A frozen paradise

A tranquil pitter patter swirled down from the ceiling and licked at my eardrums. On the window in front of me a hundred or so little droplets cascaded steadily downwards as I watched them with simplicity. I watched how they would sometimes reach out to each other in moments of stillness and upon touching would scurry off with gravity. I watched how as the wind blew, their movements would shift in a jagged synchronicity, catapulting them in unison across the glass. I looked past them and saw the ocean explode into the sky.

‘It’s wild out there’ I thought, turning my eyes on a frigid sea saturated with mountainous swells. I watched as an icy blue crest unfurled an angry lip and crashed into the shallows, turning everything white. The surge launched up the volcanic rock-face of the shore and scattered a vast white blanket over the sky. It lingered, suspended momentarily as if each droplet had wings. Then it fell gently and the droplets returned to a sense of peace and place, filtering back into the ground or wallowing in a rock pool. I thought about how water is constantly on the move. But then I was quick to remember a watery state frozen in time: ice, and its many forms.

A few weeks ago I woke up one morning and opened my blinds. It was a Sunday and it was appropriately sunny. The blue sky made for an eye-indulging contrast to a landscape carpeted in snow and the grasses were hushed and sitting still; there was no wind. ‘A perfect day to explore the ice plateau’, I thought, and rushed outside to gaze inland. The peaks were silhouetted against a clear sky and it was all too perfect. I quickly packed my backpack and Johan and I set off into the heart of this wintery wonderland.

Looking around I was amazed at how the snowfall had completely transformed the landscape. It was unbelievable. I kept trying to find new adjectives to describe its epicness and constantly found myself muttering ‘It’s amazing.’ I’m always fascinated with how wilderness has the ability to astound and confound, leaving one sedated by awe. It’s that vast nothingness that symbolises everything. It encompasses all that is wild and untouched, tranquil and perfect. Each step was done so with a smile, gradually edging closer to Katedraal Hut. I kept on thinking to myself: ‘Here I am, on a volcanic island in the middle of the Southern Ocean, more than two thousand kilometres away from any civilisation, and I’m wading through this surrealistic, snow-carpeted wilderness in a T-shirt as sunshine streams down from a blue sky.’ Never in my wildest dreams.

The wind had sculpted beautiful snow dunes with ripples as you’d find on the bottom of a still lake or calm beach. The sun was low and the snow sparkled in its angular presence. As it set, the sky was gradually coloured in layer by layer, with a deep blue closest to the stars and a rosebud pink softening the billowy clouds on the horizon. A sliver of moon smiled and so did I, this landscape was contagious.

When we reached the hut we found that some snow had forced its way inside through gaps in the door and air vents, the water in the kettle was completely frozen, the floor of the pantry was an ice rink and the walls were covered in the most beautiful ice crystals. 'It gets seriously cold up here!' I remember thinking. We soon got to work turning the kettle ice into hot chocolate, put on the heater, and enjoyed an awesome evening in Marion’s icy attic.

The winds picked up just after midnight and howled as they swept past the hut walls, giving it a little shake as if to remind us of its authority up here. I got up and went outside to pee, trying not to get blown away. The skies were clear and the stars were bright. Being so far away from the masses of artificial light and smog-suffocated cities, it was a perfect opportunity to capture the stars; so I whipped out my camera and tripod, tied on a piece of string and a pen to keep the shutter open, and let it capture their circular ways. I went back to sleep holding thumbs that the weather gods were in a generous mood and would give us another beaut of a day.

We got our wish and left early to explore the ice plateau. Once again the landscape’s rawness etched smiles all the way up our cheeks and froze them there. The skies were clear, the air was calm and the sun glistened off the icy terrain at low angles. The landscape was so frozen that at times it made walking nearly impossible, so we often indulged in a more entertaining form of locomotion:

bumsliding

.

We climbed up one of the highest peaks on the island, had tuna mayonnaise with provitas and admired the view, with the highest, Mascarin (1231m), just a well-flung snowball away.

