By Jo Chandler
"Jo! Jo - you awake?"
It's barely dawn, or it should be. Rudely roused from subconscious adventure, waking heralds only an even more bizarre reality. I claw my way out of an orange nylon cocoon and blink back the assault of brutal light from the Antarctic plateau.
Jo Chandler at Casey station.
"Merry Christmas." It doesn't come much whiter.
Eyes gradually adjust to the glare, but consciousness still struggles to bring this picture into focus. On December 25, I found myself lying snug in a sleeping bag on the Antarctic ice, about to graduate from the 24-hour survival boot camp which is part of every expeditioner's indoctrination to the last great wilderness.
A low-flying skua glides overhead, scoping for food. I see my fellow happy campers - Dennis (plumbing engineer); Gavan (meteorologist) and Tim (communications) are dressed and almost ready to haul on their bulky survival packs for the walk back to Casey base. The magnetic pull of bain maries full of warm breakfast ignites homing instincts surer than any satellite waypoint. Best get a wriggle on.
The four of us, all new arrivals, have been taken into the peninsula in Casey's backyard by a field training officer, Simon Cross, to learn how to orient ourselves in the landscape using map, compass and GPS; how to avoid hazards like falling off an ice cliff; how to safely fire up the camp stove for a meal and how to leave nothing but bootprints on the icescape.
Wilderness housekeeping involves the blokes fashioning a few kitchen improvements by building a kitchen bench with freshly cut ice blocks, the surface smoothed back with shovels full of blizzard snow.
Meanwhile we scout for the best bedrooms - ideally nice level sites in the lee of the few outcrops of rocks, just in case the weather turns foul in the night. For our evening entertainment we put on blindfolds and tie ourselves with ropes to rehearse finding one another in a blizzard - a diverting if somewhat twisted way to spend an evening without the telly.
But the most confronting departure from the comforts of home is the toilet. Situated on the far side of a field hut, this comprises two buckets (one for each), a roll of toilet paper, a container of baby powder ("to ease the blow for the next user"); a tub of germ-buster and a styrofoam toilet seat ("luxury"). The view is so spectacular, and the position so exposed, that visitations are likely to be more spiritually satisfying than they are physically purging. And if that doesn't put you off, there's the knowledge that you'll be carrying the whole lot home.
In the unending bright evening, we pour hot water into pouches of dehydrated dinner and poke them into our overalls to stew and keep warm as we spin yarns and share histories. A small squadron of Adelie penguins march purposefully by, occasionally dropping to glide lazily on their bellies, paddling over the plateau with their flippers. We break out our cameras. Dinner and a show.
Finally, survival lessons culminate in a night camping rough in a "bivvy" bag - a dress rehearsal for the process of going to ground in the event of being caught out in a blizzard.
We push our packs inside the bivvy sack then dive in behind. Our boots poke out while we bash them together to dislodge the ice (reminiscent of Weddell seals flapping their flippers), then climb inside and get comfortable. I've come equipped with an eye mask to fend off the midnight sun. Harder to ignore is the neighbourhood snorer. (All parties are snoring denialists come morning). Sleep comes, though it is hard to distinguish dreaminfg from actuality.
The weather gods have been kind, so the discomforts are minor. The magic of the physical environment is such that you can't complain. Rather the urge is to drop to your knees in gratitude at the opportunity to occupy this place, albeit briefly.
Over the journey of day to night to day, with only the clock and the subtle shift of light to distinguish one from the other, Antarctica is unveiled in an breathtaking lightshow. Shafts of sunshine break, allowing new perspectives - illuminating a bay in the middle distance, towering ice cliffs along the horizon, a field of distant, gaping crevasse. One moment the aspect is flat, features invisible. The next there is depth and texture in the ice: gaping leads tearing the surface; a carpet of dazzling crystals sprinkled over the plateau; undulating sastrugi - waves carved by the wind - appear across the plateau as nature's aperture opens and closes.
I look forward to what will be revealed over three weeks of visiting this landscape and the community which occupies it. What will be illuminated, where will light fall? What truths of life at the end of the earth - scientific, geographic, physical, personal - will be exposed?
We pick up our packs and our drums of waste and haul them back to the outpost of human civilisation at Casey station.