Going to the pole today! Stupid alarm woke me up early (I hate alarms, don't know if you've picked up on that yet) and I got into all my gear, gobbled down some breakfast (ham and eggs, yummy) and raced up to the check-in for the flight out of McMurdo. There was a much smaller group going to the pole than had been coming into McMurdo yesterday so the twenty or so of us climbed back into Ivan the Terra Bus and headed out to the "tarmac". We paused for awhile on the way there to get some hot drinks while they refueled the C130 (picture somewhere) and Doug went off to find a toilet. We got back into the bus and had gone about 50m when Fred started making "Where's Doug?" noises. He stopped the bus and then we spotted Doug making his way towards us at a quick trot. I'm sure Colin and I would have worked out he was missing eventually too.... maybe when we got to the pole!

This flight was much more comfortable - fewer people, lots more space, more windows, less flying time (3 hours or so) and some pretty spectacular views of the Transantarctic mountains and the Beardmore glacier. At one stage they even let me into the cockpit and took my picture there for posterity. It was great. Still needed the earplugs though, these babies are loud.

We landed nicely again (it must be the snow) and as we were taxiing around they opened the back of the plane. The temperature started dropping and I suddenly realised we had actually arrived somewhere pretty darn cold. We stepped off the plane and I looked around. White, and flat. As far as the eye could see. With a collection of buildings in one quadrant and some others dotted randomly around the landscape. I got a funny feeling in my nose, which had been running on the flight, and realised that it wouldn't be running anymore because it was now frozen. It felt quite scratchy and weird. Lunch was being served in the new station so we got told to head up there. Food! Hurrah. As I served myself a hamburger and chips I realised I had found a place that was in tune with my culinary desires - no sachets or bottles of tomato sauce here! Here you ladle your sauce out of a huge bowl with a soup spoon. Yeah, that's the good stuff.

We had another talking to at 4pm where they actually cheated; instead of talking to us they showed us a video. In the meantime we had a bit of an explore, wandering through the new station, visiting the store, the post office, the greenhouse, the library and of course the dining room. Inside it is quite warm and you basically only need the huge piles of ECW gear when you're trekking from one place to another outside. Like to the AASTO, which we spotted from the dining room window (picture). I didn't actually visit the AASTO today though because by this time my head was pounding quite abominably. It didn't stop me from dropping in on the Australia Day celebrations that were taking place in the bar and drinking a complimentary glass of absinthe and bellowing the Australian anthem out with the four other Aussies that were there. We didn't have two Australian coins between us or we would have played two-up :)

The satellites are rising at quite inconvenient times at the moment - they're up from about 10:30pm to 10am. I waited up, spent about ten minutes checking my email and phoning home, then the connection dropped out and by this stage my head was quite unhappy so I headed out to my bunk (it's in a hypertat which is difficult to describe but it's like half a cylinder buried in the ground full of little partioned-off rooms, one of which is mine! I live in room 7 of Betty, which is right next to Wilma, Fred and Barney. Imaginative names down here! Anyway, I curled up in bed and fell asleep - at the South Pole!
- Jessie