Fast forward a few weeks later and I found myself riding that snowball over to Mascarin Peak. To time travel one last time, I’m going to rewind two days back to a Saturday. Saturday’s weather forecast was wind and rain, Sunday’s wind and rain, and Monday’s partly cloudy, a little wind and no rain. It was the day of the high pressure system; a very good thing in this part of the world. On the Saturday I was to count nesting gentoo penguins at several colonies on the way to Kildalkey Hut and meet up with Christiaan, who was counting elephant seals, before heading over Karookop to Greyheaded Hut. As predicted the wind and rain followed us all the way to Greyheaded. The plan for the next day, high pressure Monday, was to head up Greyheaded ridge and into the interior, climb up Mascarin Peak, and head over to Katedraal for the night before our descent to base the following day. Good weather was essential and after two long days of howling wind and rain we were sceptical that such a wish would be granted. The winds picked up in the late evening and the hut rattled and rocked into the early hours of the morning.

We awoke early and were quickly enveloped in excitement. The wind had dropped and atop a mist-shrouded valley lay a majestic Mascarin, glistening magically in the early morning sun.

We knew it was going to be an epic hike so we left while the air was still ripe with the birth of the day and headed up Greyheaded ridge to Pyroxene Kop.

After a while the mist in the valley started to clear and the interior was looking amazing. We gleefully waltzed across and up the Basalt Gordyn (every now and then sending an ecstatic 'Whooooooweeeeeeee!' echoing through the valley) and found firm footing on compact snow and black lava coated in mosses and lichenicolous fungi.

The snow eventually started getting really icy and rather slippery, so we strapped some trusty crampons to our boots and continued up through a magnificent landscape strewn with dips and ridges of ice and snow.

By the time we reached West Peak we were blown away by the interior’s surreal nature (and not by the wind, which was still non-existent). Frozen hills and jagged outcrops of horizontal icicles seduced one's eyes into exploring every little detail of the landscape while little puffs of cloud danced in the warm glow of a smiling sun.

We marched on, negotiated a few icy slopes and headed up Mascarin. At 1231m on a perfectly clear, wind-still day, it was an unbelievable place from which to admire this frozen paradise, kept raw and isolated by its volcanic heart and wild nature. Surreal man, surreal.

On the way to Katedraal we passed the ice caves near Resolution Peak which were completely snowed over, testament to the landscape's wintery extreme. An incredible evening sky and a few bits of random commentary and wild cries entertained our minds as our bodies languidly strolled onwards, keen to collapse into the arms of our next abode.

On arrival we found the water tank buried deep in the snow and inside the hut the usual frozen kettle and piles of snow greeted us with a frigid embrace. We warmed up by baking a chocolate cake in celebration of Christiaan's upcoming birthday and then retired to the comfort of our sleeping bags to reflect on the remarkably outlandish and surreal adventure we had just had. Outside the night air was completely still and the silence remarkable. Such tranquility, so much zen. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. Was it all a dream? It certainly could've been.

An evolutionary tale

It was a Sunday morning and my gumboot-wedded feet and I were strolling languidly through a landscape carpeted in snow. It stretched all the way up the valley and past the scoria cones where it hugged the majestic peaks of the interior with a delightful frigidity.

The air was so crisp and still; a tranquil remnant of the storm’s wake. The only inklings of sound were the distant murmurs of chattering king penguins and the intermittent cries of giant petrels. I thought about how strangely dinosaur-like these petrels sounded and began imagining them as the reptiles from which they descended.

I came across a colony and stopped and stared at them like a Japanese tourist; my brain twitching as it tried to unravel the immediate mysteries surrounding the evolution of birds from dinosaurs.

Why did dinosaurs suddenly develop feathers? What did they use them for if they couldn’t fly? And how did they even develop feathers in the first place? I thought about this long and hard and eventually did some reading.

I’m sure that for some of you Archaeopteryx lithographica will sound familiar and for others it won’t. Either way, welcome to the world of the most famous transitional fossil linking birds and reptiles. This feathered reptile was discovered in a limestone quarry in Germany in 1860. ‘Archaeopteryx’ means “ancient wing” and ‘lithographica’ comes from the Solnfern limestone in which it was found.

Archaeopteryx lived around 145 million years ago and although most of its traits were reptilian, it possessed asymmetrical feathers (symbolic of aerodynamic flight) and an opposable big toe (probably used for perching).

So it had both very bird-like and very reptilian-like features; what evolutionists call a “mosaic”. This fossil was revolutionary (or evolutionary) in the sense that it bridged the divide between fossils of fairly modern birds, which appear about 70 million years ago, and those of their theoretical ancestors, the theropods, which were agile, carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs and lived around 200 million years ago. Have a look at the figure below (extracted from Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne) and think about the transitional similarities in the skeletal structures of Compsognathus, Archaeopteryx and the chicken.

