Enough Already About Mykonos!

 

Saturday–Jeff

 

Have you been following the hatchet-job of bad news and piling-on raging across the Internet and much of the western media about my adopted home of Mykonos?  I don’t like it, and do not wish to “give legs” to those tales, but nor can I leave such targeted rumor mongering unanswered.

 

Practically everywhere you turn someone is offering a curated agenda of reasons for blasting this legendary Aegean Greek island’s iconic draw for tourist dreams world-wide. If you believe all that’s written, during tourist season my island is a traffic jammed, mafia controlled, violent, robbery prone, drug enhanced, politically corrupt, sexually promiscuous, outrageously expensive, over-developed, wild 24/7 party scene overrun each day by behemoth cruise boats filled with tens of thousands of tourists who rarely contribute more than the price of a bottle of water to the local economy.

 

Hmm, sounds a lot like the fictional setting for my tenth Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel, The Mykonos Mob (aka Island of Secrets in trade paperback).

 

That’s quite an impressive checklist for a modest island of 11,000 full time residents to achieve.  If true, it puts Mykonos right up there with some of the free world’s most appealing tourist attractions, such as Manhattan, LA, Chicago, Miami, Paris, the South of France, Brazil, London, Rome, Naples, various locales in Mexico…you get the idea.

 

Rightly or wrongly, any number of other tourism-driven locales appear anxious to achieve what they perceive as the “Mykonos Vibe” and the imagined financial benefits to be gained from such a bargain. 

 

I’m not suggesting that all claimed in the media about Mykonos is true or false or somewhere in-between, and I freely admit that I’m not fully happy at the direction Mykonos has taken over the 40 years that I’ve called it home, but finger-pointing, name calling, and exuberant schadenfreude is not the answer. Those sorts of responses only harden positions, raise defensive hackles on the accused, and change nothing.

 

The Telegraph

Let’s be realistic. The powerful and those seeking power will always search to capitalize on places and opportunities that will profit them.  The key is to separate the bad actors from the benevolent, the corrupt from the caring, and the opportunistic predators from the powerless oppressed. For that you need an alliance of the willing and strong government management.

 

If that can’t be achieved, then perhaps all that’s been written shall indeed come to pass.

 

So, let’s get to work.

 

–Jeff

The Cango Caves revisited

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

Despite the title, this is not a repost. I’ve visited the Cango Caves three times in my life, once as a child, once as a young man, and once last weekend. The caves are spectacular. They’re situated under the foothills of the Swartberg mountains in Precambrian limestones, and they run for at least four kilometers, although only about a quarter of that is accessible to the public. The second chamber is one of the most spectacular caves I’ve ever seen. But why try to describe it when there are pictures?

My reaction to the caves has been quite different each time. Obviously, some of that is due to the distinct periods of my life when I've seen them. Some of it is, however, due to the difference in the culture and style, perhaps the thoughtfulness, of the people who manage the caves. Finally, on this latest occasion, I believed that nature itself was changing slightly, perhaps in response to the daily hordes of humans who come to visit the site.

What I recall from my first visit as a child with my parents was the wonder of these majestic and huge cave. There were perhaps twenty people on the tour. The caves seemed endless, each different from the previous one, each full of stories about angels’ wings frozen in the stone, Cleopatra’s needles, sculptures of the caves’ discoverer. I knew the stories were nonsense, but some at least were fun. Colored lights were switched on and off to illuminate particular features or structures. Everything was damp and we could see the water dripping down the stalactites slowly working to join with the stalagmite rising from the floor of the cave, a work of thousands of years. And we saw pillars where that work was complete.

When we reached the end we saw the metal ladder climbing up to a hole in the cave wall. Here, people could experience narrow tunnels, chimneys up through the rock and eventually the infamous letterbox where you posted yourself out at the end. Here, we turned back.

