Post the Tenth

The first few days at Davis have been fearfully, frightfully, terribly frantic. Not only has there been the need to rapidly adapt to working in a busy professional kitchen, but added to that is the further franticosity of a station resupply.

In addition to tranferring passengers, the whirlycopters have also been ferrying cargo. Essentials for the station come over, and rubbish and other things go back to the ship for Return to Australia (or, as it's called in the Antarctic biz, RTA.  We always use these abbreviations, because we're very hip and happening.  Groovy! ).

As well as all that the previous season's winterers have to bring their replacements up to speed as quickly as possible with their roles on station. Then they too are flown over to the ship.

All of this in combination adds up to a fearsomely frenetic period - a kind of controlled chaos. (The Station Leader claims it is controlled anyway, and I'm sure he knows better than I do).

So, in midst of this flurry of activity I have not yet had an opportunity to do a photographic tour of the station; at least not a coherent or informative one.

Instead, Swim-Swim and I offer you this: an incoherent and uninformative tour of not very much. But there are some pretty colours to be seen, so not all is lost.

These first few I took first thing in the morning (at about 6:30 local time). This first one is the view from my accommodation, looking left (south) down toward the water. (Yep. Water. That's what the blue stuff is that isn't the sky. In case you hadn't realised).

ANARESAT and Operations Building

The big grey ball is the ANARESAT dome - containing the satellite dish that connects us to the world. Indeed, these very words have been sent to you via this dome.

The yellow building is the Operations Building, which houses the Station Leader's office and the communications area. The green building is the Living Quarters (LQ) - my place of work, and somewhere with which I am certain to become intimately familiar, for better or worse.

The small brown things on the ground are the rocks.
 

The next shot is of the LQ again (because one photo of a big green building is never enough), showing this time the linkway to the Sleeping and Medical Quarters (SMQ) - the slightly less green building.

Living Quarters and red ute

The SMQ is where the winterers live, and the linkway enables them to get to the LQ without being exposed to the elements. And you just don't want to expose yourself in Antarctica. Too darn cold for a start, and the risk of sunburn is very high. No-one needs that.

The ute with the red tray is the chefs' (and slushies') ute, and will be my method for collecting supplies from the store, or taking rubbish to its various drop off points. (Rubbish is separated into different categories - recycling, RTA and stuff to be incinerated - and each has a different destination on station).

Note that all vehicles have to be parked facing south. The reason for that is that the strongest winds (i.e. in blizzards) come from the north, and are strong enough to pick up small rocks and gravel. Parking vehicles this way protects windscreens from damaged caused by flying bits of geology.

Davis doesn't get regular blizzards that throw snow at you. Nuh uh. The blizzards here throw the ground at you!

This next one is… is… uh… well, nothing in particular. It does show though the barren nature of the area. Davis is built on a very rare ice-free part of Antarctica. The landscape is very stark, and you get a bit of a sense of that here.

And that's my excuse for making you look at a picture of nothing.

Nothing

The next slide is of the Green Store – the repository of everything consumable on station. If it ain’t in there, it ain’t anywhere. But, I didn’t take this photo because you needed to see a big green brick. I took it because the moon was looking picturesque above it, and I felt like being artistique or something.

Art

Still early in the morning is this shot of the Aurora out in the bay. Ain’t she pretty from a distance? Yes she is.

Pretty

The next couple of shots were taken much later on the same day. I'm quite versatile like that, you know, and can mishandle a camera at almost any hour of the day.

From the mess windows we could clearly see all of the incessant activity of the helicopters shifting cargo back and forth from the Aurora. At one stage in the afternoon it occurred to me to extract my hands from the sink and get some action shots.

Because I am an action kind of guy!

When not doing the washing up! Or mixing up batches of powdered milk!

Action!

Yeah!

So, here they are. Action shots.

Action

Still more action, but even closer this time

And that's your lot, I'm afraid. Regrettably bitsy, but I guarantee that in due course I shall craft something altogether more informative.

And hopefully with even more pretty colours.

Mmmmmm... pretty colours...

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Live long and prosper. Nanoo nanoo.