From the bottom up you can see the reptilian tail shrinking, the teeth disappearing, the claws fusing together, and the appearance of a large breastbone to anchor flight muscles.

After the discovery of Archaeopteryx, no other reptile-bird intermediates were found for many years, leaving a gaping hole between modern birds and their ancestors. Then, in the mid-1990s, a veritable parade of feathered theropods were discovered in the lake sediments of China. Two of these are shown below (extracted from Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne); Sinornithosaurus millenii, the “Chinese bird-lizard”, and Microraptor gui, the “four-winged dinosaur”.

Theropod dinosaurs didn’t just have primitive bird-like features, it seems; they even behaved in bird-like ways. One fossil shows a feathered female theropod who met her end while sitting on her nest of twenty-two eggs, showing brooding behaviour similar to that of birds. Another fossil shows a small feathered theropod named Mei long, Chinese for “soundly sleeping dragon”, sleeping with its head tucked under its folded, wing-like forearm – exactly as birds do today (see below; extracted from Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne).

Okay, so there’s all this evidence buried in the apple skin of our earth that indicates that once upon a time there existed transitional forms of reptiles and birds, but it still doesn’t tell us why or how the first dinosaurs developed feathers. The truth is nobody is sure. Some scientists have suggested that feathers derive from the same cells which give rise to reptilian scales, and that they developed in these cold-blooded reptiles to increase insulation and help maintain body temperature, but not everyone agrees. Whatever the case, they did develop, and that is a fact.

Another important fact to consider is that early carnivorous dinosaurs evolved longer forelimbs and hands, which probably helped them grab and handle prey. That kind of grabbing would favour the evolution of muscles that would quickly extend the front legs and pull them inward: exactly the motion used in the downstroke of true flight.

So, once feathers arrived on the scene and started having beneficial effects on the survival of those individuals who possessed them, it was all up to natural selection to turn them into the flying descendents they would become over the next hundred million years. Let me explain:

The year was 150 million BC and a certain theropod dinosaur was trying to outrun a predator.

He didn’t, but some of his more feathered relatives did.

They managed to escape because their partially feathered forearms acted as running aids, making them faster and more agile. Those theropods who were best adapted to escaping their predators went on to reproduce and pass their genes onto the next generation. In each generation there are likely to be genetic mutations; it’s just the way life is, you can’t always make a perfect copy. So in the next generation most of the theropods would be partially feathered, however, there would also be some with slightly fewer or shorter feathers and some with slightly more or longer feathers. This generation would be subject to the same predation pressures and natural selection would once again make sure the better adapted theropods would survive and go on to reproduce. And it goes on and on until one day BAM! there goes a flying theropod.

But hey, this is just one scenario and the fact that these changes were induced solely by predation pressure isn’t necessarily so. There may have been other evolutionary drivers such as competition for resources and there’s always the “tree down” theory.

For instance there is evidence that some theropods lived in trees.

Feathery forearms would have allowed them to glide from tree to tree (or tree to ground), helping them escape predators, find food more readily and cushion their falls.

Whatever the case, feathered forearms were clearly an advantage and it was inevitable that as natural selection began to favour those who could fly farther instead of merely gliding, leaping or flying for short bursts, flight would soon become one of the most widespread and well used innovations of evolution. The incredible diversity of birds found today is testament to this fact.

Unfortunately, like many other groups, birds have suffered massively as a result of anthropogenic ways. Of the more than 10000 bird species that humans have co-existed with, 150 have become extinct, 189 are critically endangered, and over 1500 are listed as vulnerable or threatened. On the whole, the status of birds worldwide is getting worse and worse every day as more forests are burned, more wetlands are bulldozed, more pesticides are sprayed, more power lines and cell phone towers are erected, more invasive aliens and diseases are spread, and more longline fishing hooks are deployed.

The situation is dire, but the important part is that more people are becoming aware and positive change is happening.

Still, there are those who may argue that we don’t really need birds, so why waste time and money trying to save them? Well, then I must exclaim that these people clearly don’t understand or appreciate the significance of life, diversity and the overwhelmingly beautiful products of millions of years of gradual evolution.

To wed an island

As the tugs pulled the SA Agulhas away from the quayside I waved goodbye to my loved ones and stared out at the vast expanse of sea that lay ahead. ‘I won’t be seeing this place for more than a year!’ I thought to myself, acknowledging the strangeness of such a concept. A few hundred metres out to sea the feeling of adventure had already kicked in, as diving cormorants, porpoising seals, jumping dolphins and a lonesome sunfish filled the calm waters of the cape.

