Travel to Polar Regions

Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica

Format: Paperback
Author: Sara Wheeler
ReleaseDate: 16 March, 1999
Publisher: Modern Library
Rating:

Stumbling to the South Pole
The book promised to deliver an enjoyable blend of history, science and culture in an entertaining travelogue format. As a lover of all things glacial (with Antarctica holding a particularly special place in my heart), I was thrilled to come across this book in my local library. Sadly, I soon found myself disappointed. By the time I was halfway through, I was struggling to make progress through what should have been an engaging read.

Wheeler suffers for the most part from a lack of direction. Her "travels" consist of spur-of-the-moment helicopter rides to various locations on the ice that fail to be distinguishable after the fourth or fifth trip. Indeed, at times the book reads more like segments of a blog interspersed haphazardly with snippets of polar exploration history or the odd fact about glacial ice or penguins. This is further muddled with somewhat contrived musings on American culture (they're all depicted like they're ex-cowboys from Texas), or anomalous personal asides that try to be meaningful but come across as undeveloped filler material.

Individual chapters have no particular structure or purpose, and so the finished product feels a bit like slogging along through the variations of the same thing: funny anecdote, helicopter ride, historical bit, description of another station's toilet facilities or the food they eat, personal aside. After several chapters of this jumpy, disjointed writing style, following the narrative stops being fun and feels more like work. This is unfortunate; Wheeler's writing isn't necessarily poor, but seems to suffer from a bad editing job and a lack of planning.

The anecdotes are amusing, the history fascinating, but when it comes to the science and the researchers themselves Wheeler largely fails to make a case for their relevance. Instead, they come across as slightly eccentric guinea pigs with odd-but-quaint obsessions. Still, perhaps the book's greatest crime is that she largely fails to capture the beauty and utter wildness of this last frontier on Earth, and in the end I felt no closer to Antarctica than when I first picked up the book.

~ Jacquelyn Gill.

Hisdiory of Antarctica
Of course, you can always read Shackleton's, Scott's, Amundsen's and Fienne's accounts of their epic journeys into the unknown, but that'll take you a long time, and you may be a bit distracted by the old-fashioned language therein. This is a good choice for a predeparture read for people going to Antarctica as tourists. For a modern description of what life is like in the Antarctic nowadays, and what goes on in the head of a thirtyish female when she gets to visit (for free) with the scientists down there, you can't do better than this one.

The book is part diary of Sara Wheeler as she goes through some sort of change during her visits to Antarctica (three different trips during a seven month period, not one seven month stay as you may be led to believe at first). She's a bit too, hm, spiritual for me, "the landscape talked to me", to the degree that she suddenly decides to stop drinking alcohol, for no apparent particular reason. She describes her feelings well, although I wasn't really interested in reading about them.

The other part (and these two parts are closely intermingled throughout the book) is heaps and heaps of Antarctic history and "folklore". You get to learn all the basic facts about what happened to the pioneers and discoverers of Antarctica (with a VERY British bias, mind you), which definitely should be of basic interest to people who are going to Antarctica themselves.

"Travels in Antarctica" as a second title is not really fitting. She is not traveling. She is a guest of the American and British Antarctic Survey organisations, and is well taken care of by them, both when it comes to supplying her with equipment and with transportation. It is nothing like what traveling in Antarctica is for someone who pay their way through travel agents.

Still; good one, for what it is!.

I felt sorry for the trees that died to make this book
One written particularly because a desperate publisher made a phone call, or mailed a letter with a check to an author with the words: "It's time to write another one, Shirley. Once in a while a person accidentally stumbles on an especially annoying book. . . " and the author hurled herself to write, without a plan, without ideas and the only thing that came out was a dull diary filled with self pity, anti-Americanism, sexism and generally criticism. . . Well, this is one of those books and I truly feel sorry for the trees that have to die annually to satisfy the erroneous marketing projections of underpaid book editors in the current cost-cutting environment (especially after the advent of Print-on-Demand) in order to deliver such hideous and mind numbing gems. Yet I am also grateful. I'm grateful for these sacrifices because they serve to carry a message to the reader, which he or she can carry to you the broader audience. That message is - DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS BOOK AND THIS AUTHOR.

In terms of content - well, there is no story here. This is simply a tedious account of a lonely woman who spent someone else's money to visit Antarctica and record her daily experiences. What kind of experiences, you wonder?

The kind that go like this"

". . . we took off over the frozen sound toward the Transantarctics. . . "
". . . we could see individual birds waddling about with stones in their beaks. . . "
". . . Later that day we landed at the snout of the Mawson Glacier for a picnic. . . "
". . . so we all had our own few feet of privacy. It was hot and dark inside. . . "
". . . and later we saw all their small yellow tents pitched in the distance. . . "

and go on and on and on. . .

Occasionally the author makes references to Scott's, Shackleton's and other expeditions, but in no way enough to stir imagination or interest. I doubt you'd learn anything new from this book.

If you are truly interested about Antarctica, the history behind the conquests and a first person account of the harshness of the pole and its frozen lands, check out "Race to the Pole: Tragedy, Heroism, and Scott's Antarctic Quest" by Ranulph Fiennes.

Yield to reason - ignore this one.

- by Simon Cleveland
.

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