Mel Thunderbolt | Week One Antarctica – Touching Base
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Week One Antarctica – Touching Base

*** FIRST UPDATE FROM ANTARCTICA ***
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It’s been over a week on the Ice and it’s taken all this time to adjust to life here.
Everything is so surreal. It feels like I am on another planet.

 

I am at a Latitude of 71 degrees south and it sure is freezing. I’m wearing three pairs of thermals, another two layers plus balaclavas and beanies.

 

Everything here is frozen, which makes everything take ten times longer to do. Getting dressed, cooking, even walking.

Eighteen of us are all camped in one man tents on the ice.

I’m still trying to get used to the sun never going down and it always being light and I spend most of my sleeping time trying to keep warm, so I’m not getting much sleep.

 

The wind has picked up and started gusting to about 30 knots and so the temperature at the moment is about minus -25/-30 degrees.
I thought my tent might blow away with me in it this morning from around 3am.

 

I drove a snowmobile today for the first time – to go drop off our grey water down a crevasse which was fun.

 

Other than that, all good, cooking lots, loving the team I’m here with but struggling to type because my hands are so numb.

 

Mel Thunderbolt
melissa.sail@gmail.com