Thomas Bywater spends the night on the ice of continental Antarctica for NZ Herald Travel. Video / Thomas Bywater
With no hot running water, 10 minutes’ internet allowance a week and 93,000 stamps to cancel by hand, the icy living conditions sound like a Siberian gulag - not one of the most popular tourist attractions in Antarctica.
The wooden huts of Port Lockroy claim to host the world’s most remote post office.
Visiting at the beginning of the summer aboard the MV Fridtjof Nansen, it’s almost confronting to find a shop among the glaciers.
Ferrying teatowels, postcards and other tatt across the icy harbour towards our ship, it has adopted the strange role of gift shop to Antarctica’s burgeoning tourist industry.
For four months of the year, November to March, five volunteers from the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust man the most southerly post collection in Antarctica.
They are outnumbered by the gentoo penguins 2000 to 1 and the location has led to it being dubbed the Penguin Post Office. At the closest public post box to the south pole, for £3 ($6) you can send a postcard anywhere on Earth.
The collection of historic huts near Anvers Island on the Antarctic Peninsula have been here since the 1940s, although the heritage programme is a more recent development.
Laura Buellesbach and Bridie Martin-West from the Port Lockroy team manning the southernmost post office in the world. Photo / Thomas Bywater
A sister programme to the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, UK AHT marked its 30th anniversary last year.
Postmaster Claire Ballantyne was there last year for the anniversary in Goudier Island, as part of an all-female team. As the continuity and handover manager, she’s back on base for a second time to teach the newbies.
“We’re a lot younger than the NZAHT,” says Claire Ballantyne. “They’ve really brought us up as a trust.”
Kiwi carpenters from New Zealand’s Ross Sea Huts are regular visitors, helping with repair programmes on what Ballantyne lovingly refers to as the “world’s most useless weather station”. The site - which has been occupied on and off since 1944 when it was chosen as the site for Antarctic Survey’s “Base A” - has had many lives and been home to many different summer crews.
This year, jobs include stripping paintwork on a hut on Detaille Island, something made trickier by sub-zero temperatures and strict conservation rules.
Of course, on an island with just four inhabitants, you have to be able to turn your hand to all trades.
This year’s intake of amateur conservators includes: Jerome Viard, a former chef from France who is now wildlife monitor in charge of the annual penguin survey; Bridie Martin-West, a former midwife and this summer’s base leader; and Laura Büllesbach, the museum curator; and reformed accountant Shabir “Shabs” Alidina, who is shop manager.
They are arrived two weeks ago and are the occupants of Bransfield House, the long black Nissen hut that does little to live up to its stately name - it’s an eccentric outpost of the United Kingdom.
The Union Jack and LGBT flag fly proudly on the mast, possibly the brightest objects in Antarctica.
We pick up the stranded postal workers, who gladly leave their island for the warmth of our ship.
The spectre of Avian Flu in South America has meant that this year guests have not been able to land at the island. Instead, the team have been coming aboard visiting cruise ships to deliver lectures and sell postage stamps.
With hot showers and limited stocks of food in the huts, the Lockroy Team willingly swap stories from the Penguin Post Office for either.
Once they’ve set up shop near the gangplank of the Nansen, there is a collection of memorabilia and commemorative stamps for sale. A set marking the wedding of Megan Markle and Prince Harry catches my eye. News travels slowly here.
Another view of Port Lockroy, a UK Antarctic Heritage Trust site and the southernmost post office in the world. Photo / Thomas Bywater
This and a £70 stuffed penguin. As an outpost of the Royal Mail, everything is priced in pounds sterling or a slow and inconsistent internet bank transfer. The queues of curious tourists soon build into a backlog, averaging four minutes to pay for their souvenirs.
Of course, they aren’t really there for the fridge magnets so much as the chance to talk to the island’s inhabitants.
Büllesbach, 29, from Germany, had joined this year to manage the museum and “improve interpretation of the expedition”. However, the threat of bird flu means the huts are oddly short on visitors.
The curator and outdoors enthusiast is drawn to cold places. She was inspired to take the job after a stint managing a museum in the Swedish Arctic Circle in 2016.
She has been surprised by the number of tourists who turn up at the harbour, which is at least a two-day sailing from anywhere. In the first two weeks, they have been visited by two ships a day.
The heavy mailbags are evidence of this. With collection normally up to once a month and very indirect delivery routes, there’s no guarantee of delivery date or that your Christmas cards will be delivered on time.
“But perhaps by next Christmas,” says Büllesbach.
In normal times, visitors are capped at 300 a day with no more than 60 on shore at a time, to protect the penguin nesting site.
Her work as a curator is less to do with managing the site museum, and more with how to interpret the artefacts for people who will never visit. In this, she is building on work done by the New Zealand AHT to create virtual tours of the polar huts, and their work that will be shared in schools and outreach programmes.
“It’s a great place that not everyone can go,” she says.
The discovery in March 2022 of the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea has given curators like her more material that can be shared with virtual Antarctic tourists who will never visit the continent.
“Antarctica is very expensive to visit, it’s a long journey that not everyone can make. But we feel that everyone should be able to experience Antarctica,” she says.
Duties on the base are many and varied, including regular snow and guano shovelling, there is one day off a week, without any scheduled ship visits. This is spent mostly watching films, writing and broadcasting video clips to the station’s 120,000 TikTok followers.
Argentine cards sent from Port Lockroy, the southernmost UK post office in the world. Photo / Thomas Bywater
There’s a rota for chef duties, but the team try to get Jerome to cook as often as possible,due to his past life as a chef and ability to turn tinned and preserved foods into something more palatable.
“Ships are normally very kind to us. If they have spare cheese and fresh fruit, we’ll take it back to the huts,” she says.
Despite the hardships and constant smell of penguin guano, a summer on Port Lockroy remains one of the most sought-after jobs with the trust.
While there is no upper age limit for applicants, the UKAHT jobs listing requires candidates to be fit and open to “carrying 20-litre jerry cans of water, lifting and carrying 15kg boxes, digging a LOT of snow every day”. Despite encouragement given to international candidates and the base being located in Antarctica, applicants must have the right to work in the UK.
How long does it take to get a postcard from Antarctica?
It’s a spectacular landscape and one that Antarctic tourists feel lucky to witness, if only for half a day. But it takes a special kind of resilience to want to make Port Lockroy Home for four months. It’s a timeline which coincidentally is about as long as it will take a postcard to reach you from this most remote collection point.
CHECKLIST: ANTARCTICA
Getting there:
Latam operates daily flights from Auckland to Buenos Aires via Santiago de Chile. Airlink to Ushuaia is by charter, included in the cruise rate. Talk to your travel agent for the best route for you.
Hurtigruten Expeditions’ Highlights of Antarctica is a 12-day cruise that travels from Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula. The cruise has 40 departures planned between January 2024 and March 2026. global.hurtigruten.com
