Riding the Ice Wind: By Kite and Sledge across Antarctica

BUT just as this makes this only a middlin' read for me, it will probably be a great 'hit' and stunningly good read for others. View all 6 comments. Sep 30, Waven rated it really liked it Shelves: I really enjoyed this book. In turns funny, touching, inspiring, and painful, it was a wonderful story that only got better with a second reading. Like so many men before him, Alastair Nicoll looked at the encroaching mediocrity and predictability of his life and felt the pull of wilderness, of open skies and untamed wind.

And what more pristine continent, what wider sky and wilder wind than Antarctica? So after two years of planning in England and two weeks on an ice shelf waiting out bad weath I really enjoyed this book. So after two years of planning in England and two weeks on an ice shelf waiting out bad weather and plane repairs, Alastair's expedition struck off across the "blank space on the map.

With echoes of the famous Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen expeditions, Riding the Ice Wind 's traveling quartet of Alastair, Paul, Pat, and David face more than just brutal physical conditions in their push for the Pole and beyond. They found a land where bad decisions and bad luck can mean injury, evacuation, or death; where success is measured first in survival, second in how many limbs and appendages survived with you, and only much later in whether or not the original plan was completed; and where your traveling companions are your first and only safety net against complete disaster.

Throughout these trials, Alastair - who admits he is not a polar explorer and never will be - shares openly his thoughts, hopes, fears, and experiences This way, the reader occupies an intimate position, seeing and experiencing the journey much as Alastair did, even privy to the privy. It may be "too much information" for some, but it is an authentic portrait of life on the ice and is offered up in good humor. This isn't a macho tale of a snowy Rambo but the story of an ordinary man - ordinary men - called to extraordinary places, trying to make sense of life and survive fickle and often alien environments.

For many, Alastair's journey across Antarctica seems about as far removed from their day-to-day life as imaginable. And yet the heart of the journey, the impetus to go and the challenges he faces within himself, are found in just about every facet of the human condition.

Riding the Ice Wind: By Kite and Sledge across Antarctica

He begins in a terribly common position, lost in his own life, stifled by predictability, numbed by routine, restless and searching for something to make him feel alive again. Longing for adventure and something big enough to be seen as a real achievement, torn by social expectations and responsibilities to family, facing the threats of public failure and financial ruin, Alastair explores the same themes of life we all face and finds answers to many of his questions in unexpected places. Full of humor and wisdom, yearning and disillusionment, victory and failure, it is a wonderful book and a worthy read for anyone.

Sep 10, Karen rated it really liked it. Living and working in London in his late twenties, Nicoll found himself discontent with life and thinking more and more about doing something about it. And then a friend passed away in a tragic accident. It was at the funeral that he made the decision to change. To do something to make his friend proud. He told his girlfriend, who later became his wife, that he was leaving his job and organizing an expedition across Antarctica. And then he set out to make it happen.

For two years he planned and or Living and working in London in his late twenties, Nicoll found himself discontent with life and thinking more and more about doing something about it. For two years he planned and organized and searched for money and studied the routes of famous polar explorers Amundsen and Scott and Shackleton.

And he put together a team of 4, two who had been to Antarctica before and two who had not. He was one of the two who had not. In Riding the Ice Wind , Nicoll shares the entire process of his expedition, from making the decision, to returning home at the end of it. Along the way, he writes brilliant description of one of the planet's most desolate places and shares a lot of his own thoughts on the nature of what our lives have become, full of racing from one busy place to the next, never stopping to just be.

It's a fascinating story full of physical strain and frostbite and every hardship you can imagine, and he tells the story in such a way that I simultaneously long to go to and never want to see Antarctica. I really enjoyed this book and found myself flipping to the epilogue on more than one occasion just to make sure that everything turned out okay. What I loved most about this book was the fact that it's the story of a normal, average guy. He graduated from college and had a job and a wife and a baby on the way. By all accounts, he had a successful life.

The kind of life most people aspire to. And yet, he wanted to do something more. To leave his mark on the world somehow. I could relate to that in so many ways. I think most people can. We all have dreams. And along the way we give up those dreams for experiences that are socially acceptable and average.

