Antarctica - a decade after the trip

I stood at the South Pole on January, 2nd, 2006.

Today, that's exactly a decade ago.

So, did the 'trip of a lifetime' change anything? Or was it just a special event to be experienced and remembered, but without any lasting consequences?

Hard to tell, of course.

A lot of things happen within a decade and it's difficult to pin developments down on a single event.

Or maybe it's just to easy too pin things down to a single event and the difficult bit is to figure out whether that is just narrative convenience or a causal relation.

Lots of people seem to write biographies and appear on chat shows that had their life changed by one single thing. Not always a big catastrophe. Sometimes just small events. But then (at least according to their telling of it) this completely changed their lives.

I tend to be a bit suspicious about that, so I'm trying to step carefully here.

There was no change in my day-to-day life. Neither have I gotten more self-confident and successful as a result of the unique trip, neither did I sink into gloom-and-doom depression after finishing this 'once in a lifetime' journey, with nothing left to look forward to.

What did change a bit was the scope of future trips.

Before that, I usually went on vacations on my own. Rented a car, booked hotels and then went from pre-booked destination to pre-booked destination, stopping at interested places and tried to do interesting things along the way.

I'm still doing that when I'm at some place for a couple of days, like on the trips I took to Brazil in the last two years. But the 'main vacation' every year since the South Pole has been on a guided trip.

Which usually means that you have to travel together with other tourists (mostly, anyway) and that you need to follow a guide. Which limits the amount of free choice regarding where you want to stay a bit longer and where you just want to take a quick picture and move on.

And the 'South Pole Trip' lesson was: It's worth it.

The other tourists you meet on these trips are rarely 'typical' (by whatever criterion) and it's usually interesting to travel with them.

And the guides for such adventure tours tend to be really, really good.

My image of a 'tour guide' used to be the 'skiing instructor' stereotype.

I just googled for 'skiing instructor stereotype" and found this list of jokes:

At a party, how do you tell who the ski instructor is?
Don't worry. He will tell you.

On a date, what does a ski instructor say after the first hour?
"That's enough talk about me; now let's talk about skiing."

How many ski instructors does it take to change a light bulb?
A dozen. One to unscrew the bulb and the rest to analyze the turns.

What do you call a successful ski instructor?
A guy whose girlfriend has two jobs.

What is the difference between God and a ski instructor?
God does not think he is a ski instructor!

What’s the difference between a ski instructor and a bucket of chicken?
The bucket of chicken can feed a family of four.

Yes, that's the kind of stereotype I was thinking about.

And I don't know how much of this is (or was) true of skiing instructors, but for tour guides, it turned out to be completely wrong.

Which is a good thing, since on those trips, you, quite literally, trust the guides with your life. So you need to have a guide that is willing to take risks, but is also good at keeping everything reasonably safe.

So the one real lesson from the South Pole trip that changed a lot for my travels since then was: Trust the guide.

It helped, of course, that ANI (the company who did the South Pole trip) has amazing guides and Denise Martin did a really fantastic job.

And, besides an increased willingness on my side to go on guided tours, hanging around with interesting people resulted in good advice what to do and where to go next.

A chance discussion about polar landscapes with a photographer on the South Pole trip took me to northern Greenland in the following year.

Sitting on the same table when Denise Martin and another client were discussing dog sledding vacations made me aware of 'Uncommon Journeys' in Whitehorse, where I had my first experience with driving a dog sled (which was fantastic and made me go on dog sled trips ever since).

When they closed down their business, the recommended another company nearby, so I went with them for the next two years.

When I recently tried to book a tour with a dog sledding operator in Sweden for the next year, they didn't have the capacity to do the tour (too many customers booked for next year's tour already - a good problem to have), but recommended another company that I might like. (And now I'm booked on one of their tours.)

So it's the case of one things leading somewhat to another.

South Pole leads to Greenland (due to the landscape). A chance reference from a dinner discussion in Antarctica and the dog sledding (passenger only) leads to dogsledding in Canada. A remark during this trip leads to a snowmobiling week in Canada (and more dog sledding). Dog sledding in Canada leads to more dog sledding in Canada, Svalbard, Sweden and Finland...

So the South Pole trip started a series of other trips to polar places.

Would they have happened anyway?

I have no idea.

I had been to Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard before I went to Antarctica.

I had slept in an ice hotel in Sweden before that as well and walked on a glacier in New Zealand.

Going to polar places was something I had done before,

So, as expected, it's hard to tell how much of this was an effect of standing at the bottom of the world and what parts might have in a similar way anyway.

But in the end, it's not important.

I am more likely now to go on guided tours than I was before.

And I'm really fond of dog sledding tours now. (Which probably makes the first dog sledding tour a more significant event than going to the South Pole.)

The most surprising bit about the last ten years is how normal it all seems. It's not as if I suddenly switched to "let's do exiting adventure-like things" after Antarctica. It's the other way round. Going on a dog sled, abseiling down a frozen waterfall (or a non-frozen one), ziplining at 95 km/h or flying in an ancient biplane don't seem like 'once in a lifetime challenges' or something that 'takes me out of the comfort zone'. They are interesting and unusual things to do (with professional guidance/equipment/settings), but they're not 'adventures'.

I guess the only real change due to this kind of trips is a strong averse reaction to outdoor shows and documentaries, where journalists or presenters try to play things up by making anything that is not stereotypical domestic life a 'challenge'. Just yesterday there was some journalist covering some 'polar science expedition' where he mentioned the challenge of brushing your teeth at 30 below, since your toothpaste is frozen. Yes, that's happening when you're in the cold. So you either warm it up or you take the toothpaste (or sunscreen, which is more important) into the sleeping bag to keep it warm.

Yes, it's different from 'home', but it's about as much a 'challenge' as it is to use the keys to open the doors at home as opposed to a tent, where you don't need them. Admittedly, I don't worry about putting on dog harnesses the right way round when I'm at the office, but that doesn't make it any more of a 'difficulty to overcome' than putting on my t-shirt the right way.

Trying to promote yourself as a 'tough guy' on television, going through all this 'hardship' to 'bring the viewers this documentary' just makes them look like a retard who struggles to tie his own shoelaces.

Anyway, better to stop grumbling and prepare for the next trip.

It seemed like a good idea to sit down after a decade and have a bit of recollection and possibly nostalgic and sentimental view what happened in the decade since I stood at the South Pole, but it is hard to link a decade of things happening to one single event. 'Things sometimes lead to other things' is hardly a suitable shiny gem of wisdom to derive after ten years. But it pretty much describes life (even without being dissected into arbitrary amounts of time).

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