The next time I was a young man and went with friends. We looked forward to the adventure of the whole tour, and I looked forward to seeing areas I had not seen before. This time I found the stories and the colored lights irritating and there were about fifty people, some of whom would do the adventure part and some of whom would not. I tried to hang back, to have some time to contemplate the caverns. The adventure itself was fun, but the narrow tunnels and chimneys left little time to see the caverns and, indeed, the ones there were far less interesting than those on the general tour.

On this last occasion, many things had changed. Admittedly, we went on the Sunday of a long weekend. Booking was essential and more than 100 people joined our late afternoon timeslot. They were divided into three groups – one where the guide would speak in Afrikaans and two where English would be the language. It was clear that many visitors were from overseas and spoke among themselves in other languages. There was only a story or two, and the colored lights were banished to one small cave that we walked past – now named the Rainbow Cave. The plain white light showed the caves to much better advantage with their rich natural colors. The guide was a black man (my previous Apartheid-era visits were all guided by white men) who sang for us in the first cave, illustrating the acoustics that had been the attraction for concerts in the main cavern until 1990. 

His introduction began with the San people who had lived around the caves for 75,000 before the caves were “discovered” (in the sense that Christopher Columbus discovered America). The San believed that deep in the caves, their ancestors continued their lives and that they should be left in peace to do that. Cango should start with a click as the San pronounced it.

All this was good, but not everything struck me that way. The huge caverns felt crowded. There were visible signs of damage including the “drum” – a broad thin stalactite that had strummed for countless tourists over a hundred years until it gave up and sheared away. 

The caves no longer felt damp, despite all the visitors. The caves are drying, at least in the public sections. The stalactites will never now join the stalagmites. I hope things are different deeper in the caves. I’m glad they are left in peace. At least by the living.

Part 2 of What Makes a Series: Setting

Sujata Massey

My family settled in Minnesota when I was seven. You’d think the Laura Ingalls Wilder books set in the prairies around the state would be the perfect fit for a book-loving, history fanatic. I liked them because they were set in the past, but I was obsessed with books that were both set in the past and in Britain

 

England, the land of my birth where I spent my first five years eating Smarties, going to Infants School, and hearing grownups grumble about Mrs. Thatcher. Then suddenly we moved stateside, first to California, then to Pennsylvania, and finally Minnesota. Life was becoming confusing and frightening, and I felt like an outsider.  My parents had emigrated for a number of great reasons, but I wasn’t fitting. It was all to easy to build up the lost home in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne as superior to my everyday existence in snowy St. Paul. How grateful I was to escape to elegant London streets and wild Yorkshire moors in books by Noel Streatfield, Joan Aiken, Nina Bawden, and many more!

 

I kept up the reading habit, and gradually, my terrain grew. I came to take special pleasure in settings I don’t know at all, like the Singapore of Ovida Yu, the New York City Chinatown of S.J. Rozan, the Bangalore of Harini Nagendra. I got to India for the first time when I was nine, shown above at Golconda Fort--and my mind was now alight to read books about India. I like Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket and Alafair Burke’s Long Island. Interestingly enough, as a grown person, I’m eager to read books set in Minnesota.  

 

When I decided to try writing a first novel, I was living in Japan: an hour south of Tokyo, is how I like to describe it, kind of the way people in New Jersey talk about their relationship to New York. Tony and I rented a typical middle-class house without central heat, but with some very interesting traditional features, like a cut out space in the floor meant for fermenting foods; a very hot bath; and tatami matted floors that required you to sleep on a futon and have no furniture with legs. Shoji screens and a lower-level entry area were other features to which I became accustomed and wove into my fictional setting. But I wasn’t home much.

 

Every day of the two years I lived in Japan felt like adventure. There I was, riding trains with a frieze of funny advertisements in every compartment. I walked streets that smelled of roasting sweet potatoes and mixed towering skyscrapers with tiny old shrines. Chic young ladies with Chanel bags hurried to their office jobs, passing tiny old men bicycling to the temple. Setting was easy to draw when you saw it coming to life in front of you. 

