Flying South for Winter

Getting to Antarctica is a bit of a mission in itself.  Unsurprisingly you can’t just jump on to a direct flight from Heathrow to the South Pole (this is probably a good thing as it holds back the hordes of adventure seeking tourists), instead you (and your luggage) have to survive four separate flights (Heathrow, Madrid, Santiago, Punta Arenas, Rothera), a journey which started mid-afternoon on the 18^th and has so far taken over 24 hours and as far as Punta at the southern tip of Chile. We now have a one night stop over to eat, sleep and freshen up before we throw ourselves off the end of South America and into the adventures that lie in wait.

Santiago, with the snow capped mountains just peaking above the mist and smog

Despite the journey consisting of a lot of long and tedious ques, turns out the weekend before Christmas is a busy time to fly, there were some spectacular aerial views. Some of the best were during our twelve hour flight to Santiago, which included lightning displays over Brazil and soaring straight over the top of the Andes. We then proceeded to follow the Andes south to Punta no need for inflight entertainment when you can gaze across the vast ranges and pick out volcanoes some covered in snow others spewing out ash and smoke. The further south we flew the greener the land became and we eventually touched down in Punta getting a good view of the Dash 7 which will take us on our final leg to Rothera.

Smoking volcano

This fails to capture the epic scale of the mountains

We now have to wait for the all clear to fly, which is mainly dependant on weather a factor which can cause you to be delayed for a week but hopefully the weather gods will be on our side and we will be departing this morning (now the 20^th).