AntarcticDoctor

Neat, not-so-neat and chaotic piles of equipment, clothing, books, paperwork, electronics and camera equipment are scattered across most of the furniture and various floor spaces throughout my apartment.  Three seperate computers are connected to a pletora of portable harddrives and flashdrives, all frenetically downloading and creating backups.  A list of lists of things to do is at my side, with items being added faster than they are crossed off.  Amongst it all, I’m experiencing potent deja vu.  Yes, it’s packing-for-Antarctica… again.

Before you dial the local psychiatric services on my behalf, be advised that I am not repeating the 15-month overwintering expedition.  Phone down?  Good.  What I am doing is taking all my year’s leave from my real job and embarking on a working holiday of sorts as the expedition/ship’s doctor for an eco-expedition to a plethora of the most environmentally, hisptoric and geographically important places in the South.  Yes, that’s right – this time we are going to take pictures of cutesy pengiuns, and lots of them 😉

I’ve been blessed to join the crew from Cheeseman’s Ecology Safaris, a well established team who have been leading natural history oriented expeditions around the world for the last 30 years.  Their frank and foremost ethos is to provide their participants with the most indepth and immersive wildlife and wilderness experiences possible, and they seem to succeed grandly.  This expedition will take us aboard the MV Polar Star to the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands), South Georgia and Antarctic Peninsula.  Read about the trip, staff and itinerary here.

This promises to be a very different experience to my previous expedition with SANAE; although there will be considerable scientific input the focus is more upon the wildlife and natural beauty of the area than on investigation itself.  The participants are multinational: a brief scan of the manifest shows that they  hail from Canada, right across the USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, RSA, Thailand, Finland and Australia.  The expedition team are fantastically diverse, most with tertiary qualifications in fields ranging from biology, ecology, and geology to wildlife photography, art and polar history.  I can barely contain my excitement at picking this collection of minds and experience.

I will be posting updates from the ship throught the expedition, with photographs and video to follow as soon as I return.  Hopefully, you will be able to share in the trip 🙂

I leave on Saturday 27 December… watch this space!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 10:14 pm and is filed under 2010 Cheeseman Expedition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.