For the first time in my life this morning I blew over. I had no idea people could. Chickens blow over in Derbyshire but are we not more solid? Then it happened. One moment I was stumbling up the track to my cabin; the next, a great buffet knocked me forward, throwing me on to my knees in the gravel. I rolled over, cradling the precious video-camera to my chest.
No harm done. Camera safe, knees grazed and a lesson learnt: here on Kerguelen, weather is not a backdrop but a foreground to your life: a rogue variable, wrecker of plans. Man proposes here; the wind disposes. It has blown a score of human dreams away. The Roaring Forties, in whose path this huge island lies, generate more weather than can be consumed locally. Supply so exceeds demand that for a howling gale we hardly raise our eyes from the soup, while a briefly drooping windsock becomes an object of wonder and thanksgiving.
Yet the mercies of the weather in the Southern Ocean are as capricious as its cruelties. All at once the wind does drop. Suddenly the ocean is flat. Seals on the shingle burp and scratch. The water turns indigo in the sun and the hillsides are lit in russets and browns. Livid moss and soft green grass shine and, reflected in a thousand lakes and ponds, snowy peaks float in an immense pale blue sky. Seabirds, innumerable, wheel around.
In minutes this can pass but sometimes it stays. The Southern Ocean cheated me last week of the tempest I had secretly hoped for. We sailed from La Réunion to Mauritius, to Ile Crozet and then across to Kerguelen - eight days, 2,800 miles - on a stiff wind and a heavy swell, but mostly in sunshine. It was glorious. At night the great 6,000- tonne Marion Dufrense lunged forward, pitching with swell and the wind behind us,
diesel throbbing and the Southern Cross bright in the sky. I stood out on the bows and thought: "Were you kidding us, Captain Cook? This is easy. This isn't frightening at all."
But now? Hail shotblasts my window. People run from cabin to cabin with faces buried in Gore-Tex. This is the kingdom of Gore-Tex. Umbrellas are half-remembered jokes, the precipitation here being horizontal. Goggles make more sense. I expect to pass my four months on Kerguelen without ever seeing a raindrop fall, for the rain does not fall, it is a sideways phenomenon. As the sudden gale hits the ocean the sea is picked up in a blinding white sheet, racing across the
water to the terror of yachtsmen. Every raindrop stings.
Some of this I have already experienced, some is report. I have been here less than two weeks. And my early impressions? My first sight of the only settlement, Port-Aux-Français, was from the Alouette helicopter that brought me ashore. It looked ugly, dispiriting. The dwellings and laboratories, comfortable within, are really glorified Portakabins. The generators and stores are in huge sheds. Masts and transmitters litter the hill. Everything required to stick up into the air is secured by steel cable rigging. Almost all we eat, drink, burn, sit or sleep on is shipped in and was being unloaded as I flew in: the Marion does not return until August. This is an artificial life.
Landed, I scampered from the Alouette. Unpacking in my new room, I peered from the window at a rusty, empty 44-gallon drum, bowling unattended across the gravel in the wind. The heart sank. I videoed the territory's only two trees, imported conifers cowering behind a hut. The whole complex scores a great gash from waterfront to hilltop. The sub-Antarctic environment being as fragile as it is harsh, rabbits have eaten off chunks of the slow-growing vegetation, eroding the soil
beneath.
To what sort of hell-hole had I condemned myself until August? As the Marion sailed away, I knew there was no backing out now.
The first night found me awake, in the small hours, disturbed not by the howl of the wind - that was familiar - but by the thump. Thump is the closest description I can find for the sort of sound even the deaf could hear, for it is felt in the stomach: violent, low-frequency pressure changes that my video-camera microphones do not pick up. I snuggled under the blankets.
At dawn I opened my eyes to a new kind of morning. I looked out. Waves raced each other into the shore, smashing spray over basalt. Against a clear sky, a silvery light flooded a landscape which wasn't quite Cromarty and wasn't quite Mars. Strange peaks, black cliffs and volcanic cones paraded across the skyline, softer hills and glowing greens sloping down to the far shore of a vast bay. A choppy sea seemed almost to glitter. Mount Ross, snowy and pink, hung on the horizon 40 miles away.