When I came home two years later, the memories were rich enough for me to finish the book and write ten more after it. But it wasn’t as easy as in the beginning. I had to keep returning to Japan in order to refill my imagination tank, and I couldn’t afford to do it both financially and because of my responsibilities co-parenting two very young children. 

 

 

My second series was supposed to be easier for me to manage, yet I set it even farther away, in India. What the hell was I doing? 

I had been to India several times in company of my Indian father, but I’d never been a resident settled into a home and neighborhood. Yet I had so many Indian family resources—my friends, my parents and step-parents, and their generously welcoming families still living in India. So I took four years to learn more about India, including studying Hindi and reading a lot; dancing and cooking with my friends was part of it, too. With our children growing up and liking travel, it became easier to make return visits to India, sometimes with family members in tow. 

 

In hindsight, I think I chose to set both my mystery series abroad because that’s the way my imagination comes alive. But it’s not an essential rule for everyone. People may love their homes and be able to explain them better than anyone else. The one wise thing I think a series writer should do is dive deep into one geographic setting, whether a region, town, or neighborhood. Readers do get attached—and the writer gets certain benefits.

 

The first is a buildup of intellectual capital. If you’ve dragged yourself through one novel, you have done lots of investigations of street names, buildings, and have put characters into cafes and police stations and homes. You will probably write even more richly about these places the second time around—because now you know them. 

 

And that brings up the point; should a series setting be an actual village, town, or city—or is it wise to fictionalize? Do you want to write about a fictional in rural Canada or the actual U.S. city of Chicago? 

 

A lot of writers feel emotionally more free and creative writing about a fictitious place. Obviously, there’s less of a chance of some person thinking they are being described in your novel, or you making an accidental geographic or historical error. However, if Whispering Woods (your fictional village) is entirely being built from your imagination, you probably have to work harder for story ideas, because all of it will be self-generated.

 

If I choose to write about Chicago, I can send characters into well-known ethnic neighborhoods, watching a basketball game at Northwestern, and eating Latin pastries at an up-and-coming restaurant in River North. Readers will love this! And ideas for plots involving the setting’s key features will bubble like seltzer from the tap. 

 

Brilliant Laura Lippman writes books set in Baltimore and other real towns in Maryland. Laura's said that if an actual Baltimore restaurant is good, she will mention it by name if it seems like a good place to put in a book. Yet she wouldn’t put in a real restaurant that isn’t so good and talk trash about it. Below is a hotel restaurant in India that looks like an old-fashioned Irani place in Bombay, but is actually in Fort Cochin, Kerala.

 

I mixed reality and fantasy in my work by using actual restaurant’s name for a fictional restaurant in The Widows of Malabar Hill, my first Perveen Mistry novel. I decided to use Yazdani's name on a very good, fictional café of my choice on Bruce Street (now renamed Homi Modi Lane). The real Yazdani’s Bakery and Cafe lies about a block away from Homi Modi Lane. It is an adorable corner store bought by an Irani family in the 1940s, not the 1920s of my book’s setting. Still, Yazdani’s the oldest Irani café in the area with an amazingly charming elderly owner, and I imagine my readers going in might wonder if the white haired, voluble elderly owner once was the 30-something friendly and undeniably macho restaurateur, Firoze, in my book. 

 

There are so many challenges of trying to recreate cities as they were a hundred years ago. It can never be done perfectly; and in my case, nobody’s still living who could make that judgment. 

 

I’ve found Mumbai and Kolkata to be goldmines of gorgeous atmosphere that I can learn about through literature, maps photography, and best of all, in person. I’m working on a train journey for my character, and while I remember a long train journey as a child in India, I’m taking a 5-night trip in Karnataka early next year in a historically furnished train as a way to understand the experience.