But through this book, I felt awakened. Like it's really possible to go out and live those dreams. Of course, there is also the not-so-veiled warning that the romanticized view of our dreams isn't always the reality. But I've always believed the things that are worth it are usually difficult. And Riding the Ice Wind is the story of a really difficult experience that was worth it in the end. Sep 15, Toby rated it really liked it Shelves: All in all, I'd say in general that this isn't a great adventure book. There but still Nowhere Chapter 7: Family Matters Chapter 8: Fly on my Wind Chapter 9: A New Horizon Chapter The Icefall Chapter The Layer Cake Chapter Down and Out Chapter Silence Valley Chapter The Sword of Damocles Chapter Difficult Decisions Chapter Divide and Rule Chapter Heat Miser Chapter Travelling without Moving Chapter The South Pole Chapter Leaving the End of the Earth Chapter The Winds of Change Chapter Touching the Void Chapter The Final Burst Chapter An End and a Beginning Epilogue.

But it is answered beautifully in this book. What impressed me most about this journey was the team. That is real courage. Getting on and enduring, with a smile. I know all of the team, except David, and I am so full of admiration for them, as men, as friends and as adventurers. I have known Al since he was 13 and I have realised over the years that he possesses a rare quality that life often rewards. Toil, sweat and tears. Hard work, never quitting. And of course he possesses the eyes of a dreamer, one of T. Al, Paul, David and Pat have my greatest admiration. Now go home and enjoy a beer, please.

George Bernard Shaw We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the mid-life crisis. We can instantly recognise its distinctive and incongruous couplings — the uplifted blonde with the down-slung grey, the slow body in the fast car, the ostentatious outfits but the thinning plumage — but we are less familiar with its quarter-life counterpart. A decade after leaving school and looking ahead to a life of repetitive drudgery like a goldfish in an aquarium, those hitting their late twenties or early thirties can often also face their own, quieter, crisis of direction.

While the mid-life crisis is essentially Epicurean — characterised by indulgence — the quarter-life crisis is more Stoic. Rather than wanting to be in society, it wants to be outside it. It wants to get its kicks from something of substance — rather than from substances. It aspires to reinvention rather than reliving. After my first five years of professional life, I felt a little empty — as if nothing in the current circle of my existence had the capacity to truly stir me.

Your future spreads out before you and can seem so interminable, so dull, so filled with routine tasks — each successive day the same as the next, the career ladder so hierarchical, and promotion won by time-serving, conservatism and petty politics. It is the world of precedent — you learn by copying what those have done before you, all risks nullified. The formula of each year punctuated only by the odd holiday spent going to the same overcrowded and rapidly melting ski-slopes.

Maybe marriage and parenthood are not as ideal as you had imagined them. Perhaps the reality of a long monogamous relationship seems like a more daunting challenge than it did at the first cupidity of love. They ask themselves how they will attain the fulfilment that they dreamed of when they were younger but were too green to reach for. Do they dare to give it all up and strive for something else? If so — what? How can they be fulfilled and rewarded?

Life stretches out ahead — how should it be lived? The world suddenly seems a bigger and harder place than it did from the back seat of the family car. It did for me. I felt dissatisfied and a little empty. I know now that at the same time as I was experiencing this restlessness — this existential dizziness, if you like — in fact society itself was creating a perfect storm, of which we now all have a steadier view.

For this was the world of consumerism and excess before the ensuing financial Gomorrah of the credit crunch. Like ants, we have an infinite capacity to create pointless occupations for ourselves but now this was as extreme as it can have ever been: And all this activity, this reaching and over-reaching, fans a powerful vortex that spins in an endless gyre, served by myopic hierarchies that face perpetually inward.

I wanted to break away, to endeavour to have my actions match my ideals, to feel a sense of self-worth, even a taste of genuine euphoria. It seemed to me that embracing something of my own choosing whole heartedly and with inspiration would be the only real cure for the restlessness I was experiencing and so I sought a big challenge, something that I thought other people might relate to — partly so that I could feel that what I had done was an achievement, not just inside my head but objectively — because a great undertaking that is not recognised as such externally can also be more easily diminished by yourself.