Walking along the shore I nearly tripped over a young basking elephant-seal. He offered a snarl more admonitory than hostile. Every animal here comes from the sea and is preparing to return there for the southern winter, for the ocean is now warmer than the land and full of food. Birds of all kinds, from giant albatrosses to tiny diving petrels, seals as big as sofas, hundreds of thousands of king penguins lining every beach - all of them are, not
"tame", but blithely unafraid of man. They blink at us, waddle round us, mildly bemused. We are not within their ken.
From this same shore I looked back yesterday towards the base. Now I saw a different place. Shelter! Company! Heat! Food! The bar! A safe haven - and I knew people there. I was in Port-Aux-Français, after all, not as an architectural critic but as a fellow-hivernant - winterer. I will never again be able to see this place as I saw it on landing. I don't give a stuff about the appearance any more. This is home.
I have been welcomed so warmly as to be in severe danger of becoming a Francophile. My accommodation is cosier and more generous than I had expected, and that's almost a pity - except that the truth is, this is no gulag; nobody suffers here. It's a sociable and well-provisioned base camp in a very, very isolated place. At any one time there are some 40 souls - scientists, students, weathermen, satellite trackers - in a close-knit community where everyone mucks in.
I have volunteered to take my turn on the morning rubbish collection, with tractor. My school French is proving adequate - just - to communicate but not to chat or banter. I miss the nuances and my Lonely Planet phrasebook is useless for "And how are your transplanted Kerguelen cabbages doing this morning?" at breakfast. There is no big practical problem for me in this, but there has been at first a problem of self-confidence. I found myself slightly dreading mealtimes, hanging back, worried about which table to choose, terrified at the silence which fell when I spoke, anxious in a way I cannot remember since the first weeks of boarding school.
I still grin inanely, or panic, when people talk to me. I suspect the cause of this occasional depression, which speaks ill of me, is nothing to do with loss of company or communication: it's because I have lost the social predominance which my own gift of the gab has always afforded me. Cut down to size, I am learning what it is like, not only to be an Englishman among the French, but also to be the kind of shy, halting Englishman with no particular gift, who lacks confidence among his
own people. Never again will I slap someone on the back and tell them to snap out of it, plunge in, and be jolly. For the first time I know how it feels to be nervous of company.
But this will pass - is passing. Names and faces are beginning to gel. Many here seem to be Breton, have odd names like Loic, and enjoy dreadful communal singing. I have been reminded how deeply politically incorrect are the French. What other nation would include, from among 58 scientists and support staff, 56 men and two women?
If I ever thought that the documentary I'm making for Channel 4's To the Ends of the Earth series would show Port-Aux-Français as some kind of pemmican-provisioned trench in the snow, I have had to revise that view. The base is a crowd of chummy blokes getting on with their work, eating well, watching videos and playing table football.
But Port-Aux-Français is not Kerguelen. This archipelago is wildly beautiful, serenely desolate and quite dangerous. From here all kinds of expeditions venture, some very tough. The interior is as precipitous as the weather is demented. There are bogs, cliffs, sink-holes and crevasses, and always there is the wind and the rain. It takes two weeks - a walk of perhaps 150 miles - to reach Christmas Harbour, where Captain Cook dropped anchor on December 25, 1776.
My first sally will be more modest: I have enlisted on a four-day walk to Port Jeanne d'Arc, a whaling and sealing station abandoned early in the last century. There we shall overnight in a cabin, spending five days seeking the feral cats whose ancestors were ship's cats and which now threaten the nestling albatross. There will be radio contact with the base and, all being well, they will send a little boat for us when we've finished.
We set out on April 20. My 16 kilos of Mars bars will come in handy. Damn. Why didn't I think of seeking sponsorship from Mars?
