I Bid You Adieu Antarctica and Léih hóu Hong Kong

“Only dead fish swim with the sea.”  -German Proverb

Current Weather:

 56 degrees/Partly Cloudy

Wind N 13mph/Gusting 21 mph

62% humidity/43% dew point

10.0 mi visibility/29.75 in pressure and rising

It’s that time again, time to make a move. Summer is nearly over; my feet are beginning to itch for new territory, my eyes often intent on the far off distant horizon.  And move I shall. In just a mere ten days I will be boarding a flight in Anchorage, AK and some sixteen hours later I’ll be landing in downtown Hong Kong.  

Asia. Antarctica…eh, they both start with an “A”. It’s the same, right? Not…exactly. 

This blog, once known as “Antarctic Driven,” has taken a back seat since returning stateside in mid-March and much has occurred since that day I landed in the L.A. airport from Christchurch, NZ. I traveled, visited with friends and family, and remembered what it was like to live in a country that had variety. Antarctica had/has variety, but in the form of human variety, stateside has ecosystems. And well, I gloried in these ecosystems once I was back. I made my way back and forth across the US a few times, and eventually landed back in Seward, AK in early April to start my third season kayak guiding.

For a month or so, it was easy to forget Antarctica ever happened. It was surreal the day I left McMurdo in February and in some ways it is still surreal. It has been six months to the day that I left Antarctica and the first flight bringing fresh and new faces just arrived yesterday on the ice to start the beginning of another summer season down there.  The winter-overs will be relieved from their duties and will board a plane to a warmer climate after six months of dark isolation from the rest of the world.  A person who winter-overs in Antarctica should be classified as the official definition of “bad ass,” that is my vote anyhow. 

Seeing posts on the social network, face book, made by friends as they prep for their arrival to the ice has allowed for the reality of life in Antarctica to return to my awareness. Life does exist down there at the bottom of the world. I can attest to that first hand. Many friends are returning, but I am not. A myriad of feelings overwhelm me as I sit here in Alaska prepping for the next venture in my life. I find myself nostalgic for that life I left behind in Antarctica. My senses are sometimes still overwhelmed by the phantom essence of diesel fumes from the Deltas and the jarring, yet soothing sway of their behemoth mass lumbering down the Ice Runway. My skin sometimes longs for the biting lick of that Antarctic breeze. My eyes continue to search for that endless expanse of white ice that I was surrounded by for four and a half months, the surrealness of seeing penguins. 

It has been an amazing experience to be working in Seward, AK and to look out on the street from our kayak shop and smile as I occasionally see someone walking down the street who worked at McMurdo or at the South Pole. It is a big world, but it is small in the scheme of things. There was nothing more exciting than to be out guiding a multi-day trip in the fjords and hear someone shout “Shuttle Fran!” from the water taxi. To turn around and see my neighbor from McMurdo walking toward me waving their hands like crazy on the beach out in Aialik Bay, one of the remote fjords of the Kenai Fjords National Park. Yes, that happened this summer, several times. It is a small community that have worked in Antarctica, but for some reason many of them reside in Alaska because it works well with the seasons. They call these people “bi-polar.” I have been working in Seward for three summers and after one season in Antarctica; the number of people I know in this small town has tripled because of our connection to that icy continent. Many of them I didn’t know well, but we have one thing in common that seem to make us instant friends here in Alaska. We had all been to Antarctica together and we knew that the other would understand what we were talking about when we mentioned “the ice.” 

I left the ice in February knowing I was not finished with that continent and I still carry that feeling with me. But life takes us in different directions for a reason. For some reason, my path is supposed to veer toward warmer climes this time around or at least for the time being. If I am supposed to return to that icy, yet heartwarming continent, it will happen when it is supposed to happen. 

New Contractors operating the United States Antarctic Program resulted in cut positions which resulted in many of us being put on the alternate list, myself included. But that didn’t mean the adventure had to stop, the world is a giant globe and there is much to see. I am like a hound on a scent trail…this scent trail being sweet, pure, adventure; I always manage to seek it out somehow, somewhere. I promised myself last spring on my long drive up to Alaska from Minnesota that I would do something epic every year for the rest of my life. I was determined to stay true to that promise. 

Antarctica had been a good way to introduce that tradition. Antarctica had given me a taste for international travel but had also left me thirsting for more. If I couldn’t make it back down to Antarctica to travel afterward, I knew that I at least had to get somewhere international somehow, some way.  That was the only goal I had.

Therefore, Hong Kong is this season’s Antarctica.  So, why Hong Kong you might ask?

A good and dear friend of mine who is known by many in the Seward community as Turkey, Turk-A-Lurk, Turkey Tetrazzini, (yes, we will keep his identity to one of these handles) used to guide here at Kayak Adventures Worldwide and was drawn to Hong Kong last fall to teach outdoor education with this outdoor company called Dragonfly Outdoors. 

Turk-A-Lurk (the name I have decided to stick with for the duration of this blog entry) is like the brother I have always wished to have. I look up to him, I respect him, he is a great co-worker, and dear friend, I poke fun at him every chance I get, and vice versa, he returns the favor every opportunity he gets as well. He loved his experience in Hong Kong so much he decided to sign on for an entire year after his fall/winter contract was up. While in Antarctica we had maintained correspondence and I knew that his company hired for all of fall and some of winter. It seemed like a good fit since it would allow me to return to the world of outdoor education and it would allow me to travel and see more of the world since Antarctica had to be put on the back burner. 

The Turk-A-Lurk

So after some extensive grilling on Turk-A-Lurk as to the functioning of this company he worked for, I decided to go for it. I had heard that it was most likely looking like I would be offered an alternate position for Antarctica so I knew that getting down there pretty much wasn’t an option any more.  The submittal of my application, job interview and acceptance of the position with Dragonfly all occurred in the last month. All quite recently and needless to say, it has been a bit of a whirlwind. I was offered a position as a Senior Instructor with the possibility of being a Program Coordinator with Dragonfly Outdoors. A week after accepting the position I had to get all my paperwork in to get the ball rolling to obtain the Hong Kong work visa. In the midst of all that, I was guiding multi-day sea kayak trips here in Alaska as well as having to purchase a round trip ticket to Hong Kong that same week. A little bit stressful. But all managed some way or another.

So here I sit, a round trip ticket to Hong Kong purchased, and a work visa still MIA, but not the biggest deal. Apparently I can receive it once I arrive in Hong Kong. Only ten days until I land in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, a wee bit of an intimidating concept for me right now. Hong Kong has a population of seven million people. I don’t even know how to conceptualize that. Hong Kong is a tiny little island off the mainland of China. It is a mere dot in the mass we call Asia. 

That red star indicates the size of Hong Kong in the mass of Asia

Seven million people here??

Seven million people live on that island??? I have one question: Where do they put them all? I will soon find out. 

I’ll be honest, I know very little of Asia as a whole or of Hong Kong as a mere entity of this continent. This is me going in blind. 

Welcome to the “La Aventura Escrita.” Translation: “The Written Adventure.” 

Happy reading.