So, with no prior experience at all and no good reason why anyone would back me, I decided to plan a ski traverse of Antarctica — the coldest, windiest and highest continent on earth. Maybe I hoped to find some nirvana, perhaps I had watched too many movies or maybe I had just gone plain mad, destined to replace one emptiness, one set of endless winds for another. No one can ever tell me now that you can forecast how things will pan out. The tent canvas creaked, strung taut against the wind. David kept nodding asleep, nearly dropping his rice into his lap.

I had to kick him awake to avoid him making a mess in the tent. I wondered what he was dreaming about.

Perhaps that he had nearly died yesterday? In this desolate waste land, he probably felt as if he already had. Patrick stared straight ahead, expressionless. His enthusiasm had burned out over the last 30 hours of constant endeavour. Paul, the last of my companions, stirred the pot with an automatic hand.

He must have been thinking of his own family waiting for him on the sea ice only a short distance in front of us. He, of all of us, must have understood why I was in such a hurry — after all, I had miles to go and a promise to keep. Just the old dope of honesty is the best policy — honesty with yourself, I mean.

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Just stop lying about yourself and kidding yourself about tomorrows. Having shaved for the last time, I turned to the pile of clean, shop-folded clothes on my bed. I decided to wear them all in order to save on luggage weight. I picked up the first item: Long johns and a clinging thermal top followed. The rest of the layers were piled on top. I could have sworn that they turned the heating up as they saw me coming.

By the time I hit the tarmac to make the short walk to the Russian cargo plane I was sweating profusely.

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I walked with all the elegance of an astronaut. My brand new, lurid yellow boots creaked and squeaked with each step. I was about to board the Valdivia Belle — its name signed jauntily on the fuselage next to a cartoon, incongruously, of a blonde, midwestern, all-American girl with an impossible smile and tantalisingly easy virtue.

Its wings curved elegantly down from the top of the fuselage, which made it look as if it was permanently swooping downwards like a bird of prey. This menacing appearance was enhanced by a hooked nose. Slung under the eyes of the cockpit windows was a small glass viewing chamber that looked like a beak. The plane had been chartered out of Kazakhstan to fly to Antarctica. Inside was barrel upon barrel of jet fuel. I was about to get onto a roller coaster carrying a cargo of unstable high explosives.

On top of them were all manner of expedition bags, rations, skis, sleds and other equipment. I scrambled in through the cabin door in all my regalia. Everyone turned to look at me. In the few seconds that it took me to appraise the group, I noticed an abundance of facial hair, old tattered woollen jerseys, jeans and jutting chins. No logos, no starched fleeces and no yellow boots. All I needed was a hosepipe and a helmet. There were no bulkheads. There were no orange curtains. There were no plastic overhead lockers. There were not even any seats. There were only three portholes on each side for windows.

We had to sit on wooden benches along the sides of the plane. I zipped my jacket a little higher under my chin. It was 1 November. The camp had not been set up yet. My eyes were drawn to one of them in particular — Boris. He was a bald Chilean with huge hands and a monstrous bushy beard. I stroked my whiskerless cheeks and felt, next to him, like a soft-palmed little whelp.

The rest of my team — Patrick, Paul and David — sat in a row talking excitedly. He passed it down the line.

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Somehow its ingenious rhyming was even more exciting than the most stirring literature: Today is your day. It was jaunty and fun but it also went on to remind us that we would have some dark times. I wondered what they would be. What would be in store for us? Would something awful and unforeseen happen? Would one of us die? Would this be one of the epic tragedies of polar history?

Even if Antarctica is marked, it is splayed inelegantly like a spatchcocked chicken along the bottom border of the map in a form that bears no relation to its real shape. As far as I was concerned, it was the land of legend — in fact the only things I really knew about it were the semi-distorted myths of the great explorers.

Instead of Hercules, Scott. For Jason and the Argonauts, read Shackleton and the Nimrod. Although I am the antithesis of these heroes, in many ways the story of the wanderer — the person who leaves his home and family to roam in unknown lands in order to prove himself — is the archetype of myth and legend. This blueprint also contains a Darwinian flavour. The young boy leaves to go on Walkabout to come back a man.

