What it’s like to explore Antarctica with Buzz Aldrin

You can’t (yet) repeat Buzz Aldrin’s trip to the moon, but you can retrace his steps to the second-most alien environment he’s explored. Nigel Henbest joins him

(Hencoup Enterprises)

The alien world assailed me the instant I stepped down onto the ground, right behind veteran astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Bleak desolation. A featureless landscape stretching to a distant horizon. A cold so intense that it pierced the exposed skin on my face like a thousand surgeons’ scalpels. Air so thin that I gasped for breath.

This wasn’t the moon; but it was the second-most extreme place where Buzz had planted his boots. And, unlike Tranquillity Base, the South Pole is somewhere you can venture yourself.

After his epic journey with Neil Armstrong, 50 years ago this month, Buzz travelled to the North Pole and down to the wreck of the Titanic. But three years ago, there was one place still on his bucket list, and – at the age of 86 – time was running out to reach it.

Sporting brightly striped braces and a T-shirt shouting “Get your ass to Mars”, Buzz was belying his years when I met up with him in Cape Town, along with the other members of our 12-strong team from Britain, the US and Dubai, ahead of our journey to the South Pole.

From here, we were in the hands of British explorer Patrick Woodhead. “I went to a talk by Ranulph Fiennes,” he said, “and I was filled with jealousy – how come he got to live such an amazing life?” Woodhead spent eight years exploring rivers in Suriname and scaling mountains in Tibet. And he ended up in the extreme south, leading the first east-west crossing of Antarctica in 2004.

In 2006, Woodhead and his South African wife Robyn set up White Desert to open up the continent to visitors. “As opposed to cruise ships where you just pop into the Antarctic Peninsula, we take clients right into the interior – it’s a totally immersive experience.”

After the flight from Cape Town, Patrick and Robyn welcomed us to our Antarctic home: Whichaway Camp, a cluster of futuristic white pods nestled together amid ochre granite boulders – like burgeoning mushrooms growing on plains of Mars. Buzz provided some practical feedback in case Woodhead wanted to expand his operations: “If this were a Martian base, I’d put the pods closer together.”

We shared twin-bed pods, each with its own toilet. To take a shower we had to don multiple layers of polar clothing and trek to the bathroom pod. It joined a dining room largely occupied by a round table for 12; a pod featuring a library of Antarctic titles; and a lounge, complete with a gas-burning stove and a terrace with views over the local lake, backed by the towering cliffs of the Antarctic ice sheet. Lake Whichaway provided us with pure drinking water, which was some 25,000 years old.

During our week here, we learned cross-country skiing and how to climb sheer ice walls with crampons and ice-axes. Harnessed together on ropes, we edged along narrow ledges on rocky cliffs 200 metres above the huge static billows of sea ice. And we investigated long sinuous ice-caves, illuminated by eerie blue light filtering through from far above.

But the ultimate experience was the flight to the South Pole. Only 300 tourists have ever visited the South Pole; and we were about to join this elite few.

In full polar gear – two pairs of socks and heavy Baffin boots, four pairs of leggings, five tops, a buff around the neck, a beanie on top and photochromic goggles – we boarded a DC3 Basler. And, for the best part of five hours, we flew over the featureless Antarctic Plateau.

We refuelled at a place known simply as FD83: a few tents plus row upon row of orange fuel barrels. The two Russian staff here have one of the loneliest jobs on Earth: to keep the runway clear and to refuel the occasional plane. They weren’t expecting another flight for four weeks.

Two hours on again, we touched down at the South Pole. Taxiing down the ice landing strip, we passed giant constructions that take advantage of this unique environment for studying radiation from the depths of space.

Taking that small step down from the Basler, our first raw encounter with the alien environment wasn’t just an effect of the extreme temperature (-32C, with the wind-chill taking it down to -40C): the air was dangerously thin at the Pole’s altitude of 2,835 metres.

The plane had stopped near the monolithic hulk of the Amundsen-Scott scientific base. Inside was another world: warm enough to strip to shirtsleeves. We were taken around the control room, science labs and a greenhouse flush with fresh vegetables. At the gift shop, we picked up postcards and sweatshirts – and had our passports stamped.

While Buzz was busy responding to enthusiastic questions, I bundled myself back into the protective clothing, and trudged through the loose snow to the Ceremonial Pole. Surrounded by the flags of the 12 countries that signed the Antarctic Treaty, it’s a mirrored globe atop a striped barber’s pole.

But the ice underfoot is constantly on the move, carrying everything with it. Every year, scientists check the current location of the geographic Pole – the point about which the Earth actually spins – and mark it with a board and an American flag. A couple of hundred metres’ trudge from the Ceremonial Pole, it was the holy grail of my Antarctic journey.

Also, I wanted to know how Buzz would react. Would he top Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” speech with a comment even more profound?

But I waited in vain: Buzz never came out to the Pole. Back in the base, I heard that a routine check-up had shown his blood-oxygen levels were low. Though Buzz felt fine, as a precaution he was whisked away on the next flight to New Zealand.

I was at least able to record his final words as he departed from the South Pole. With right stuff grit, he turned to the crew and ordered: “OK guys, let’s go!”

Travel essentials

Nigel Henbest travelled to the South Pole with White Desert. Adventures range from $13,500 for a one-day flight to Antarctica from Cape Town, to $92,500 for a week-long stay that includes visiting Emperor Penguins and the South Pole.