 

Of course, there are those who have sold a lot of books set in countries where they haven’t visited. The late HRF Keating, who lived in Britain, depicted India in his novels, based on his own encounters with Indian people in England, and on his reading. John LeCarre traveled to a lot of countries in his lifetime—but he didn’t go to Panama for The Tailor of Panama and perhaps some other books. LeCarre was aging and at the top of bestseller lists, but instead of traveling to Panama, he sent a researcher. Now, I liked this book—but I imagine it would have been even better if he’d laid his own eyes on the place. When a writer regards a location thinking ‘a city or country is sooo like this’ it means they are working from other writers’ opinions. That puts the writer at risk for trafficking in cliches and ethnic stereotypes—the problem with H.R.F. Keating. He eventually started a second series with a British protagonist. Yet his affection for his first character never ended and resulted in just a few more Inspector Ghote books. 

 

HRF Keating truly loved his characters and milieu. But he was living in a fictional India, because he wrote dozens of books without visiting. He finally traveled only because Air India sent him a free ticket, and his first words upon landing were about his shock at the heat. One hears that India is hot, but there’s a Dry-New-Delhi-in-July hot that’s different from Humid-Kerala-in-February hot. He was feeling that, for the first time.

 

And physical sensation brings a final question: how comfortable are you in it? It may seem gripping to readers for you to write about a very tough city and give your protagonist a shabby apartment on its meanest street. But if you don’t love a setting and feel comfortable staying there, it could be hard to sustain a series there. Another option is for your protagonist to be a traveler, a Jack Reacher or James Bond type, and have constant changing scenery and people. The reader experiences settings from the eye of a protagonist who doesn’t know it well…which can be an ongoing theme.

 

I write about Mumbai (named Bombay before independence) because I truly enjoy the people I know in the city. I have real friends here, built up over years of visiting and research. They always tell me the next place to go. I have a fondness and familiarity with a few buildings and neighborhoods that enriches my imagination. I’m writing about an era roughly 100 years ago, another reason I chose this place versus another city in India. Mumbai’s preservation laws will keep the façade of the central train station and its windows the same as before, which is crucial if I want to describe things accurately. 

 

Finally, I feel a level of physical freedom and safety working in Mumbai that’s the same as in my home. I’m glad to come back there, in my books and in person. Traveling so regularly to India is a financial expense that eats up a lot of my book advance. 

It’s ironic that the England I thought was perfect heaven in my childhood days now is an antagonistic idea to heroine of my series. How times change! And sometimes I think, maybe one day I will get away from the travels and write a book or even a series set in my neighborhood. But I suspect that I’m hard-wired to venture outside of the familiar, because I’m on the same journey that many readers are. 

 

Carrying a book to term and gaining 3 kg along the way

“The first draft of writing anything is shit” — Ernest Hemingway

“The end result of eating anything is shit” -- Me at the moment

Ovidia—Every Other Tuesday

I’m in the really final Stretch of finishing my latest Tree History Mystery and yes, 3 kg heavier than when I started. But by now I’ve come to realise it’s part of the process.

I love writing. I love the process, the picking and nitpicking, the sudden wonderful bursts of ‘that’s what I mean’ even if it means starting over with one more rewrite and the satisfaction of knowing I’ve done all I can to get the right words down in the right order to put across what I want to say.

But I also hate writing.
Especially when I’m mired in the chrysalis stage like I am now. When nothing seems to be changing on the outside but there’s agonising breaking down of a hundred caterpillar legs into sludge before they can re-form into the final book or butterfly.

There have been breaks, though.

Like Sunday night, when the Beloved Husband declared I needed (even if I didn’t deserve) a break and treated us to a ‘feast night’ out at our neighbourhood kopitiam. Also, he wanted to test his crab dissecting travel kit, so we ordered chilli crab…

The crab was Delicious and came with little fried mantous, thin crispy brown skins over moist Chinese bread that’s perfect for sopping up juices.

