Places I Would Like To Visit Someday But Almost Certainly Never Will: An Occasional Travel Series For Non-Travellers

#2 Antarctica

Antarctica: it's cooler than you.

No, really, it is. It can get to -80 degrees there, and even the absolute maximum temperature on the coast in summer is about 15 degrees; you on the other hand need to stay at around 36-37 degrees to be AOK. You might conceivably be a bit cold while trying to read this, but if you're down even as far as low as 30 degrees you'll be too busy with paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing to pay attention to this sentence. So really, Antarctica at its very warmest is at least 15 degrees cooler than you than you at your coolest - just trust me, I've run the numbers on this one, and you can't fight it.

Some people kick your arse at staying warm in cold temperatures though, and by people, I mean animals. And by animals, I mean animals and birds. Antarctica is in fact home to 68,000 different species of penguin, including the Chinstrap Penguin, the Gentoo Penguin, the Rockhopper Penguin, the Emperor Penguin, and the Darth Vader Penguin. Only one of those is made up.

(It was the Gentoo penguin, obviously)

As well as having 68,000 species of penguin, Antarctica has 4 billion species of seals, including the Weddell Seal, the Antarctic Fur Seal, the Crabeater Seal (which ironically only eats pineapples) and the cute wee Leopard Seal, pictured here:

 

Aww, isn't he cute? The Leopard Seal is named the Leopard Seal because like leopards, they like to spend a lot of time climbing trees. As you can see, they're adorable, cuddly little things, and there's some confusion as to how they came across their commonly used nickname, which is "Nature's Utter Bastards". Strange really.

Unlike other continents, which are made up of stuff like rocks and plants and people and concrete and Denny's family restuarants, Antarctica is composed entirely of scenery:

There's even more of it than this, rest assured, but because of the Antarctic Pictures Treaty of 1964, I'm not legally allowed to show it to you unless it has some kind of ice archway in it. Antarctica's scenery is superior to scenery elsewhere in the world, because if you're in Antarctica and your drink is a bit warm, you merely need to extend  your arm slightly and chip off some bits of the nearest scenery into your glass. Try that in the Sahara and you'll end up with a Coke full of sand, and nobody wants that.

Being the cool land that it is, Antarctica will only associate with cool people. For thousands of years, Antarctica was so cool that nobody and nothing else was nearly cool enough to come anywhere freaking near it. Eventually though Antarctica took pity on us in our uncoolness and decided to let someone approach. Antarctica still had standards though, and that is why the first person to even (officially) see it had to have the unreasonably cool name of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellinghausen.

Do you think Estonia makes a habit of putting any old fool on its stamps? Because let me tell you my friend, it doesn't.

Fabian Gottlieb Van Bellinghausen was the trailblazer for a procession of people with cool names to go check out Antarctica during what is now officially known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (because if you were going to be cool enough to go to Antarctica, not only did your name have to be cool, but you had to be a goddamned actual hero).

During the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, there was a sort of an international competition to send the people with the coolest names to Antarctica. Belgium fired an incredibly strong first salvo in this contest by sending Adrien Victor Joseph de Gerlache de Gomery. England were upset that Belgium could be beating them at anything, and needed a contender, but their country was lamentably full of guys called Rupert and Percy. 

Nevertheless, they scoured the length and breadth of the nation and somehow found someone called Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink they could claim as being English enough to represent them. Then as a back up plan, they sent Robert Falcon Scott, too - his first and last names were pretty ordinary, but his middle name was Falcon for crying out loud, so this could be forgiven. Germany threw its hat into the ring with Erich Dagobert von Drygalski, inventing the name "Dagobert" especially for the occasion, and tacking an "H" onto the end of "Eric" for good measure. Simultaneously, keen that its own history of cool names should be recognised, and to prevent Germany from becoming too big for its boots, Sweden dispatched Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskjöld. 

The UK had now sent the citizens with the two coolest names in the country to Antarctica, and there was a hint of desperation to their next choice, William Spiers Bruce. Possibly they were hoping a repeat of their success with the "cool middle name" tactic that had worked so well with Scott, but the inadequacy of their choice was made plain when the dastardly French immediately trumped them with Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who projected such and air of effortless insouciance that his polar-exploring ship was called Porquoi-Pas? (Why Not?). 

