Enderby Island teems with albatross, assorted penguins, petrels, parakeets, gulls, shags and skuas, and its treeless meadows are ablaze with distinctive flowering plants, particularly the subantarctic megaherbs like Bulbinella, with its striking yellow flowers. These are the world’s southernmost plants, evolution pushed to its limits in this punishing environment.

An easy walk on Campbell Island climbs away from Perseverance Harbour, following a wooden boardwalk across hillsides carpeted with tussocks, to reach a high saddle. Many southern royal albatross, snow white, spread across the windswept slopes, hunkered down on their nests to mind an egg whilst their partner is out foraging.

One evening we pass two distant naval frigates travelling in convoy. New Zealand’s governor general, a cabinet minister and a gaggle of scientists are bound for Campbell Island to inaugurate a national bicentennial research program.

Not so fast, chaps. Next day, HMNZS Otago breaks down in “a remote subantarctic fiord” – yes, that’s Perseverance Harbour – and the dignitaries must await transfer to the escort frigate. It’s twenty seconds of fame for a lonely, austerely-beautiful corner of New Zealand’s southernmost islands.

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Stepping ashore at Sandy Bay, a windswept beach on this remote subantarctic island, we are the alien invaders, inspected and quizzed by fearless creatures which waddle up to greet us when not preoccupied with their own courtship and nesting rituals. Amidst these thousands of webbed feet lie dozens of corpulent elephant seals, strewn about like sacks of wadding, stretching and yawning as they moult.

At 54 degrees south latitude, a mere speck in the Southern Ocean, Macquarie lies halfway from Australia to the Antarctic continent, the only island on earth formed by rocks forced up from the ocean’s floor, and near-new in geological terms.

This is not the dry, icy expanse of the Antarctic continent – officially, it is Tasmanian territory – but it is a challenging and inhospitable outpost whose only human habitation is an Australian Antarctic research base.Visitors usually join an expedition cruise, often en route to Antarctic waters.

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When the first Arctic explorers starting venturing north, some five hundred years ago, in search of the supposed riches beyond the ice, they encountering numerous problems. Not the least of them being that their flimsy wooden ships kept sinking when they ran into the inevitable ice pack.

The pursuit of the fabled North West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific brought numerous sailors undone as they pushed deeper into the frozen wilderness above what is now Canada. In fact, the most celebrated failure, that of Sir John Franklin in 1845, saw two ships and the entire complement of 128 men disappear.

I was not alone in turning down this chance of a lifetime, preferring to snuggle up in my bunk on the Akademik Ioffe, aka The Peregrine Mariner, while the really intrepid campers were ferried ashore in Zodiacs. For me, simply being 63 degrees south, surrounded by icebergs was adventurous enough.

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This article continues, written in an chatty conversational style and includes information on the tour, zodiac trips, the wildlife, historical anecdotes and fascinating facts about Antarctica.

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(finishes…)

Antarctica has always attracted explorers. Some like Scott and Oates from that ill-fated expedition still lie somewhere under the ice. Others like Shackleton, and his crew, who faced tremendous extremes to simply survive after their ship was squeezed to its destruction by the pack ice, kept coming back.

"Great God, this is an awful place," said Scott in his diary. He was desperately disappointed to have missed being the first person to reach the South Pole, even though he was the first Briton. But then he finished, philosophically: "Well, it's something to have got here."

It IS something to get to Antarctica. Something that only a few thousand people have done so far. And although I may not have slept on the ice, I have at least stepped on the shore of one of the world's last truly wild and unspoiled places.

(1750 words + Factfile)

©Sally Hammond 2006

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