The crab dissecting travel kit worked perfectly, by the way. Though we didn’t need the little finger bowl because there was a sink a few steps away from our table.

(And yes, if anyone’s wondering, he also has a public restroom kit, a transit lounge shower kit, and a keeping footwear dry while viewing the Niagara Falls from boat deck kit and they all work.)

I also had the Hokkien Mee (one of my favourite dishes) and added a satay ‘set’ to make up for our wait.

And the drink stall was pushing their homemade honey lemon drink—“not from cans! Ownself make one!”—which was so good that we polished off two mugs each.

It was a fantastic feast. And yes, I came home afterwards and polished off three more chapters, but in a completely different mood. It’s amazing how a good meal can lift your spirits—and yes, it’s a completely different feeling from mindlessly swallowing junk food while sitting at the computer—because I’ve done that too, trust me.

And yet that’s part of the problem. The 3 kg I’ve put on in these three months of this final round of writing.
It’s totally understandable. I haven’t been to yoga, haven’t set foot in the gym or dipped a toe in the pool. The best I can say is I’ve kept to my daily morning and evening walks because that’s when I get to see my doggy friends.
Once this book is in, I know I’ll get back in shape.
I was thinking of taking October off writing to catch up on reading and exercising but I’ve already got a great (they’re always great until you start writing) idea for a standalone middle grade book that I really want to get down and if I could…

I know that writing a book is a marathon run, a cycling grand tour where stamina and mind set count for as much, if not more, than the idea you started out with. And yes, I enjoy even the grind as part of the process. Just as I enjoy preparing our home meals as much as the occasional feast night out.

We’re having noodles tonight; fairly healthy as you see— and I enjoy the preparation and cooking. It could be the start of the path back to losing this extra belly fat, except... the Beloved Husband just arrived home with what he calls happy writing fuel….

If anyone’s still wondering where that extra 3 kg came from… but yes I’m happy.

Heading back to the grindstone now… Wish me luck!

May Shakespeare Forgive Me. Again.

 

 

 

Jeff—Saturday

 

It's been one hell of an interesting week.  Perhaps one day soon I'll get to tell you all about it.  But for now there's no way I dare put pen (or fingers) to paper (or keyboard) lest my current state of mind has me jumping the gun, running amuck, or any number of more literate analogies to counting chickens before they're hatched.  So, instead I offer you this take on where my mind is at the moment...whether I want it to be, or not to be.  [Did you catch that cutesy little word play (so to speak)?  But that's from Hamlet's soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1 of his eponymous tragedy, and this parody is based upon Macbeth's soliloquy in Act 2, Scene 1 of the play bearing his name.] 

So, with apologies to The Bard (and Caro), I give you the King of Scotland describing my life at the moment:

 

Is this a blank page which I see before me,

The blog thought toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To writing as to sight? Or art thou but

A blogpost of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the late-night pressèd brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I write.

Thou deceived me the way that I was going,

With such inspiration I was to use.

Mine blog is made the fool o' th' other ones done,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy screen and laptop gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There’s no blog here.

It is the bloody press to write which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale god Poe’s offerings, and withered murder,

Alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With deadline’s ravishing strides, towards some design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my words, which way they speak, for fear

my very stories prate of my runamuck,

And take the present offer from the time,

Which now sits on me. Whiles I write, MIE lives.

Words to the heat of reads too bold breath gives.

 

 

And now the original...

 

 

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,

And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives.

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

 

 –Jeff

 

The Lady In Bay 1

 

Something weird has been happening in Scotland this week.

The sun has been shining and the situation is’ taps aff’. Tops off I.e. warm enough to remove your shirt.

It didn’t stop raining at all during August and next week, it’s back to normal with warnings of 100 kph winds and torrential rain with risk of flooding, thunder, lightning, pestilence. Fleetwood Mac reforming and lots of other things that shouldn’t happen these days.

