It's now the last days for us on the Antarctic mainland, and we are busy getting ready to go back home. All our scientific equipment was packed into containers down in the depot this morning, and now we've just put all our cabin luggage into smaller containers, to be driven overland to the ship tonight, arriving in the Atka bukta where A/S Agulhas is waiting for us sometime tomorrow night if all goes well. The plan is that we will be flown to the ship by helicopter tomorrow afternoon, but the snow storm that we had the last couple of days makes it a bit insecure when exactly we can fly. The ship is scheduled to leave the bay on Saturday, so hopefully they will have gotten us all there by then. In the meantime we will have to wait.. Due to weight limitations on the helicopters the only things we still have with us is our sleeping bag, outdoor gear, laptop and camera... all the rest had to go with the cargo! We've hidden some toileteries (toothbrush etc) and clean underwear in our laptop bags (and chocolate, but that is simply a part of the emergency kit anyway and as Dan would say, 'quite a necessity'), and hope we will see our luggage tomorrow again, but it could be a few days still before we can get to the ship.
The plan is for the ship to be sailing again through the furious 50's and roaring 40's and have us back in Cape Town by 23 Feb. We then have the flight booked so that we are arriving in Stockholm again on 27 Feb.
Oh, the Japanese inspection team made it here finally, on Sunday morning. It was really nice with some visitors and to see everyone excited about it. They flew in with a plane equipped with skis instead of wheels! I have only seen that in movies and so we went down to the airfield to look closer at the plane. It is a Canadian plane (ehrm, I'll spare you all the dull technical details of its design...), and the four pilots were Canadian too. The photo below shows the plane, and Tobbe and Marlie standing in front of it.
Apparently every take over ends with a proper storm, and so did this one.. On Sunday and Monday we had 60 knots wind and white-out conditions, which was just what everyone had been waiting for! During the last three weeks at least we've had lovely weather with sunshine, very little or no wind and only a few degrees below zero, and some people were getting quite disappointed... This is not the weather to expect on Antarctica! Well, at least they got a storm in the end, even though the temperatures never dropped quite as far below zero as desired perhaps. :)
Now the storm has eased quite a bit, which is nice since we spent today unpacking the frozen meat and veg that had to come in to the freezers inside from containers, and backloading all the left over stuff that is going to the winter depot for reserve. It was quite a lot and carrying package after package of 20 kg frozen meat is not an exercise I will miss once I get back from this adventure.
Below is a photo of the sun setting behind the base, taken last night when we went out for a walk after the storm. The new wind turbine is also in the picture, and one of its engineers, Johan, admiring his creation. 
That's it from now, we will probably post another message just before leaving the base, whether it will be tomorrow or the day after or even later.. After that we will be in internet shadow again for about 2 weeks..
Cheers, Hanna
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