His belly slowly expands, the strength in his legs diminishes and the adventure in him is slowly crushed by the weight of responsibility. I saw this Walkabout as my great test. I was an unripe romantic who had never done anything more extreme than risk being crushed on the Tube or drinking hot wine in the Alps, and who now, untried and unthinking, was on his way to Antarctica to tilt at windmills. As I flew inside this fiery phoenix to the land of ice and snow, it seemed that every nursery rhyme and story I had ever read and every concept of heroism and adventure that had left their mark on an impressionable mind were now being rewritten for me alone.

Antarctica is a mythical place. It is in the thrall of ice, slumbering cryogenically for a future era. Even though Antarctica has been covered in ice since way before the era of modern man, Oronteus Finaeus drew a map in based upon even more ancient maps. How could anyone of that or previous eras even have known that Antarctica was there? Although some outlying icebergs were discovered by Captain Cook, the actual existence of the continent was not definitely known until first seen by James Clark Ross in It is a land that holds compelling mysteries.

As the air in the cabin slowly got colder, people started to change out of their more comfortable clothes into cold-weather kit. It, unlike me, was stripped and ready for action. I crouched down next to the Russian navigator and watched the sea slowly metamorphose into a soup of floating ice-cubes — some as big as small islands — until it died in ice and everything became white.

Part sea, part land, part sky, all the elements fused into a viscous whiteness, holding no life, no men, no lights, no cities, no petty struggles. Just an illusion of gentleness, patient but implacable; nothing was tiny, everything was large. It was a veil, a hinterland — representing for me the border between hope and fear, the known and the unknown, the physical and the metaphysical.

As we started to descend for landing, I became progressively more nervous. I was about to hurtle down an ice-chute in a ton luge. There are no runways in Antarctica, there are only a few places that an airplane of this size can land and that is on natural blue ice. The Kazak crew had never been to Antarctica before.

Riding the Ice Wind: By Kite and Sledge across Antarctica - Harvard Book Store

This would be their first attempt. I started to tie up my bootlaces just in case I had to move fast. The cabin grew quiet. All of us, even the camp veterans, looked nervous. Only the first mate exuded calm. He sat on his stool, still in his vest, like an imperturbable Buddha. The idea was to touch down onto the ice and then use alternate reverse thrust to steady the craft since breaking would only induce an uneven skid. The main challenge was to keep the plane straight and not to slew around into the flanking mountains. The landing was perfect.

Better and smoother than a runway. An involuntary cheer went up and the Kazaks took out bottles of gin to celebrate, straight from the neck. I guess it would normally have been vodka but here, in a land that hung like a limpet to the underside of the globe, everything is thrown on its head. The whole back of the plane lowered hydraulically, like the mouth of a giant whale and, Jonah-like, I was disgorged from its belly. I walked down the ramp out into the bright sunshine, taking care not to slip on the sheet ice.

Breaking a bone now would be the very epitome of humiliation. All I could see was whiteness.

It was like a bad dream of heaven. Behind me, the ice was thronged by mountains. The sky was absolutely clear. The cold hit my face; I drew up my fur hood for protection. It was fresh but not aggressive. After putting up our base camp tent, which would stay there until we left Antarctica, it was time to sleep. The clouds had come in and the wind had started to blow more strongly. The sun revolved in a low arc over the mountains, never dipping below the horizon and, despite the clouds starting to fill up the sky, it stayed light.

I tried to work out what I should wear in my sleeping bag. I opted for everything. The temperature in the tent was the same. I laid my down jacket over my chest for extra warmth. The wind flapped the tent violently and noisily. Small particles of frozen breath fell onto my face. Where my sleeping bag touched the flysheet it had frozen and where I had drawn the down hood tightly around my face the nylon surface was crusty with frost.

Poor madman, who dreamt of glory, love, laurels, journeys, the Orient. For a few years I had bleated in general terms about being bored with my routine and the lack of excitement in my prospects as a lawyer in a large firm. Having travelled widely, I was also starting to become more cynical about the places I visited. What were the mountains like without pylons?

