Feature
Keepers of the flame
by Sarah Barnett
Sir Edmund’s spirit inspires New Zealand’s new adventurers.
It was a fine day for adventuring. So warm that Kiwi duo Marcus Waters and Graham Charles were dressed only in their polyprops and oversized ski boots as they contemplated the 200kg of gear they were about to drag, east to west, across the Greenland ice sheet.
They hadn’t even finished packing, and as we helped carry boxes of power cookies and other essentials, it seemed inconceivable that all this, with a gradual diminution in cookies, was going with them.
But Waters and Charles were all cheery waves, light-hearted bro’Town references and adventurers’ squints when they set off in August last year.
They would be the first all-New Zealand team to make such a crossing. They were planning to take about a month, optimistic that, for much of that time, they’d have the good weather to use kites to pull their sleds.
Their send-off was not grand. None of us knew any waiata, so, with some choice last words from Charles – “You’ll be the last peyow-peyow we see for a while” – they were off to Nagtivit, their start point, in the sun.
Then it started raining. For two solid days, when their sleds were at maximum weight and the climb was at its steepest, getting up onto the sheet. They had an almost constant headwind during the trip – only two days’ kiting, in the end – and several days of snow, which is hell to drag sleds through. Nearly every night’s campsite required them to build an ice wall to shield the tent from ground winds, but they still regularly woke to find their wee shelter half full of snow. There was nothing to look at except each other’s rear ends; they were in white-out conditions most of the time.
It wasn’t their first time. In 2001, their team (Adventure Philosophy, with fellow Kiwi Mark Jones) was the first to kayak down the Antarctic Peninsula. They traversed the Darwin mountain range – the world’s southern-most range outside of Antarctica – in Tierra del Fuego two years later. Afterwards, the first circumnavigation by kayak of the spectacular island of South Georgia, where Shackleton is buried.*
And people say there’s nothing left to conquer. “All the principal geographic points have been,” Waters says. “The highest mountain has been climbed, the poles have been reached … The saying that there’s nothing new under the sun is part true, but we’re only limited by our own imaginations in terms of creating journeys that are different.”
Doing something that captures some attention is what keeps the adventure alive, Waters says, “and we think that what Sir Ed stands for, that spirit of adventure, is really important to us as Kiwis. If we’re going to do well in the world, adventurous qualities are really important to us.”
The final few kilometres of the ice sheet stretched out as Waters and Charles repeatedly retraced their steps in the humps and hollows of the coastal ice.
The trip took 36 days; they had no food left by the time they stepped off the other side on September 24 last year. In a video log made the day before, a bearded, mildly frost-bitten Waters remarked, “It’s been an absolute nightmare to get off this thing.”
So, why? Because, Waters says now, “if you call yourself an adventurer, you have to do a sledding expedition at some point!”
Waters has wondered how early explorers managed without modern technology.
“Either they were just complete legends, and they were cut from such a rough cloth, living in these conditions on such a regular basis that it was almost their whole life,” he says, or they might have done it only once. “They sort of survive it and come home and don’t ever do it again because it was so awful.”
Waters is coy about the nature of their next adventure – he doesn’t want to be pipped at the post by another adrenalin seeker. He was relieved when the Australian kayakers James Castrission and Justin Jones completed their transtasman journey earlier this month because it meant he didn’t have to do it: “It sounded fairly miserable.”
Any future trip will undoubtedly involve plenty of planning and help from modern technology, like GPS.
What the modern equipment means, says Waters, is that the risk is contained, “and it makes it slightly more conceivable that you’d go out and do something like it again. The comfort is increased to such a point where you think, ‘That was bloody tough, it was cold, it wasn’t even that much fun’, but it wasn’t so dire that I’d think, ‘I’ll never do that again.’
“Give it a year and I’ll start thinking about it.”
