A visit by my Antarctic marathon tour ship, the RV Akademik Ioffe, to the Chilean Air force base Gabriel Gonzalez Videla. Antarctica. March 2007.

Base Presidente Gabriel Gonzalez Videla is a summer months only, Chilean Air Force Base, research station. I visited their base with my friends on the Ioffe, as part of our tour of the western side of the Antarctic peninsula. I was down there to run a marathon, as part of my quest, to run a marathon on all 7 continents.

Before my trip started, the most important thing to me, was running the marathon, but as my Peregrine expedition tour leader Dutch told us, there was a lot more to see and do in the Antarctic than run; and that other things would become the highlight, and he was right, and we visited a few research bases.

Most of us smelt the base at Waterboat point in Paradise bay, before we left our ship the Ioffe, and boarded Zodiac's for the short ride to shore. Apparently this is where according to the ships log entry "Two English scientists in 1921 spent a winter camped under a waterboat, conducting penguin research". According to the wikipedia entry the men were: Thomas Bagshawe and M. C. Lester and were part of the British Imperial expedition.

The scientists and base staff were very friendly and shook my hand as we came ashore, and we thought that we were the first people that they had seen in months. Click here for a video panoramic of the base from my ship:

MVI_0451.AVI - 30 seconds, 6MB.

My mate Austin Budlong from Minnesota, USA, had a very amusing story about his visit. We'd been told by our expedition leader Dutch that they hardly saw anybody at this base, the Ioffe almost never visits and that we should be on our best behaviour, as he'd be calling in a favour to have us land there.

So Austin collected up all the small chocolate pillow mints, that the Russian cleaning staff had been leaving in our cabins. He filled a ziplock bag with them and collected as many as he could as a small present for these poor Chilean's stranded there for months on end.

After landing ashore he approached one of the base staff and very politely offered this small bag of chocolates as a gift to try and brighten their isolation here. The scientist gave him a very odd look, he described it as a "Stupid cheapskate American look" and said Gracia's anyway.

Later on Austin is listening in to another conversation, asking about how many people they'd seen this season, the man replied, "hmm about 30 boats, in 3 months!" Austin just laughed and said in his trademark "What the hell??" Feeling very silly about the bag of chocolates. I thought it was a great story, and a very thoughtful gesture nonetheless.

After about 30 minutes on the base, the smell of Gentoo became overpowering. Here is a good photo summing up the place, courtesy and copyright of Bruce Mc Alpine, Ontario, Canada who was on the trip with me: Gentoo on my boot. In case you are wondering what the brown substance is in the photo's, well there isn't any soil in the Antarctic and it's something else less pleasant. The base had a small museum, with photographs of the history of the base and island, and they sold postcards etc. I also have a red stamp from the base in my passport. We were grateful to the base staff for showing us around their home, however we came to the conclusion, that Austin's comment on the place was spot on:

"Paradise bay, I beg to differ..."