Boarding pass

This is the boarding pass for the flight. We are still in Punta waiting for weather to improve at UG. This is sent by sat phone.

Waiting starts

We had small cocktail party at ALE office this evening where we had a debrief about the flight to Union Glacier basecamp. The camp is big, and very organized. Apparently UG has better weather than Patriot Hills (that's why they moved there).  Even bathroom facility is nice.  I am looking forward to it. Mike Sharp was there, and he said he kinda recognized me from the last trip. He commented on my shirt and tie and said I should bring it to the South Pole for the picture.  Looks like I will.  

About that shirt and tie, I didn't bring any thing nice.  Who would bring nice stuffs when they are on expedition?  Apparently, Carl insisted that we should had cocktail attire (maybe it was a practical joke for Em?) but he kept saying it and I thought he was serious.  I didn't plan to buy anything anyway but since the shirt and tie together cost me less than $10, I snatched them just for the event. Turned out, I was the only one in shirt and tie and everyone was in their regular outfit!

My boarding pass

At the event, we also pickup our boarding passes (yes, even it's a chartered flight, we still need them). Unfortunately, as of this evening, the weather at UG is not looking good, so we probably won't be able to fly tomorrow morning.  From tomorrow, we are officially in the waiting game, where every morning the ALE staff will call us to inform whether we can fly or not.  If we get to go, we will have to be ready to be picked up at the hotel in 20 mins. So everything has to be on standby. If we don't get to fly, they'll give us another time for another call.  I was told the wait can be up to one week.  This time around, I am not anxious about it at all.  It is what it is and we cannot do much about the weather except for working with it.

Prep day 4: Lazy day

I  got to sleep in for another extra 1 hour and a half today cause we don't have anything planned as a group. Despite having a day "off", I still haven't got through all the things I needed to do.  One thing I did was sew the fur ruff on the hood of my jacket.  It didn't take a long time but it's work.  Another was to shorten the work gloves I bought from a hardware store in Punta Arenas. They are soft suede and quite heavy. I had to trim the excess leather to make it a bit lighter.  The work gloves are the one I forgot to pack with me.

Gloves after: imperfect :(

Gloves before

Carl, Em (Emma prefers Em) and I went for lunch then went to the warehouse for the weighing of our stuffs to Antarctica. We have 20 boxes (all food).  I should have tallied the weight, but my guess is roughly about 250 kg.  We recorded the weight of each box though, so I would have the exact number tomorrow if Carl brings the note book with him.

New haircut

Another thing I did was to go shopping for christmas gifts.  Yes, we're going to have a Christmas "party" with some treats and gift exchange. I think Em and Carl will like my gifts :).  On the way back, I swung by a hair salon for a shorter hair cut.  I don't like my new hair style that much but I will mostly in my hat for a while so it's ok.

Prep day 3: Done packing

Finally we are done with packing.  The boxes are ready to be shipped to Union Glacier base camp when we get to fly there. Each of my day bag of food now weighs about 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs) and that does not count the fruits and nuts, salami, cheese and other things. I expect it to go up to 1.7 kg per day.  Let say average about 1.6 kg/day, I would consume 80 kg (176 lbs) of food by the end of the trip. Because we have so much food, we are going to drink at least 5 liters of water per day.  This is a lot of number ones and twos to have :).

We are using this tent on the ice

We practiced pitching the tents we are going to use in Antarctica. Some of us have not used this tunnel tent before so there are a few things to know about them and do's and dont's while on the ice.  I used the same tent last time, and I own one myself, so it's no brainer.  

One thing that was fun was playing around with fire. One would have to be careful with the stove that sits inside the tent in the vestibule. Emma's polar training course on starting the stove procedure seems to be a little different from how we are going to actually use it on the ice, which is kind of interesting to me.  Not sure if people who gave the training have done this type of trip before.

Each of us haul a sled like this full of stuffs for 50 days

The real fun thing today though was a trip to pay tribute to Magellan at his statue downtown Punta Arenas to ask for a safe passage. This is a tradition to some skiers to the South Pole apparently. We had fun rubbing the toe of the Patagonian statue below Magellan.

Since we are finished with the packing, it's nice to have the next couple of days to work on customized stuffs on gears, and clothing.

We are scheduled to fly to Union Glacier base camp on Saturday but historically, the flight to Antarctica are always delayed due to weather.  

Prep day 2: Packing

I didn't get back to the hotel until late last night after the dinner/hangout with the guys who are also skiing to the South Pole.  I almost couldn't get out of my bed this morning if it wasn't for Emma waking me up. We were supposed to be at the warehouse by 9:15 to start our day. While I was having breakfast, Emma ran into a group of marathon runners that were going to fly to Antarctica for Antarctic Ice Marathon tomorrow.  Looks like its a marathon has taken new frontier for a while now.

Carl, Emma and I went over our tech gears so that we know how they work.  I'm quite impressed with Carl technical knowledge.  He taught himself web programming.  He built his company website was built by himself. I went over how the tracking program I wrote for this trip works (I will talk a little about it in another entry).  I tested it quite a bit (and I already filed myself a few bugs:)) but I hope it really works the while I'm on the ice.  If you want to have "interactive" tracking instead of just an image on Facebook, you should check out knovava.blogspot.com.

After technical TOI, we headed to the warehouse where we continue packing.  We didn't finish the until almost 6.  There are few more things we need to do regarding food but it seems we're almost done. In the picture, the two rows in front of me and three at the back are my food for the next 5 days.  Each bag is a day worth of food.  There will be more in each ziplock bag. They would add to total of about 5000+ calorie each.  On top of that we have others like butter, chips, and extra 8 days of food. It's a lot of food.

Prep day 1: Food

We had a productive day today. Carl came to our hotel to do a gear check to make sure we had everything we need.  I thought I had everything but turned out I missed a couple of items.  Things in Punta are not cheap, and gears in particular are outrageously expensive. Oh well, I just have to suck it up and pay for it.

Food!

After gear check, we spent pretty much the whole afternoon ripping the food packaging, adding up the calorie and re-pack them in our lighter bags.  We had the whole production line going on. I was the package ripper, Emma the bagger and Carl the tier and bag excess remover.  We are pretty much done with the repacking by the end of the day.  There's still a lot more regarding food packing but it was a great progress.

More food

I got to try out some of the power bars we are going to consume at every break while skiing.  Some are good, one pretty gross so it's not going to be on my list in Antarctica.  I will try more tomorrow to make sure the food I bring with me are the one I can enjoy at hourly.

The amount of food we must eat for breakfasts, breaks during skiing, snacks and dinners is A LOT.  Much more than last time I was able to consume.  But I the way I look at it is they are just fuel. And hopefully eating 4-5 meals a day since mid Sept helps my stomach stretched out enough to accommodate all these.