Call of the White (17 page)

I was worried that the last-minute team turmoil might make our sponsors nervous but was relieved (and grateful) that Suk Ling was willing to trust me without concern as I explained events to her. For Kaspersky Lab the new expedition website was a more pressing issue. The website would be the team's main platform for communicating our experiences to a global audience while in Antarctica. We didn't have a limitless budget but I was determined to use exciting and economical technology to make the most of what we had. We would be carrying two satellite telephones with us on the expedition, which would enable us to call anywhere in the world, just like a mobile, but we discovered we could do much more with them than that. By ringing a voicemail number we could record podcasts that could be uploaded onto our website so that anyone could listen to us talking to them direct from Antarctica; we could write SMS messages from the satellite phone to a Twitter account that would display our microblogs on our website in real time (quite literally tweeting to the South Pole, which, as far as we are aware, hadn't been tried before); and most exciting of all, I was sure that we could give a live lecture to an audience in London while sitting in a tent in Antarctica (which certainly hadn't been done before). By sharing our experience so immediately and vividly, we could engage more people and have a greater opportunity to spread our message, to motivate and inspire, and to provoke thought.

By the end of October, I was waiting for the team to arrive in the UK. The plan was for the team to be together for three or four days before we all travelled to Punta Arenas in Chile, where we would spend a week preparing and checking our equipment in readiness for our scheduled flight to Antarctica on 12 November. Kylie was the first to arrive. It had been six years since I'd last seen her but the time vanished in an instant. She hadn't changed at all but I felt like a completely different person to the young, idealistic girl she had known in Antarctica. As we hugged I wondered if she would notice the difference in me.

My modest flat wasn't big enough to accommodate the entire team plus all our kit. Instead, my parents had offered to host us at Crofton, my childhood home in West Kent. A few months before I was born, my parents and grandparents moved into this big house with large bay windows and they have lived there ever since. It was an idyllic place to grow up. Surrounded by 9 acres of woodland I spent endless summers building camps in the trees and bossing around my younger sister. Crofton has always been a busy place: my parents are natural hosts, so the house is usually full of friends and extended family. I drove there with Kylie and began sorting through the growing mountain of boxes and parcels that had been arriving all through the previous week and which were quickly filling my parents' front room to capacity. We burrowed our way in, ripping open boxes to check what was inside.

Reena and Sophia arrived early the next morning, quickly followed by Era and Steph. I introduced them all to Kylie and left them to get to know each other as I went to greet a lorry that had arrived with a delivery of enormous boxes – it was the branded clothing from Montane. I pulled out a jacket from one of the boxes and felt a wave of pride. The bright red insulated smocks were stamped with the expedition logo which stood out in prominent white and green. Kaspersky Lab logos ran along the sleeves and the hood was framed with thick wolverine trim. It looked like a jacket that real polar explorers would wear, the kind of jacket imagined in childish daydreams of adventure. Now I knew we were going on an expedition and the scale of what we had achieved in getting this far finally sank in. Two years ago the expedition had been just a dream; now it had a uniform.

Crofton was full to bursting. As well as the team, Rob the photographer had arrived, and a constant stream of local media, from TV crews to radio cars with extendable masts, came and went. My good friend Guy arrived to give us some last-minute first aid training. He showed the team how to look after a blister and ensure it didn't get infected; how to strap up a sprain with gaffer tape; how to look after a broken bone; and how to stop major bleeding. Going through all the drugs in our first aid kits he asked each of us if we had any allergies. Sophia thought that she might be allergic to ibuprofen but wasn't sure.

‘Well, there's only one way to find out,' said Guy, holding out a small white pill in the flat of his palm. Sophia looked uncertain.

‘Is this a good idea?' I asked Guy. The last thing I needed was the hospitalisation of a team member the day before our departure.

Guy looked at me seriously, ‘If it goes wrong here, Sophia can get immediate medical help. Would you rather she found out she was allergic in the middle of Antarctica?' He had a point.

