Arrival at SANAE!

Finally! After 28 days on the ship the weather finally cleared and the helicopters could take off to bring us to SANAE and the Antarctic mainland! It was almost a religious feeling to have solid ground under our feet again and to see something else than the walls of the ship. Letting all the locked-up scientists out to play in the snow was scarily similar to the behavior of happy cows that are let out after a long winter in the stable… There were snow ball fights and riding on sleds and scooters (or ski-doos as the south Africans call them). The base is great, it’s really huge and we’re accommodated into rooms with 4 people in each, but it’s much more spacious than on the ship and there’s a library, a game room, two TV lounges, a bar and a gym… but we’re limited to one shower every 4 days due to diesel shortage (so not enough water can be melted for the water system) so it’s most people’s wish that the gym is not too frequently used. Anyway, we will spend most of the days working outside now, and today we got our daily muscle training when helping out bringing all the food inside the base. There is a lot of food to bring to a base that will feed 80 people for 1½ months and another 10 people for 12 months more. It is great to finally have internet again too, we can’t believe we survived 4 weeks without browsing the world wide web, and it wasn’t as terrifying as we had both imagined actually! Tomorrow the real work starts, and we’re quite eager to get familiar with what we’ve come all this way to do. We’ll keep you posted!
-Hanna

The southern end of the SANAE base, with ski-doos parked outside.