                                       

I have a deadline for the first of October, and both work and book worlds have been very busy so we took advantage of the fact that the business is not mine anymore and we can get away at any time. We took five days up at Tyndrum where there is nothing to distract me apart from walking the Limpy dog and being amused by the red squirrels.

                                      

And, added bonus, it’s quite hard to get on the internet here.  

On day two, it was a record hot day for Crianlarich for September.  The campsite is long, with a single row of 8 bays on either side. It was an old railway siding so the lay out makes sense. At the front door is a trekkers hostel. On one side there are trekkers huts and lodges. On the other just serviced bays for motorhomes and caravans.

Bay one is opposite the toilets. Everything that happens, happens in the vicinity of bay one.

The owner knows us by now and they like dogs, so Mathilda always gets bay 3 which has a lot of grass with a nice height of hedge so that the small red one is not over bothered by other canines or campers frying their dinners over an open flame. She does like to pull her cheeks in and look starved so that she gets tit bits and treats, she is a wee scavenger. Mathilda, Cockroaches and teddy bears are three things that could survive a nuclear winter.

We tend to be the only people who stay here. Most people stop overnight on their way to the Western Isles turn left, or the Great Glen and Skye, turn right. 

                                            

This week there has been another van who has stayed for the week- the lady in bay one.

She is not young. She’s recovering from having a knee operation. She’s off her work but the doctor said she could go away in her wee campervan as long as she didn’t overdo it.  She’s parked opposite the toilets and next to the grass used by the small tents of the walkers.

She lies late in the morning and goes for a short walk, then places her deckchair facing the sun – and moves it every hour or so. She dressed in in long shorts and a loose t shirt, and she sits on her chair with a wee table beside her, she has a glass of wine and a pile of books. The level of wine in the glass starts very high and drops, as does the book pile.

                                     

Everybody who goes past talks to her.  Mostly asking for the codes for the toilets, where the cold-water tap is.  She says she stays here often, and the recent knee operation had forced her to stay rather than move on. And she’s loving it. She has learned the joy of staying in one place and soaking in the view.  Rather than getting up earlier and having the bay vacated by 11am to move to the next site by 3, here she sits and lets life come to her. She reads, drinks wine and watches, and these last few days, she’s following the sunshine as it moves around her van.

 Tonight, she dressed in her pjs with a large fluffy hoodie on when the sun closed down for the day at about 6 pm. She was outside eating, with her hood up, and I asked her what was for her tea tonight- she said mashed tattie and haggis. And it always tastes better in the fresh air,

On Monday she was reading an autobiography a gardener she likes, - she loves her garden, but it has been a wash out this year. Yesterday it was a thick bodice ripper, today it was a gangland thriller with the typical front cover of a young lady in a red coat and redder lip stick.

                               

Some Dutch bikers were talking to her for half an hour earlier. Now she’s talking to the owner of a Rhodesian ridgeback. One American lady yesterday was waving a map around at her to discuss where was the best place to walk next.  There were lots of pointing north.

The site owner gets updates on who dropped what where and who was responsible for the laughter at 10.05 last night- no noise after 10 pm, and certainly no laughing – we are still very presbyterian.

                                       

It’s getting dark now and she’s still sitting out, in her chair, with a blanket wrapped round her, she has as night light and a citronella candle on her wee table to keep the midgies* away.

I think I am going to use her as a role model with the small adjustment of a limpy dog at my feet. 

                                      

*The true spelling of Midge, it’s pronounced Midg gy. As in Squidgy.

Now you know.

                                          

 

 

One Heck of an Icebreaker

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

The Nuyina seen from across the Hobart Harbor.

This week I wanted to write a bit about our tour of the newest Australian icebreaker, the RSV Nuyina, which docks in Hobart, Tasmania when it’s not making its way to the Australian stations in Antarctica. We were lucky enough to have a fabulous guide in the ship’s bosun, Joe McMenemy. My husband James has written about Joe before in the Belfast Telegraph, and I’m grateful he’s allowed me to quote a few bits of the article below.