Sophia took the pill and her eye promptly swelled up with a nasty blister just beneath her lower lashes. ‘Well, at least now I know,' she said shrugging it off. Within hours her eye was back to normal.

Guy taught us the recovery position but didn't bother with CPR. ‘If your heart stops you are going to need serious medical help very quickly,' he explained. ‘In Antarctica you are not going to get that help so, I hate to say it, but if your heart stops, you are dead and nothing I can teach you will change that.' He was right but it was a sobering thought.

His words made me think of a conversation I'd had with Kylie the day before. She had asked about the risk of crevasses during the expedition. Crevasses are deep cracks in the ice that can occur anywhere in Antarctica. Often covered by a layer of snow, and therefore invisible on the surface, they can be wide enough for a person to fall into and deep enough for that person to never be seen again. The thought of them made me cold with fear and I had discussed the risks exhaustively with those that had skied to the South Pole before. Crevasses usually occur where the ice is disturbed by a sudden change in topography, such as a mountain range or an ice stream. By avoiding features like this, the risk of coming across crevasse fields is reduced. We would be on skis which spread our weight, making it less likely that we would fall through any snow covered crevasses, and we were going early in the season when the snow layer over the crevasses would be strongest. We could have opted to wear harnesses and rope ourselves together so that if someone fell, the rest could, theoretically, stop them but it was impractical to ski roped together. Our only protection was to ski in single file and to be extremely observant so that if we spotted anything suspicious we could take action to avoid it.

The decision was logical and justified but whereas months ago the danger had been hypothetical and distant, it now seemed real and immediate. I couldn't shake off a feeling of dread, almost a sense of premonition. My fear, which had been mitigated by objective reasoning, now became emotionally driven. Saying goodbye to my parents as we prepared to leave reignited the fears that I had tried to rationalise out of my head. Dad is usually very matter of fact in his goodbyes but this time I noticed him staying close, putting his arm around me as we stood for photos and hugging me extra tight as he said farewell. He even blew a kiss as we drove off to the airport, in a way that he hasn't done since I was little. Both parents told me they were proud but they seemed scared in a way that they hadn't been for other trips – perhaps it was simply my own fear being reflected.

As we took off in the plane bound for Punta Arenas in Chile, I could see the white and red lights of the M25 stream away into the darkness. I pushed one fingertip against the glass of the window tracing the line of lights which I knew led back home to those I love. In that moment I wanted to be in one of those cars more than anything else in the world. Usually when I leave on a long expedition, the sadness of goodbye is tempered by the excitement of the adventure to come. This time it was different. Every fibre of my body seemed to be screaming at me to stay, to run home, not to leave – as if I was being pulled by a magnet. I told myself that the excitement would come – that as I threw myself into the plans and preparations this horrid homesickness would be squeezed out. In all other respects I felt ridiculously calm. Perhaps the reason crevasses filled my mind was because there was little else left that I could worry about; everything else had already been set in motion and there was nothing I could change, even if I'd wanted to.

Punta Arenas is a city with a population of over 150,000 but it retains the feel of a frontier town. Sandwiched between the coast and a sprawling hillside, it looks out towards the Strait of Magellan, providing a clear view of incoming storms that gather on the steely horizon. I had visited Punta once before, on my way out of Antarctica nearly a decade ago, and I remembered two things about it: the constant wind and the packs of stray dogs. As a face-full of dust was blown into my eyes and I warded a pack of dogs away from our stack of luggage on the street outside the hostel, I realised that nothing much had changed.

The hostel was a rundown backpacker haunt just like hundreds of others all over the city but it had a shabby homeliness about it and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. It was perfect. The hostel manager looked slightly bewildered as the team took over his kitchen, made themselves at home in the meeting room and filled the upstairs landing with clothing and equipment. I gathered the team together and between us we came up with an action plan for the following six days. Our biggest job was to prepare all the expedition rations. To save the cost of shipping large, weighty volumes of food from the UK we had decided to source what we could in Punta. In addition, any food we had brought with us was still in its original packaging to satisfy the Chilean customs regulations. This meant that the job of sorting the expedition food into individual daily rations had to be started from scratch in our hostel.

