A very long journey

I have already arrived in Antarctica. I could write many lines about this continent, but we will talk about that later and now focus on describing the long journey that brought me here. At the moment, I am 13,300 km from Switzerland, and I arrived after crossing half the world in three trains, four planes and a short trip in a motorized snow vehicle (see the interactive map). I am not particularly proud of having resorted to so many plane trips, because the plane is a very polluting means of transport, but to know the continent better we must take measurements and carry out experiments on site with a low impact. So I need to get some really good information to make the whole trip worth it.

To reach Antarctica, you must first go to one of the three gateways to the continent, depending on which part of Antarctica you wish to approach: Ushuaia (Argentina) or Punta Arenas (Chile), in the south from South America, to access the Antarctic Peninsula, Hobart (Australia) or Christchurch (New Zealand) to reach the Ross Sea and the bases located to the east of the Amery ice cap, and Cape Town (South Africa) to reach the Queen Maud Land region. It was the latter that was my destination.

The trip began on December 16 in Davos, where I took three trains to Zurich airport to catch the plane that took me to Cape Town after a stopover in Istanbul, delays included. It was upon arrival in Cape Town that I experienced the first anecdote of the expedition. Already on the plane, I knew that it was some of the Belgians who would accompany me to the station, and I tried in vain to spot them already during the flight. At the airport, I meet Allen, our contact person, and my flight companions. We introduce ourselves one after the other and when the last one, a Belgian named Alexander, hears my name, he says to me: “Sergi, I know you from Juan Carlos”. And he was right, I didn't recognize him at first, but we had met during the 2018 Antarctic campaign at the Spanish Juan Carlos I base, where I worked as a weather forecaster while he installed some instruments. What a coincidence! Or maybe not – the number of researchers in Antarctica is very low.