 

With our generous host, Joe, who even gave us caps to take home!

 

Antarctic exploration has sparked the imagination of seafarers, scientists, and adventurers for almost 250 years. James Cook first crossed the Antarctic Circle in the HMS Resolution in 1775, and there were sightings and attempts by various whalers and explorers in the 19th century. 

 

Imagined image from James Cook's southern voyage.

 

The Southern Cross Expedition, which lasted from 1898 to 1900, wintered at the top of the landmass, and the 20th century brought famous expeditions by first Robert Falcon Scott and then Ernest Shackleton, who reached what they call "Farthest South” in 1909. Shackleton’s 1922 voyage marked the end of the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.” 

 

Early explorations.

Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance.

 

Hundreds of trips followed, with various countries vying for sovereignty in the region. Currently (according to Wikipedia. . .) “Antarctica is governed by a group of nations in a one-of-a-kind international partnership called The Antarctic Treaty, which was first signed by representatives from seven countries on December 1, 1959.”  

 

In terms of where the US fits in, according to the U.S. Department of State: “Seven countries (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom) maintain territorial claims in Antarctica, but the United States and most other countries do not recognize those claims. While the United States maintains a basis to claim territory in Antarctica, it has not made a claim.”

 

Map of the four Australian stations and their distance from the mainland.

 

Many countries beyond the original seven maintain stations in the region, including Australia, which officially has four: Mawson, Davis, Casey, and Macquarie Island. You can find out about the different stations and see photos of each of them here:  https://www.antarctica.gov.au/antarctic-operations/stations/#group

 

James in front of the previous icebreaker, the Aurora Australis.

These stations have always been serviced by a series of Australian icebreakers. The Nuyina, which replaced the Aurora Australis (1989 to 2021), is the largest, and most sophisticated vessel to date. 

 

Looking down from midship.

 

As James writes in the Telegraph, it was “constructed at a cost of $528 million (£271m), and is fitted out with laboratories for biological, meteorological, and oceanographic research, and was named by Australian schoolchildren from the Tasmanian Aboriginal word for Southern Lights.”

 

And from the dock.

 

To be honest, the size, scope, and capabilities of this 526 foot long ship completely stunned us during our tour of the ten(!) decks.

The ship is covered in satellite and navigational equipment.

 

As noted above, the ship has a myriad of duties beyond breaking through the ice to take fuel, food, scientists, and other supplies to its stations. Some researchers and scientists just go along for the ride, using onboard labs for their experiments. 

 

The "Moon Pool" -- for letting water into the ship for testing.

 

The ship is designed to test and sound the waters as they go south, keeps track of the ice pack, is a launchpad for helicopters (it can hold three), and has a full clinic and surgery area, a mess hall, and a cinema for the crew. It also is fully equipped to perform its own repairs. 

It is also sometimes called upon for rescue operations. 

 

In 2023, Joe was part of a medi-rescue from the Casey station which involved heading “South” in winter, a brutally cold and dangerous time when they’re usually safe in dock. If you’d like to read about the rescue, you can find it here:  https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/tasmanian-angels-belfast-man-helps-rescue-researcher-from-icy-antarctica/a380485721.html

 

The helipad, for launching transport - and rescues.

 The boat is full of every manner of ropes. I found them absolutely gorgeous. 

 

 

Looking up towards the top of the ship. Note the huge crane in front.

Loved this view.

Crew suits are hung on "suitwarmers."

Another view from one of the lower decks.

Great view out of the "operational headquarters."

James in the captain's chair.

They even have a section that swings out, for whale watching!

It was an extraordinary day and if you’d like to follow the ship’s journeys when she’s at sea, there’s a live webcam here:

https://www.antarctica.gov.au/antarctic-operations/webcams/rsv-nuyina/

--Wendall