I had spent a long time over the previous months planning the rations in minute detail, right down to the last gram. There is a formula used by sports scientists that determines the amount of carbohydrates and protein a person will need, just from their body weight. Unfortunately, the size and shape of the members of our team varied widely from tiny Era, who weighed barely 50 kilograms, to Reena, who weighed over 70 kilograms. I was the heaviest in the team by far (as well as the tallest – I often felt like a freakish giant next to my teammates), so I decided to use my weight for all the calculations. This would mean that some of the girls would get at a least a third more carbohydrates and protein than they needed but, I reasoned, too much was better than too little.

As well as carbohydrates and proteins, I had to take into consideration our fat and calorie intake. With the weight in our sledges always my primary consideration, I had set a target of no more than 1 kilogram of food, per person, per day. The task of getting the necessary amounts of carbohydrate, protein, fat and calories into just 1 kilogram of food was time-consuming and frustrating. Trawling through the nutritional information on packets of hundreds of different foodstuffs, I'd find something that was extremely high in carbohydrates but had no fat or protein; or something that was high in protein and fat but which was extremely heavy. To make matters more complicated, I had to take into account the likes and dislikes of eight women who all ate very different food at home. Kim wanted banana chips and dried mango, Reena wouldn't eat prawn crackers, Sophia didn't want too much sweet food and, of course, I also had to make sure that nothing contained alcohol or meat products (unless I was sure they were halal) and especially not products from a cow (Reena's request as a Hindu) or a pig (Era and Kim's request).

After days of trial and error, I finally had a combination I was happy with that would fit all the requirements. For breakfast we would eat porridge with sugar and fortified milk powder and a hot chocolate. During the day we would each have a bag of snacks to munch on during our breaks. The bags would contain peanuts, sesame snaps, toffee popcorn, banana chips, chocolate and boiled sweets, and we had two sachets of high-carbohydrate sports drink to add to our water bottles. In the evening we would have a dehydrated meal, a protein drink, a hot chocolate, a soup and a packet of noodles to add to our meal.

Armed with lists of the foodstuffs we had not brought with us from the UK, the team split up and scouted the shops in the city, quickly clearing shelves of chocolate, peanuts and boiled sweets as if we were on a deranged trolley dash. Powdered soup presented a problem. The people of Punta, it appears, only like asparagus soup, as it was the only flavour we could find. Forty days of asparagus soup wasn't ideal but at least everyone liked the flavour. The most elusive item was banana chips and we had all but given up when we were directed to a tiny, brightly painted shop opposite the large supermarket in town. The shop's glass counters were divided into big bins of dried fruit, from figs to papayas, and every conceivable type of nut. Not only did the shop have banana chips but they had two varieties, sweet and salty. This sparked perhaps the most heated team discussion of the entire expedition. ‘What foolishness creates salty banana chips?' exclaimed Kim. ‘It's not a banana chip if it isn't sweet.'

‘No,' insisted Sophia. ‘We want salty. We have too much sweet stuff. Banana chips are salty.'

We were all called upon to give our verdict in the Great Banana Chip Debate, each team member tasting both varieties and stating their preference. It was clear that the only compromise was to have a mix of both but the exact proportion of sweet versus salty was haggled over with all the finesse of an international territorial dispute.

Back at the hostel, we had started a production line to prepare some 460 ration bags. Each of us took control of one ingredient. I was in charge of toffee popcorn along with Kim; Steph and Reena dealt with the peanuts, Kylie added boiled sweets, Helen took control of chocolate and Sophia the hotly debated banana chips. At first it was difficult not to eat as we worked but as the sickly smell of confectionary filled the hostel, sugar was the last thing we were craving.