The earth

The end of the journey is getting closer. After many different turns, we will eventually board the Madrid plane. We also have our Helsinki tickets in our pockets. If everything goes as planned, we’ll arrive in Helsinki at 3.35pm on Saturday.

During the expedition, we have experienced everything between heaven and earth. Today’s photos are, in that way, very appropriate for the last days of the diary. The first things we remember are the space and desolation of Antarctica, nature around us. For one and a half months, sastrugi filled the snowfields everywhere, whether we looked forward, behind or to the sides - just snow and ice and flat emptiness everywhere. Often there was mot a single cloud in the sky. In the photo there’s one of the very few.

Clouds

When living so completely in nature, you sense your environment in a new way. One of the best things on the expedition was realising the uniqueness and eternity of the icy surroundings. We would like to keep it that way.

On to the sastruga

We chose a ski image from a couple of weeks ago as our diary image today, since we were then still moving quite fast compared to today. Now we are stuck in Santiago de Chile. We had to stay here overnight because of the cancelled Iberia flight to Europe. They have promised that we will fly tomorrow around noon. At the moment it looks as if we will arrive in Finland on Saturday, 3rd of January, at 3.35pm from Madrid. We’ll believe it when we see it.

If the expedition was long and covered a big distance, it looks as if the journey home has similar attributes. We arrived at the South Pole eight days ago and since then we have been mainly waiting for different flights.

At the terrace

Everything went well with our luggage and sleds today. We have everything with us and checked through all the way to Helsinki,so we don’t need to figure out how to manoeuvre over-two-metre-long sleighs in the crowds at the airports. We had about 60 kilos of excess weight, which was what we estimated.

There was something good in the delay also: we opened this year’s terrace season today, or was someone faster?

Pionera backyard

Last night went as planned and we arrived in Chile in the morning. After landing at Punta Arenas airport we felt the warm summer wind blowing across the airstrip. It was somehow unreal to experience wind that was not freezing cold and that did not nip the cheeks or go under our clothing. Rather, it felt soft and warm, even if the temperature was not more than 10°C at 6am in the morning.

Today’s excitement came from our flights. Could we make the necessary changes to fly earlier than the original 6th of January? Eventually, after numerous emails and phone calls, the resilient Area Travel Agency staff found new flights for us, and we will carry on tomorrow 1st January, 2009. We will arrive in Finland in the evening of the 2nd of January via Santiago, Madrid and Frankfurt. Let’s hope our luggage can keep up with us all the way.

Packed sleigh

Tomorrow we will experience more exciting moments with our sleighs. We will take more-than-two-metres-long sleighs in with our luggage. The information collected from different sources is controversial and we don’t know if we will be able to take them all with us. Maybe, that will keep us focused during the 36-hour journey home.

We dried and packed our equipment on the front yard of our hotel, Patagonia Pionera, during the afternoon. Green summery grass felt nice under the feet and we could enjoy the warm weather, wearing just our T-shirts. Despite this, we already miss the winter in Finland. We are hoping for more snow so that there will be good skiing conditions in Southern Finland as well.

Happy New Year to everyone! Unfortunately, our New Year celebration this time was only a good dinner in a local restaurant. We did not see or hear any fireworks. The local people said that they don’t do that kind of thing nowadays.

Plane landing

There’s plenty of hope in the air as I am writing this. We are waiting in the dining tent for the Ilyushin jet plane, which is due to land after midnight. We have spent the whole day looking at the weather forecasts and guessing whether we can fly or not. There was too much wind in the morning; it was too warm in the daytime and the runway got too slippery to land. And in the evening there were too many clouds gathering above the mountains, making the contrast bad. At 8pm we heard that the plane has permission to take off from Punta Arenas, so we still have hopes of flying tonight.

Flying time from Chile to here is about five hours. After a couple of hours’ stop here, we should make it to Punta Arenas just in time for breakfast.

If we are lucky enough and manage to change our return flights, we can carry on towards Finland right after New Year’s Eve, having first watched the fireworks in the South American way. So it is possible that we will arrive in Helsinki on the 2nd of January at 10.55pm. We’ll see.

