Forty Shades Of White

Ginni Bazlinton

Description

When Ginni Bazlinton signed up for a voyage to the planet's fifth largest and coldest continent, she did not know what to expect. An icy wilderness governed by no nation, where virtually the only natives are penguins and seals, Antarctica was a vast unknown when she set off on the rugged scientific vessel the Akademik Shokalskiy. From this grandmother 'next door' comes a first-hand encounter with a region unknown to many, a fascinating book about the miracle that is Antarctica and an understanding of humanity's ambiguous role within it.

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: Explore Books
• Date de parution: 09 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911184010
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

FORTY SHADES OF WHITE
My Amazing Antarctic Journey
Ginni Bazlinton
THE AUTHOR
Brought up in Zimbabwe and the UK, Ginni Bazlinton , after a career as a professional dancer in the theatre and at the world famous Murray s Cabaret Club, commenced her world travels in earnest at the age of 52, visiting in quick succession Morocco, Japan, Chile, Argentina (including Patagonia) and Antarctica. She has taught English as a foreign language working in Portsmouth, Japan and Chile and shares her passion for Antarctica and her other experiences through teaching, writing and advocacy.
FORTY SHADES OF WHITE
My Amazing Antarctic Journey
GINNI BAZLINTON

EXPLORE BOOKS LONDON
First published in 2016 by
EXPLORE BOOKS
26 Grosvenor Road, London, N10 2DS
www.exploretravelwriting.com
email: [e-mail]
Copyright text 2016 Ginni Balinton
Foreword copyright @ 2016 Sir Ranulph Fiennes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Ginni Bazlinton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBNs: 978-1-911184-00-3 (paperback)
978-1-911184-01-0 (ePub)
978-1-911184-02-7 (mobi)
Typeset by JPO design and typesetting.
Maps by Simonetta Giori.
eBook converted by Geethik Technologies
CONTENTS
Maps
Foreword by Sir Ranulph Fiennes
1. Prologue
2. The Land of Fire
3. Antarctic Air and Water
4. Our First Landing
5. Antarctic Fire and Ice
6. Deception: Hell s Gate
7. Pure Ice
8. The Birth of Antarctica
9. A Whale of a Time
10. A Phenomenogical Journey
11. The Antarctic Mainland
12. Human Endurance
13. The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust
14. Antarctic Politics and Anarchy
15. Nature in Eastern and Western Thought
16. Quantum Physics and Vodka
17. Crescendo at Dawn
18. The Screaming Sixties
19. El Fin del Mundo
20. Epilogue
Latin Names of Wildlife
Acknowledgements
Credits

