ending day where shadows wax and wane

And conjure up strange images

Of sleep

In the world of insomniacs."

Back in Christchurch with the shadow of the blinds painting me zebra, it’s hard to believe this is the same sun that stood watch over my entire Antarctica trip. It’s a good place to start a narrative though because although most of the trip was like an action movie on fastforward playing out in a giant freezer, the sun stayed lazy and took its time.

During the summer months it never gets dark in Antarctica so in some ways it is like walking right into a Dali painting, the kind where the sky hangs like treacle and melted clocks prevent the future from ever happening. Only in some ways though because even though the desert landscape fits and the shadows seem grotesque at 3am, the heat is missing. We got a fitting surrealist welcome when we arrived into Scott Base, with the five suns of a ‘sundog’ halo up above that could have come from a scientific manual.

Back home in NZ everyone knows that sun = summer = sunscreen, and it’s no different in Antarctica. No different except for the fact that there is no ‘no burn’ time and protection is essential even at 2am. It was a bizarre feeling to be reaching to the SPF100 well past midnight and even stranger having to remember to dab it up into your nostrils because of the strength of the reflected UV rays. It was equally bizarre to be digging a snow cave at 11pm, midnight, 1am and still have our pit lit up like a stage. We figured the whole sleep thing could wait and the hyperactive sun did nothing to dissuade us from that view.

One thing that no one reminds you to pack when you head down South is a pair of togs. Really they ought to be essential. The reflected light creates a far better sun bed than any white sand beach ever could and some days the sun feels warmer than back home. That may of course have something to do with the layers of black thermals soaking it up and causing us to pose as if we were in an advert for Speights as ‘Southern Women’, but we all came home with particularly attractive goggle tans and surprisingly brown hands.

Some members of our group took sunbathing more seriously than the casual strip down, with one lad digging a ditch across the main walkway outside his tent. He asked me if I was wondering what he was doing and I nodded, perplexed. Was it a polar bear trap? A trench to lie in and snap paparazzi photos of the tutors? In fact it turned out to be a sunbathing trench. Designed to maximize the natural light resource. Unfortunately the construction was voted to be too much of a Health and Safety hazard because not everyone was familiar was the old NZ adage ‘slip slop slap and wrap’.

In the words of Robert W. Service, ‘there are strange things done in the midnight sun’. This tepid 9am chink of morning knows more than it is letting on. More tales from The Ice will follow, but in the meantime don’t forget the sunscreen.