Living Under the World: Arrived in Antarctica!

Howdy from McMurdo!!!!
We arrived yesterday at McMurdo station after a long long night. The flight was beautiful scenery, and leaving the night behind was quite interesting. It is truly is 24hrs of daylight here.
I have thousands of photos already I'd love to share, but with the slow internet here and the absence of a charger for my computer I will have to wait until I arrive at Casey I think!
I'll put up a few now though!
Anyway, more to come, believe me there is a lot lot I want to share and show you photos!

UPDATE

Finally am getting a bit more internet as we are stuck longer and longer in McMurdo. Figured I'd focus this blog post on the flight down.

After a looong couple weeks of sleepless anticipation of the voyage, I had a fully sleepless night flying down. Partially because I was way too excited to even sleep, but also mostly because we had to be at the airport at 2.30 am for a 4am departure. Being herded around like cattle at that time of night, when the airport was privately opened for the AAD (Australian Antarctic Division) was still a pretty cool experience.

Team building exercises were undertaken without any prompting, as we formed a human conveyor belt to move this wall of luggage which we were not to see until we arrive in Casey. But as soon as we got past the surprisingly chipper customs officers, we all started to readily fade.

Our plane was a standard AirBus (modified to hold a LOT more fuel than usual), from which they had removed about 7rows of seats in the middle of the plane. This central galley was great! Allowing us to wander around, stand up most of the flight, or even better: lie down flat! Despite this, I spent most of my time in my seat with my feet up chatting to my neighbors, and getting increasingly excited about the trip, and watching the very last inklings of darkness disappear.

As soon as we saw our first ice-bergs and Ice-flows that excitement quadrupled, and everyone just lined the windows to take photos, or simply just stare at the slow approach to antarctica. By now time had no meaning except the little prompts on the screens telling us we still had 2 hours to go before landing in McMurdo.

Next thing you knew we had to put on our layers and layers of “survival gear”, and get ready for landing. Yes. Landing. In Antarctica.

Feeling like the michelin man, I was even more excited to get outside and see what this great adventure was going to look and feel like, especially since they were promising -17°C!

My first thoughts when stepping out of the plane were, quite simultaneously: “This isn't that cold!”, “Oh look at all those silly yellow ants on the ice (my fellow expeditionners)” and “Oh cool! Ivan the Terrabus!!! I know that from that Werner Herzog documentary!”.

After everyone stopped and took the obligatory first selfies on the ice with the plane in the background, we piled into Ivan for the hour-long ride to Mc Murdo station, driving past Scott base (New Zealand) on the way.