Yes. Now we can see the big steel bird on the horizon; the Ilyushin is landing.

At the rocks

Today we did not have good enough weather for the big jet plane to fly, so our flight out from Antarctica will not leave before Tuesday. The gusty wind surprised us many times during the day. The change from being completely calm to blowing a gale-force wind happened in seconds. But the day was reasonably suitable for being outdoors. The wind found its way under the shell clothing through the smallest gaps, so we needed lots of middle layers to keep us warm. Luckily, it was only -5°C.

Poppis skied to the foot of nearby mountains, looking for solid ground, as he wanted to have his hot chocolate on real rocks. It felt great to walk on rocks for the first time since the beginning of November. The bleak rocks actually felt warm and cosy. It was good to recall the last couple of months while sitting beside a big rock, sheltered from the wind.

A rock

In the evening we enjoyed ALE’s hospitality again, since they invited us to join them at dinner. We sat and chatted in the dining tent until late night. British explorers, Gavin and Adam, joined us during the dinner. They, like us, skied to the South Pole unsupported. They started from Hercules Inlet the same day that we did, and arrived at the Pole on the 27th of December. Their flight back to Patriot Hills brought them in, just in time for the dinner.

Patriot Hills

Now we are just waiting. We are resting at Patriot Hills for the second day now and the days involve only lying in the tent. The wind keeps the planes grounded. The temperature is mild, only -5°C. At the moment we are waiting for the big Ilyushin jet plane to come from Punta Arenas and get us back to South America. There is also a big group of climbers here, waiting to get their Twin Otter flight to Mount Vinson base camp, and in Chile there are expeditions and travellers waiting to get over to Antarctica.

All flights here are completely weather-dependent. Just before Christmas there were more than fifty travellers stuck in Patriot Hills for ten days. Instead of going home, they ended up spending Christmas here. It is difficult for us to know when we will get to Chile and be able to look at the return flights to Europe and Finland.

Patriot Hills

Expeditions use their own facilities in Patriot Hills; we sleep in our own tents and eat our own food. The feeling is quite similar to the rest days in the middle of the expedition. The field toilet in a tent is the biggest difference and it is very much appreciated. The travellers here have full board.

Added to the long line of expedition tents there are numerous big Weather Haven maintenance tents. These tents, with thick steel pipe frames, include dining tent, medical tent, toilet, laundry, garage tents for Pisten Bullies, snowmobiles and planes. There are also tons of stormproof accommodation tents for travellers. All the waste from the camp is transported back to Chile after the end of the season in February. Quite a task!

Steel ball

Today started in yesterday’s journal. We got a warm welcome at the Patriot Hills tent village. Although it was six in the morning local time, the kitchen, under Ronnie’s guidance, served us with king crab soup for starters, huge and very delicious tenderloin steaks for the main course and chocolate pie with vanilla sauce for dessert. Naturally, we started with some sparkling wine and had red wine and Chilean Polar Imperial beer with the dinner. You can imagine how full we were after the meal, having, up till then, been eating a closely rationed amount of mashed potatoes, rice or macaroni, with just the two of us eating from the same pot.

The library

The Amundsen-Scott Polar Station was an interesting experience. The huge station is built on the ice, which means it moves with the ice. It also sinks, which is why it stands on adjustable poles.
Two poles have been marked outside the station. There’s the ceremonial pole, with a gleaming steel ball on a pole in the middle, the symbol of the South Pole, surrounded by the flags of the original signatories of the Antarctic Treaty. The real pole is a hundred metres away, marked with a more subdued, small brass plate. The proper location of the pole is moved around as the ice mass moves.

During the summer, the station may have as many as 270 people. In the winter – from February to October – the station is isolated from the rest of the world and has only a few dozen people working in the Antarctic darkness. The locals say that staying throughout the winter is not the worst mistake you can make but it’s certainly the longest one.

