It's 2 am, and everyone is fast asleep. We're in a holiday cottage in the village of Twizel, New Zealand. Suddenly my mobile phone vibrates its way across the desktop and emits two little beeps, heralding the arrival of an SMS. I struggle into consciousness, stagger across the room and flip open the phone, confidently expecting it to read "Vodaphone welcomes you to New Zealand" or some other useless platitude.

However the message reads: "C130 will be in ChCh Nov 17 8:30 pls be in touch. Luigi."

And so the adventure begins.

We'd flown in to Christchurch from Sydney the previous Sunday, and headed to the Italian Antarctic Office ready to fly south. However, we were soon made aware of the bad news - the South African Hercules C130 used by the Italian Antarctic program had lost an engine, and was sitting at Terra Nova Bay, on the Antarctic Coast, waiting for a replacement to be flown down by the New Zealanders. A day to get there, a day to replace the engine, a day to get the plane back, and at best we'd be on our way on Thursday - but more likely Friday or Saturday. So, off to the Dux deLux for dinner.

Monday saw us sleeping mainly, but with time left over for wandering around the beautiful Christchurch botanic gardens, quietly rowing along the Avon in a clinker-built skiff, then touring the excellent museum. Christchurch is such a lovely place. At 6pm we were back in the Antarctic Centre for our pre-flight briefing. This was the usual good fun - highlights included putting up a tent in the middle of the conference room, discovering all the macabre snow tools and ice saws in the survival kit, and attempting to burn the building down with the petrol-fired camping stove. On the negative side, however, was the discovery that Monday's flight to Terra Nova Bay by the New Zealanders had been cancelled, so our replacement Hercules engine was still sitting on the tarmac less than a kilometre away.

With a few days to kill we checked out of our ludicrously expensive Christchurch motel, hired a car, and headed out across the South Island. Along the way we stopped off at Mount John, in order to check out the University of Canterbury Observatory. A generous Steve Barlow showed us around, kindly demonstrating the Fabry Perot spectrometer used to study airglow, and including on his tour the new "MOA" telescope due to be opened next month. This is a Japanese-built 1.8 metre telescope, and is exceedingly handsome. Telescopes always look good in red. It was a trifle windy outside but, according to Steve, nothing like the record 250km/hr winds that have been recorded at that site. By contrast, the wind speed at Dome C, where hopefully we'll be in a couple of days, has never exceeded 72 km/hr.

After a very pleasant couple of hours we hit the road again and soon found ourselves in Twizel. Twizel was built in the middle of nowhere from pre-fabricated houses to create a village to support the construction of the hydroelectric scheme. Its work completed, by 1968 it faced bulldozing. However powerful friends and a momentary lapse of concentration on the part of the bulldozer driver meant the town was saved. Since that moment, Twizel has strived to make a virtue out of every one of its unremarkable features, including its street layout ("based on a Scandinavian hydro town"), its collection of discarded earth-moving equipment ("the machinery display"), and the fact that, somewhat belatedly, someone decided to plant a few trees to add interest to the streetscape ("Twizel - town of trees"). However, what's extraordinary is that, by sheer optimism and determination, the Twizelites have succeeded in creating a quite delightful little village.

We booked into a holiday cottage and headed to the Korner Kafe for dinner. Despite a lamentable inability to spell (they made a complete botch of "potato" as well), the proprietors were excellent cooks, and we dined superbly. So impressed are we by what Twizel has made of itself that I propose that a new word should enter the English language:

Twizel (verb; transitive): To take a thing or concept so utterly devoid of all merit that bulldozing is too good for it and, by the consistent application of optimism and positive thinking, to not only create something of beauty and significance but to actually elevate it to near iconic status. Twizel stands as an uplifting monument to the triumph of hope over reality. Other examples of things that have successfully been twizeled include Bob Dylan's voice and the Harley Davidson motor bike.

And so we find ourselves in Twizel, in the wee hours of the morning, with a recall notice SMSed to us and only a quick trip to Mount Cook between us the C130. I ring Luigi and he tells me that indeed the plane has just taken off from Terra Nova Bay, and that we need to be back in town within 18 hours. One day I must find out how it's possible to change over an entire aircraft engine so quickly. Maybe they use the same pit crews the Formula One teams employ.

"We" this year denotes Jon Lawrence, Suzanne Kenyon, and myself. Jon is an Antarctic veteran, with two trips to Dome C and one to South Pole already under his belt. Suze has just enrolled at the beginning of this year to do a PhD with the UNSW Antarctic group, and is about to find out what all the excitement is about.

By late Wednesday afternoon we were back in Christchurch. A quick briefing at the Antarctic Centre and we were turned loose again. As we were about to leave, another SMS arrived, this one from Sue back at UNSW. It brought the very welcome news that the Australian Research Council has funded our research for another three years. So, with something very tangible to celebrate, we headed for the Dux deLux again for a final Christchurch dinner.


- John