Was the translation of the menu the only compromise? What was the town like before the coaches and trinket shop? How did one travel to Macchu Picchu before the train? Now, the guidebooks dictate what you think of a place as much as how to get there. I felt that authenticity was in short supply. In this celebrity world, people seemed to undertake adventure more for self-aggrandisement than real romance.

I wanted to spend time in a place, be there and not just see it through a lens that had been stained by fingerprints. For me, Antarctica lay in a stark contrast to conventional tourism; it possessed mystery and wonder. Behind my choice of Antarctica lay some unreasoned conviction that some corners of the world might possess more magic than others. A month later, still desiccating in the airless basement, something truly awful occurred, which also contributed to my swerving into another lane of life: It was an utterly senseless tragedy.

He was walking along the side of the road with his sister when a car, driven out of control, ploughed into him, missing his sister by millimetres but hoisting Alex up over a high wall like a rag doll and onto some rocky ground beyond. He was in a coma for a week before he died. He was just a good friend. He had other, better, friends but I knew him well and liked him enormously. He also had the strength of character and confidence to demonstrate his feelings, compliment someone or tell you when he felt deeply about an issue. Alex was the first person I knew well to be taken away.

Being about my age, it gave me a sharp and painful reminder of my own mortality. Everyone experienced a strange guilt: Despite the sadness, we gave thanks for the amazing life he had led. A letter from his aunt was read out from the pulpit by the vicar. The reverence and emotion of the ceremony lent the words a greater power. Then and there, listening through a cloak of tears, I resolved finally to do something that I could be proud of and dedicate it to Alex.

But he died just when all the amorphous dissatisfaction with society and my life in it were at their most pressing inside of me. I told Annabel, then my girlfriend, that I was leaving my job to organise an expedition to Antarctica. By some strange alchemy, articulating an idea makes it real. I was desperate to haul myself out of my rut and put my face to the wind, to lose myself in endeavour. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the World, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I do not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the World, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now! CHAPTER 3 A New Life How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Caught in a euphoria of resolution, I left my job and took up a parttime teaching role.

Nothing really goes awry if you bleed your time away by watching films, reading and recovering from hangovers. Retribution is far enough in the future not to cast its long shadow. The problem is that there is a small insistent voice inside you that accuses you of being lazy. I decided that the expedition would take place the following winter, two years away. Going to the gym was a good way of convincing myself that I was expending positive energy. With so much of our future dependent on chance, fate, whimsy and the arbitrary actions of other people, many of us try to manipulate the one area that does, largely, obey us — our bodies.

So, to control the chaos into which I was heading, I went to the gym. Ironically, Scott of the Antarctic, who proved himself in the traces again and again and who drove his party on and on each day — even when the going was at its toughest — also felt that he was, by nature, an idle man.

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He feared that any form of comfort or the lack of compulsion could bring out that indolent side. In letters on his deathbed, he wrote to his family about the son, Peter, who would survive him: Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know — had always an inclination to be idle. Now, for me, every temptation was towards inertia. The task was so daunting it seemed hard to know where to start.

There was constant refuge in procrastination. The Journals of Captain R. When the idea of the expedition had first entered my mind, Annabel had introduced me to the boyfriend of one of her close friends, Patrick Woodhead, who had recently skied to the South Pole from Hercules Inlet on the edge of the continent, with one resupply, in a record 46 days.

I got in touch and invited him to lunch. At that moment, circumstance and the universe got in a huddle and started to conspire. The metaphor is apt. This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes.

Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. Walton rescues the hapless creator, numb with cold and near to starvation, and listens to his tale.

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand. I am practically industrious — painstaking; a workman to execute with perseverance and labour: Or, The Modern Prometheus. A NEW LIFE 19 Of all tales, Frankenstein goes much further than the issue of bringing dreams to life, which, of course, the protagonist so tragically does — it is about what follows: What happens, Shelley asks, if the consequences are bigger than you are? He did, but his dream became his nemesis, his fate played out in the ice and the snow. He was 28, of medium height with unkempt, tousled brown hair, a gaunt but chiselled face and piercing blue eyes.