The station

The modern station was built only a few years ago and it is really an entire town. People work 53 hours each week and have, of course, less time off in the bargain. The station does have its own sports hall, gym, library, hobby room, band room, internet connection, etc. To make daily life easier, there’s a store, a bar, laundry room and a sauna. There’s a central kitchen and a well-equipped hospital to guarantee basic safety. The polar station is serviced from McMurdo station and from New Zealand. There are around ten flights daily in the summer!

Weather overcast, wind 10 m/s
Temperature -6°C

In the plane

Our plans changed today in a welcome way. We received information that our flight to the base camp at Patriot Hills, which is where our expedition started, would take place tonight or early morning or midday. The uncertainty was not because no one knew when exactly the flight would leave but because of time zones: we’ve been following three different zones since arriving at the pole. Our watches are in Chilean time, 5 hours behind Finnish time or GMT -3. The polar station is in New Zealand time, 11 hours ahead of Finnish time. You never really know what time zone you should be in.
We were joined on the flight by a Norwegian expedition. They arrived five hours before its departure. I have to admit that crossing the ice was somewhat easier in a Twin Otter than on skis. It took us 43 days to reach the pole and five hours, including a stop for refuelling, to get back. We made a stop at the Thiel Mountains, which we saw on the horizon on our way to the pole. Now we have seen them from above and close-up, too.

Thiel Mountains

We are currently at Patriot Hills and about to go to bed. We’ll try to write something about the polar station tomorrow.

X-mas celebration

Last night’s journal was a little short but it did state what really mattered. We made it to the South Pole.

The day was very rough and exhausting, as we had expected. We wanted to reach the finish on Christmas night. The rational thing would have been to set up another camp and continue on Christmas Day but, since we felt strongly about it, there’s no need to make excuses.
We skied a total of 19 hours on our last day. The sun made a few appearances but, otherwise, the day was cloudy and misty. Once more, we experienced very poor visibility and the wind kept reminding us of itself, too. It was impossible to stay awake in the morning and we were both asleep on the skis. When the staggering and falling became so frequent that it started to slow us down, we decided to take a brief nap. It was surprisingly comfortable to sleep on the pulka - to keep the ski boots and clothes on, to dive into the sleeping bag and go to sleep. After half an hour you wake up a new man, but, unfortunately, we were soon back to being the old ones.

Coordinates

The race was close to the finish but we weren’t exactly rushing, because our legs simply refused orders to ski faster. Instead, they kept to their slow shuffle for the final ten kilometres. They were a long ten kilometres, indeed, possibly the longest we’ve ever skied. It felt as if we weren’t making any progress towards the research station on the horizon.

Eventually, we did progress, however. They had been keeping an eye on our approach with binoculars and there was a two-person welcoming committee waiting for us outside the station. There was no fanfare or brass band, which was just as well, as it was 25 degrees below freezing. We set up the tent right away: we were more interested in sleeping than celebrating our arrival.

Christmas Day was like the other rest days. We concentrated on resting. The satellite phone was ringing like mad in the morning, mostly with calls from family and the media.

To create a Christmas spirit, we set up a Christmas tree in the tent and, naturally, had the Advent calendar on the wall, with all 24 doors open. We weren’t exactly dancing around the Christmas tree but we did celebrate a little. Relief is what best describes our emotions right now. The old cliché about being exhausted but happy really felt apt.

Now we’re waiting for the flight back to Patriot Hills. Its timing will largely depend on the weather. The weather on the coast is poor right now and is keeping planes on the ground. I hope that conditions will improve by Friday or Saturday.

We visited the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station today. We received a very warm welcome, had the opportunity to use a WC and enjoyed some fresh-baked pastries.

There will be more about the station tomorrow.

After a gruelling and long final dash, we’ve reached the South Pole. We skied almost 90 kilometres during 36 hours. The first Finnish South Pole expedition has reached its goal! Poppis is now one of 12 people in the world who have skied to both poles without external support.

We arrived at the South Pole on Christmas Eve, if barely. The important thing was that we got to open door 24 in our Advent calendar at the South Pole. But it’s off to bed now. We will be back soon, though.

At the South Pole