The SA Agulhas isn’t the fastest of ships so the coastline stretching from Camps Bay to Cape Point took all the remaining hours of daylight to pass by, my eyes picking out some familiar spots; the Sentinel near Hout Bay, the BOSS 400 wreck off Sandy Bay, the crayfish factory at Witsands and all those beautiful beaches in the reserve. The last glimpse I shared with civilisation came from the haze of lights emanating from within the arms of False Bay; a lighthouse at the end of each warning ships, like ours, of their extremities. I stared up at the night sky from the upper deck and marvelled at the star studded Milky Way. According to Bill Bryson the Milky Way is one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. Hmm, space couldn’t be more appropriately named.

The first few days on the ship were rather quiet as most people succumbed to sea sickness and kept to their rooms. I had heard that ginger was a good preventative so I added plenty to my tea and it worked perfectly.

I spent lots of time outside on the deck watching pelagic seabirds gracefully negotiate the crests and troughs of passing swells. These birds feed on small fish and krill near the water’s surface and spend most of their lives at sea, using the wind in their wings and hardly ever needing to flap. The birds weren’t the only ones taking to the air; I was standing at the bow one afternoon and to my amazement saw a fish leap out of the water, spread its silvery wings and glide effortlessly through the air. It was a flying fish! And it was shimmering all kinds of blues and greens. As quickly as it had come, it had disappeared. I stood with my camera in hand and waited eagerly for another one, but to no avail. Staring out at the frigid ocean and its incredible blues I daydreamed, and snapped a few shots of these beautiful birds.

Our expected time of arrival was 08:00 on Sunday, however, we ran into a passing storm and had to change course. The wind picked up and the 10 metre swells made walking down the passages, and breakfast, lunch and suppertime, highly entertaining.

Our new ETA was 03:00 on Monday morning and I was getting anxious. When that morning came I woke up, threw on my fleece and rushed out to the starboard side of the ship. Nothing, it was pitch black. I moved over to the port side and saw the first glimpse of my new home; a few lights emanating from the base. Hmm. I'd have to wait until after breakfast to greet my little piece of sub-Antarctic paradise. When the morning light broke I rushed outside again and there it was. Marion Island, you are so, so beautiful.

We waited on the ship for the helicopter to take us over to the island, but by the time my flight, the last flight, came around there was a problem and we had to remain on board to help pack a few containers. It really didn’t faze me as the SA Agulhas was fast becoming a popular tourist attraction for the king penguins and they were swimming up to the ship in the hundreds to check us out.

The first few days on the island were filled with admin and unpacking, but it was still such a new experience to be in such an incredible research facility (which feels like a space station) and to look out the window and see a completely foreign, but intriguing, landscape. The time eventually came to venture into the field when we were sent to Sealer’s Beach (about 2km north of the base) to deploy GPS loggers on king penguins.

One of the first things I marvelled at was the vegetation. It’s so strange and unlike anything I’ve been exposed to. There are a few familiar grasses and mosses, but then a whole array of plants that I’ve never seen before. There’s

Blechnum

, my new best friend, which is a tiny fern-like plant that is exceptionally nice to lie down on. In the photograph below it shares the landscape with a few mosses and grasses.

There’s

Acaena

, whose leaves are a mix of purples, blues and greens, which gives rise to prickly balls that stick to your clothes. There’s

Azorella

(see below) which forms massive cushions that appear singular or even mossy at first glance but if you look closely they’re actually composed of hundreds of tiny green heads. We have to avoid stepping on them as they can only grow 2 cm a year!

My favourite plant on the island so far is the liverwort

Marchantia berteroana

. Have a look at the photographs below; can you see the circular structures? They're called gemmae cups and are used for asexual reproduction. In the first photograph you'll see that in the one gemmae cup there are two little green things called gemmaes. These get splashed out when it rains, washed down the furrows in the leaf and end up in the ground where they develop into new liverwort plants.

There are also countless species of lichen and a few loving mushrooms.

