Monday/Tuesday, November 23/24 – An Explorer

Antarctica is cold, unpleasant, unfriendly, and wild… and it wants you dead! Being here, living here, enjoying in unique beauties of this incredible continent – it’s a matter of surviving every single minute.

I am not sure how many degrees is bellow °0, wind is about 35 knots, and by the forecast we can expect storm during the night. Expedition team, about 60 people from all over the world got together on one of the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula, with one common goal – to explore and survive.

I have to share with you marvelous experience of exploring the Antarctica. If you thought that Antarctica is only about icebergs and snow, you’re wrong. It’s a continent with diverse and unique species all around, fantastic landscapes and the most incredible silence I have ever “heard”. Here I can sit down for hours, watching penguins, seals, birds and trying to catch the whales at the horizon. Beauty and uniqueness of the Antarctica is not describable by any words, you just have to live the experience. Main feelings that are following me during the whole expedition are being grateful to the nature and respect its rules.

Following the experiences of historic polar explorers such as Scott and Amundsen, we challenged ourselves in making camp base and proper snow shelters that can keep us worm and alive during the night. Limited resources, feeling of 24-hours day light, storm followed with snow and strong wind, low temperature, surviving together with over 50 people in the camp made me thinking how grateful I have to be for living in nice and comfortable conditions and gave me profound picture of my strengths and weaknesses.

It is incredible experience to observe people’s behavior in the situations when we’re limited with resources and time. Natural instinct for surviving mixed with rational thinking, skills and strengths of every single member of the team gives extraordinary force and motivation to reach final results and come up with sustainable solutions.

Every single day of life requires from us to make decisions, choices, but more then everything else to stay committed what we promised first to ourselves and then to the others… It’s a matter of living on the edge and leading by example.