FOREWORD
by Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Forty Shades of White: My Amazing Antarctic Journey is the story of a grandmother who sets off alone to fulfil her childhood dream of going to the end of the world, totally unaware of the life-changing impact it would have on her. Her journey takes her to a unique continent that has changed very little in 55 million years. Virginia Bazlinton invites you to take a step back into childhood, that time of imagination, spontaneity and discovery, when the self is lost in the timeless immediacy of the moment. She enters a magical land which is still hiding many secrets; so far away from our daily lives that few of us know very much about this continent of superlatives. Over the years, many books have been written about Antarctica by scientists, TV presenters, explorers and travel journalists.
Forty Shades of White is different. It is Antarctica seen through the eyes of an ordinary member of the public. It clearly had a life-changing impact on the author, both enriching yet humbling her. Whether you pick up this book as background reading for a trip you propose making, or if you ve already been there and want to compare your experience with others, it is a book worth reading.
I can fully understand Virginia s feelings, having led the first one-way crossing of Antarctica on the Transglobe Expedition 1979-82, and other later ventures on this continent. The uniqueness of this unspoilt land leaves one with a new sense of awareness - making Antarctica impossible to forget. This continent must be preserved, and this can only happen through knowledge and understanding of such an important place on our planet.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 2015
1. PROLOGUE
It rose out of the water like some giant prehistoric monster; it appeared to be smiling at us. It heaved its massive body up into the air, arching its back before diving back into the water with just its tail suspended like a weirdly shaped mushroom growing out of the sea. Then it disappeared back into the icy depths. I had no idea that a humpback whale could leave such an indelible imprint on my memory. But that was what Antarctica was like for me always taking me beyond what I knew. The decision to go was made spontaneously; I did not realise that the continent s sights and sounds like the humpback whale were to change the way I was to think about the world.
You must be mad! Why on earth do you want to go to such a bitterly cold, remote place; there s nothing there and nothing to do? That was the reaction I got from some of my friends. I couldn t answer why I wanted to go, it was just a spontaneous decision. My family however, thought it would be a wonderful adventure. They know I have an incurable travel bug and have to go off to some far-flung place from time to time. Their only comment was, You won t do anything stupid will you?
My academic achievements when I left school were sadly lacking. I used to spend a lot of my time daydreaming about being a ballerina; a status I didn t quite aspire to but I did make a living as a professional dancer in the theatre. My life treading the boards came to an end a couple of years after I got married with the arrival of my sons. I settled down to my new life as a wife and mother and continued to attend a weekly ballet class. Life was happy for fifteen years and then came the crash. Following divorce I found solace in education, it couldn t hurt me; it was up to me to work hard and succeed. I went to university and then taught English as a foreign language at an adult language school in Portsmouth.
One afternoon I was teaching a Spanish student named Manuel. He told me he didn t want to learn grammar, all he wanted to learn was new vocabulary, to speak and be corrected if he made a mistake. Having planned a lesson for him, I suddenly had to abandon it and think on my feet; well backside in this case. I sat poised with pen and paper at the ready and asked him to tell me about himself. He told me he was living in Chile and was the manager of a flying school in Santiago. He then described a train journey in the Andes, the longest mountain range in the world, going south from Santiago to a place called San Fernando. I was so engrossed with his vivid description of the terrain I don t recall even making one mark on the paper. Fortunately I was recording his lesson so we could analyse it later. I was hooked. I knew that as soon as my youngest son left home, Santiago was where I would go.
I spent eighteen months teaching in Santiago and before leaving for England I decided to spend three weeks in the far south of Chile and Argentina. On a Saturday in September I flew to Punta Arenas, the most southerly inhabited mainland place in the world. I booked into a residencia (a guest house) for two nights. I had hoped to leave for Ushuaia in Argentine Tierra del Fuego the next day but there were no buses on a Sunday. The next morning I woke up to heavy, overcast skies. Despite the terrible weather, I braved a walk along the seashore of the Magellan Strait, the graveyard of a good many ships that met their fate in the Southern Ocean. It was such a bleak, desolate place; a bone chilling cold wind lashed against me, and the rain, like sharp needles of ice, stung my face. I didn t see another human being anywhere; the atmosphere was forlorn and forgotten. I suppose it s only mad dogs and English grandmothers who go out in the morning wind and rain on the shores of the Magellan Strait.
There were a lot of shipwrecks along the shore, their great, rusting hulls belying their powerful, pioneering past. I felt rather sad as I walked along thinking of the poor people who d perished in a distant, hostile land and freezing cold sea. As there was no other sign of life in the vicinity; I called out across the sea You are not forgotten. I m thinking of you. It was the only time in my life that I have felt lonely on my travels. I think my call was more to make me feel less alone than for the poor dead sailors who were unlikely to hear my voice. At the time I didn t know the following poem, but now I believe that maybe my voice was carried to the dead men on the wings of the albatross. The poem appears in Spanish on a plinth at Cape Horn with a sculpture of an albatross.

Soy el albatross que te espera
I am the albatross who waits
En el final del mondo
For you at the end of the world
Soy el alama olivida de los marinos muertos
I am the forgotten soul of the dead sailors
Que cruzaron el Cabo de Horno
Who crossed Cape Horn
Desde todos los mares de la tierra.
From all the seas of the earth.
Pero ellos no murieron
But they did not die
Em las furiosas,
In the furious waves,
Hoy vuelane en mis alas,
Today they fly on my wings,
Hacia la eternidad,
Towards eternity,
En la ultima grieta
In the last gust
De los vientos Antarctica.
Of the Antarctic winds.
(Sara Vial, December 1992)

Albatross plinth at Cape Horn
Sara Vial was born and lived in Valparaiso, Chile. It was a place that inspired her work as a writer. She won the Gabriela Mistral Prize in 1976, and she was a friend of the late Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. Gabriela Mistral was also a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1945.
The following morning dawned sunny with occasional wisps of cloud in an otherwise azure sky. The bus left dead on time and took us along the coast of the Strait of Magellan, but in the opposite direction from my walk the day before. It was such a contrast from the desolate bleakness of the previous day. We soon arrived at the ferry that