And so it seemed to everyone that the UK had finally thrown in the towel when they next selected Ernest Shackleton. A polar explorer called Ernie? This seemed like pretty weak sauce, especially after Norway fired off Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (who only rubbed it in by becoming the first guy to the South Pole) and even Japan snuck in Shirase Nobu. 

Even Shackleton's middle name was only Henry, which no matter which way you pronounced it could not be made to sound like either a kick-arse bird that kills things or a deadly object for stabbing people with. 

Shackleton endured a couple of trips to Antarctica well aware that the other explorers were laughing behind his back at his insufficiently cool name. On the

third trip he finally snapped and decided he would do something so cool that no-one could ever mock him for being called Ernie again, so he got himself trapped in his icebound ship for 8 months, watched it sink when it finally got free, set up camp with his men on a floating ice floe (which they lived on for 2 months), made landfall on a frozen rock in the middle of nowhere called Elephant Island, (setting foot on land for the first time in 497 days), and then promptly set out to sea again with 3 of his men to successfully sail a piddly little rowboat 1500km through a Southern Ocean hurricane to South Georgia, in order to fetch help from the whaling station there. 

This was pretty cool by anyone's measure, but just to really nail it home, he landed on the opposite side of South Georgia to the whaling station and walked for 36 hours straight along a previously unexplored route over a freaking mountain range in order to get to the station. Then he (eventually) got back to Elephant Island and rescued every single one of his men.

"Well guys, what an awesome time it's been these last 20 months, am I right?"
"Shut the hell up, Bob."

Shackleton had thus completed probably the best total failure in history, and undoubtedly proved he was cool enough to be a polar explorer, but Great Britain thought about it and decided it was a lot cheaper and easier just to go back to cool names. So after Shackleton was sent, they turned to Aeneas Lionel Acton Mackintosh. This guy was named after the Trojan superhero who founded Rome AND had "Lion" in his name AND his second middle name was practically the word "Action". Clearly, he was the perfect polar explorer. He got to Antarctica, suicidally marched out into a blizzard and died.

...and the penguins came from miles around to feast on his corpse, oh yes

Cool names are still important to Antarctica today, and only people with cool names are generally allowed to go there, because the whole place is one very exclusive continent. In the Antarctic winter months on planet Earth, about 1 in every 6,755,325 humans is to be found in Antarctica, enjoying use of a claustrophobic 14,000 square kilometres each. If one year the combined world's Antarctic programmes decided "Just for a laugh, we're going to replace every single person we've got in Antarctica right now man-for-man with the first people with the given name Benjamin we can find worldwide", I'd probably still miss out. 

This is why you still need an impossibly cool name to go there, and like Shackelton, if your name is nothing flash, you have to redeem it with even more impossibly cool deeds. For example, you might come across some sort of Antarctica-associated John Smith and think "If your theory is correct, Ben, how did he get to Antarctica, then?", but the answer is almost certain to be that said John Smith is a stunt pilot archeologist and his PhD is in fighting ninjas (Cambridge). Because that icy mofo is not just gonna welcome anyone. It is sparse. Scenes you will not see in Antarctica subsequently include this:

And this:

And this:

...OK, in all fairness I have to concede that you might see that last one, but tell you what, you definitely won't see this one:

The 68-year-old Bulgarian said: "My cow has never done such a thing before. Worst of all - even my donkey collapsed afterwards on the ground. I am sure it was laughing at me."

 ...because although this woman might somehow be part of the Bulgarian Antarctic Institute (what do you mean? It is so totally a thing!), she would never take both her cow and her donkey down there. Well maybe one at a time, but certainly never simultaneously. 

For those sort of livestock import numbers might cause all sorts of a ruckus, and Bulgaria is just one of many nations co-existing strangely peacefully in Antarctica, which still proudly holds the all-time Earth record for Most Relatively War-Free Continent. Admittedly the Americans had to send a taskforce down there in 1946 to wipe out Hitler's secret UFO hideout, but after that, the place has been very peaceful indeed. 

Don't be fooled though, because bizarrely, little old New Zealand sort-of, sort-of disputedly lays claim to 450,000 square kilometres of it, so it's likely that any minute now we'll all be conscripted to go down there and fight a 7-way territorial war with the UK, France, Australia, Norway, Chile and Argentina for the place. For now though, Antarctica is a tranquil place - the one continent on our planet where nothing violent ever happens.

Aww, another cute leopa -OH SWEET JESUS 

Ohhhhh, that explains that then.

So Antarctica, it's pretty cool really cold. I'd like to go check it out. But I probably won't.