Typically, as a trait I would come to know well, he arrived late and breathless. Have you got anything in your fridge? Although it was now a few weeks since he had got back from the South Pole, he was still jaded from the experience. Having said that, the one thing I really enjoyed was getting these huge kites up — now that was fun, seriously dangerous, but seriously fun. But that experience had given him a taste for it.

I opened a big map of Antarctica out on the table for him to show me where he had gone. I started to describe my goals to him. Together, we started to construct a plan. His casualness, as I found many times after that, can be quite deceptive. He has the boundless optimism of the very lucky or the very talented. Totally genuine, he is, however, almost the caricature of the action hero. He drives a fast bike, is utterly nonchalant about the concept of danger, has a touching and quite inspiring faith in the inherent goodness of the world and that shut doors are meant to be opened.

If a plastic figurine were ever made of Patrick, the Buzz Lightyear button-touch phrase it would repeat would be: He makes things sound very easy. He could lure anyone to accompany him on a madcap project and was without equal at making an utterly foolhardy suggestion seem totally plausible. He had climbed unscaled peaks in Kyrgyzstan and Tibet, even been a rhino ranger in Namibia. Never has anyone been able to get friends to work for free so easily, get even the most doughty old secretaries to agree to refer him to their bosses with a coquettish little smile and then persuade the flintiest executives to part with their cash by means of a single perfectly nuanced compliment.

On one occasion, I was skiing in the Alps. Patrick was in town and we were going to celebrate New Year full-on, Patrick-style. The problem was that my hotel had been double booked and Annabel and I were being ejected. I had rung around but there was no room at the inn.

He persuaded me, credulous as I am, not only that we could build an igloo, but that that we should. Annabel would sleep with his girlfriend, Robyn, and even though we had no sleeping bags he assured her in characteristic fashion: This was the guy I was going to trust my life to. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

Albert Einstein, That was two years ago. The weather stayed patchy. About to draw them over my feet, I saw that the insides were choked with ice and thought better of it. I knelt over my pee bottle. It was hardly the enticing sound of a kettle boiling but it was enough to rouse the giant. He slid his eye blinds on to his forehead and squinted up at me. It took him a second to register what he was looking at. David de Rothschild was our third team member.

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He was tall, bearded, dishevelled and good-looking. In fact, on learning what he had done made me see exactly how he considered this enterprise: Einstein maintained that the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up hypotheses, was to him invariably the easiest. The act of writing them down and testing them, he alleged, itself suggested more ideas. David, in the same way, comes up with an infinite number of ideas and the more he dreams up, the more those ideas themselves suggest others. He is a human whirligig of energy and constant motion.

Those are just his big-ticket occupations. If you could buy stock in a person, you certainly would invest in him. During our expedition, he came up with screenplays, book ideas, inventions, business plans, a project to turn the South Pole into a World Heritage site and an educational scheme based on school kids learning more about the world by following his progress traversing all of the six other continents — an idea inspired by coming to Antarctica. Now he is planning to sail a boat made entirely out of plastic bottles over the Pacific to publicise oceanic pollution.

Equally amazing is that he carries out a great proportion of his ideas. David is an inspiring man and he got involved with our project at just the right time. Initially, I was slightly sceptical about someone joining the team at such a late stage. That fear was to be unfounded on both counts. More by good luck than good judgement, we had managed to happen upon someone who was also of irrepressible good humour, which was to prove invaluable in the tent as things got tough. Now, waking up to our first day on the ice, we enthusiastically unpacked our kit.

Our domed base camp tent was so cold it was hard to stay warm. We sat like four hunched, freezing dragons. A constant plume of thick smoke poured from each of our nostrils. We ripped up the cardboard boxes that had contained our supplies in order to put a small segment under our feet. We hoped thereby, fractionally, to insulate ourselves from the snow underfoot. We all rubbed our hands, twitched our knees and stamped up and down incessantly to keep warm.