A little bit of Marion Island history… Once upon a time there was an island, and once upon a time there wasn’t. Marion Island hasn’t always been around, as the very waters in which it lies now used to be an open ocean of crests and troughs. It started off as a small little volcanic cone oozing lava out onto the seafloor some 5000 metres below the sea surface. Gradually it grew and it grew until it popped its volcanic head out into the aerobic world about one million years ago. It caught the attention of passers-by, such as seals and seabirds, which were quick to colonise the coastal regions. Plants soon followed as seeds and spores arrived from the west via the wind or attached to seabirds. Those that could survive the harsh climate flourished, while those that couldn’t, perished. Over time the island has changed its face many times over but today it stands at 1230 metres high and covers almost 300 square kilometres.

There are 28 species of bird on the island. One of the most studied birds are the wandering albatrosses (in the first two photographs below) which exhibit incredible mating dances. In the first photograph a young female practises with an adult male so that by the time the next breeding season comes she'll be on top form to impress her partner. The other birds featured below are as follows: black-faced sheathbill, rockhopper penguin, greyheaded albatross and sooty albatross.

There are three species of seal on the island; the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic fur seal, and the elephant seal. Another major marine mammal is the killer whale, of which there is a large group that regularly patrol the waters around the base. I saw my first killer whale the other day and couldn't believe my eyes! Such incredible creatures.

In the first week on the island the previous team’s birders took Marguerite and I around the island to introduce us to all her beautiful nooks and crannies and briefed us on what the work entails. There are nine little huts stationed around the island and we stayed at seven of them, each for a night. One thing that is especially weird about walking around Marion Island is that every footstep sinks at least a few centimetres into the ground. It’s just so wet and mushy! People often fall into mires, which are extremely wet patches, and lose a gumboot.

The round island took us eight days, during which we had relatively good weather. The only exception was on our second to last day where we had to climb Karookoppie in a gusting 100 km/hour wind coupled with icy rain. Nightmare! Each day on Marion is determined by the weather. The same walk could either be incredible or miserable, depending on the conditions. The weather’s also very temperamental. It could be a calm and blue-skied day, beautiful to begin with, and a few moments later a few clouds roll in and suddenly it’s bucketing sideways. On the colder days the raindrops turn into ice pellets, which deliver quite a sting. On most days it only snows up at the main peaks and not at the coast, however, in the winter months the entire landscape is regularly covered in a thick, white blanket of snow.

Marion Island is still an active volcano, although the last activity was recorded in 1980 when there was a lava flow on the west side of the island.

All in all, my experience of Marion Island so far has been surreal. This sub-Antarctic island, with its plethora of life, is just so beautiful, and so otherworldly, that it’s been hard to take it all in. I’ve tried and tried to describe what I see and feel but I’ll never truly capture the essence of this place simply because it is indescribable. It is wilderness in its rawest form and I am so privileged to be here.

Volunteering in Zanzibar

I arrived in Zanzibar after backpacking my way through Malawi and Tanzania, largely undecided as to where I was heading next. During a walk on the beach close to where I was staying in Nungwi, the northernmost village on the island, I stumbled upon Mnarani Turtle Conservation Pond – a natural lagoon stretching over a hundred metres inland, lined with coral rock and mangrove trees. I met two women outside the aquarium, both volunteers who had organised their experience through Global Vision International (GVI), a UK-based organisation with volunteer projects all over the globe.

After being introduced to a few of the locaIs who manage the aquarium, I offered my physical assistance and little understanding of marine ecology in exchange for a place to stay. They put me up in a banda (hut) right outside the aquarium, only a few metres from the beach.

For the first few days I gobbled up turtle facts so that I could act as a guide for any tourists that visited. The rest of my tasks involved feeding the turtles, collecting seaweed and changing the water in the smaller tanks that housed the hatchlings. Every day was educational: whether it was learning facts about turtles, the political history of Zanzibar or basic Swahili.

The incredible beauty of my environment also made every day a pleasure; the sand was a powdery white and the water an ethereal shade of turquoise. In the evenings the sun would disappear behind a line of palms on the other end of the beach, leaking reds, oranges and pinks into the sky. Joyous shouts and fits of laughter rang from the beach daily as kids played soccer and swam until the stars twinkled.

By living and working with the locals, I became part of the community and didn’t feel like a tourist. During my two months at the aquarium I was able to explore some of the other joys Zanzibar had to offer. I snorkelled above the psychedelic reefs of Mnemba Atoll, walked beneath the towering trees of Jozani forest, rode a bicycle through the narrow streets of Stonetown and danced the night away at full-moon parties in Kendwa. Do something productive and play - that to me is what travel should be all about.

Check out the article in the Getaway magazine.