WORDS
Nick Smith
As the migratory Arctic tern flies, Goudier Island is a shade under 9,000 miles from London. Almost due south from the metropolis, Goudier is hidden away on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula in the quiet harbour of Port Lockroy. Home to around a thousand gentoo penguins, at first glance it is identical to the countless other islands here. But on closer inspection, visitors will witness a strange sight: a small settlement of black wooden buildings. They call it the Penguin Post Office.
It’s a long, hard way to go just to send a postcard home, but that’s what I did. Twenty-four hours of long-haul from Heathrow to Madrid, to Buenos Aires, to Ushuaia in Argentina; followed by three days at sea crossing the fearsome Drake Passage, the roughest waters on the planet. But in time the ocean settles into a glass-like surface, the temperature stabilises at a pleasant -10°C and the crystal air takes on the delicate whiff of penguin guano.
Most of the 15,000 adventure travellers who make it this far annually will arrive at Goudier as part of an Antarctic cruise, ferried ashore on Zodiac inflatable boats, wrapped from head to toe in polar gear, clutching their cameras and relieved to find their feet once more on solid ground. But before you rush off to terra firma, make sure to get plenty of hot coffee inside you. There’s no Starbucks on Goudier – the nearest is in Buenos Aires 800 miles away.
It’s hard to decide what to do first. You know you want your passport stamped because, let’s face it, for the global wanderer there’s nothing much cooler than a smudgy red ink impression of the word “Antarctica” and an outline of a penguin needlessly filling up the pages of your passport. You know you want to buy souvenirs or send a letter, and you know you want to visit the museum or talk to the people who live and work on one of the loneliest islands on Earth. But before you do any of these things, you have to set aside your responsible traveller instincts and spend a little time – because that’s all you’ll get – with the penguins.
It’s unlikely you’ll ever get closer to gentoos (or even the occasional chinstrap) in the wild, because they are either oblivious to your presence and go about their business without a care in the world, or they find these enormous wingless creatures that hold black metal boxes to their faces interesting and will come to investigate. According to official environmental protection guidelines, tourists are not allowed to approach wildlife in Antarctica and must maintain a distance of five metres. The penguins, it seems, haven’t read the guidelines. Deep down you know it’s wrong to anthropomorphise animals, but these deeper feelings don’t last long, and you soon start to think of them as insanely cute, endlessly amusing and politely nosey chaps in dinner suits looking for a late-night spot on Piccadilly for a nightcap.
With its battered black weatherboards and red-and-white window frames, if the main wooden structure of Bransfield House (or “Base A”) looks like it comes from a different era, that’s because it does. Although the island itself was discovered by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot during his 1903-1905 expedition – sponsored by the champagne house G H Mumm – it wasn’t until World War II that the British government set up a permanent base on the island to assert its territorial claims on the White Continent. After the war, Port Lockroy became a science research base and wireless communications hub, over time gaining an extra boat shed and a Nissen hut. And that’s it. Just three buildings on a desolate outpost that for the past few decades has been run by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust as a historic site and museum.
A time traveller’s delight, Port Lockroy is endlessly fascinating. As the post office staff – who also act as museum guides and occasionally take a headcount of the Goudier penguins – showed me around I was transported into a nostalgic world of analogue scientific equipment scrutinised by pipe-smoking and homesick meteorologists, overlooked by a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II. In their leisure time these men ate pemmican and played dominoes, or read poetry and novels published by (of course) Penguin. Placing my postcard in Port Lockroy’s official red box – complete with Elizabeth’s royal cypher – I wondered if I’d beat the transglobal mail home. I did. By six weeks.