Twitch, fidget, rub, joke, insult, laugh. We were all eager to cut our shivering teeth on some Antarctic man-hauling, so we started to get ready for our first dose of exercise. We wore light, high-performance cross-country skis. Most people nail skins now artificial fur to the underside in order to gain purchase on the snow. The skis glide with the grain of the hair and then grip going against it. Cross-country skiing is not particularly challenging on soft, flat ground. This ground, however, was pitted and undulating. The skis tended to skid away on any down slope or uneven ground.

My confidence immediately took a bashing. There the snow had been soft and the skiing easy. I landed in an ungainly heap going through one twisted patch of sastrugi. I felt uncomfortable and ill at ease. Dave, also unbalanced on the narrow skis, leaned too hard on to his ski-pole and, brittle in the extreme cold, it snapped in half. Minute one — a crucial, indispensable piece of kit broken. To an outsider, this first day must have been laughable — how on earth were these inept novices going to ski across Antarctica without seriously hurting themselves?

As we were preparing the rations, the camp manager Mike entered our tent, bringing with him his own particular brand of idiosyncrasy in the shape of an unflattering orange skullcap with a jagged yellow plume. I half expected him to play the fool and dance a merry jig. Mike was a burly and blunt Yorkshireman who had spent his life in remote and challenging places. The skills honed in its unique environment are ill-suited elsewhere and so workers often return.

And so the cycle goes on. Mike had spent many seasons in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, and Antarctic veterans tend to be an eccentric crew — adapted like a colony of penguins to the bizarre routines of their extraordinary world. You have to love being part of a little enclave with all the rituals, in-jokes and discomfort.

In any typical Antarctic camp there is as much alcohol as there are few attractive females. I realised that I was escaping the oddities of city life for another existence that was equally lop-sided. While we prowled around the campsite or resecured the guy ropes, we would jealously watch them stumbling out of their room-warm, gas-heated tent making the short walk to the radio tent — which was fitted with another welcoming furnace.

Then they erected a couple of toilet tents also with wooden floors. We were forbidden to use them, too. It seemed a little strange to forbid us from entering any of these sanctuaries. There were only odd people in both senses in a corner of the world with no other humans and yet five of us were kept in the cold. It was even more unfriendly in this instance given that Paul, our guide and the fourth member of our party, had been to Patriot Hills twice before even working for the organisation and Patrick had also stayed there two years previously.

It was just as well to acclimatise. However, we grew increasingly resentful over the next fortnight as conditions stayed incredibly harsh; we were unable to leave as planned and we found ourselves getting depleted before we had even progressed a yard along our chosen path. No one owns Antarctica. By virtue of the Antarctic Treaty which, ominously, formed the basis of the Outer Space Treaty it has been devoted to peace and science.

Under the surface, though, all the Treaty nations are trying to get a grubby foothold in case the ceasefire ever collapses. At the hub of this wheel is the South Pole where the US has its science station. In the middle is. The scientists are notoriously reluctant to fraternise with expeditions. Therefore, unless you can twist governmental arms, the doors of the science stations are generally barred shut and there is no way of getting into Antarctica other than a fleeting visit to the outer perimeters by cruise ship.

That is where ALE comes in. They have permission under the Treaty to run a temporary base for tourists, operational for three months of the year, which, of course, is where we were now. Like a big polar bear on the prowl, he was on the hunt for any freebies — a bar of chocolate, a slice of freshly baked bread. Warming his hands by the gas stove for a second, he got too close. His GoreTex trousers crumpled and melted, red-hot like burning wallpaper, before he felt the heat on his cold legs.

They were his only pair. David had to spend the rest of the day sewing a piece of spare material, which he had removed from a snow-skirt on his jacket, to his thigh. Three days was the consensus. Dave bore the brunt of most of this because no one here had ever come across anyone like him. I kept my mistakes a little quieter. Dave would laugh about his to everyone. Most polar adventurers have massive egos, take themselves very seriously, overstate their accomplishments and attempt to fulfil a very hard image. David would clown about, oblivious to what was expected.

He made no attempt to disguise his inexperience and no attempt to try to pretend he was other than he was.

One time, as he was goofing around, Mike looked at him askance and called him, light-heartedly, a fool.