Lots of you ask me news about the base, everyday’s life and the relation with the environment. I do have many things to tell you, trust me, and I have got a lot of material too, I just lack some time to publish it. Moreover yesterday we started to work in the laboratories and for 4 hours a day we help researchers in their analytical job on cores. But be quiet: I will find time anyway. Today, for instance, I would like to open a particular window about life at the base. Do you want to understand the connection between man and his environment? Let’s start from an unusual point of view. Let’s do like this: we will observe at close quarters the means used in ground shifts, the ones they use here everyday.

The antarctic equivalent of our buses, utes, undergrounds and motortrucks that we have use and fight daily. Have you ever guessed? Perhaps a new idea will raise from the environment and, why not, also from the men that built and now drive them.

They impressed me at once, all of them. As soon as I reached the base. It seemed to me as if I was in a fun-fair where everybody tries to outdo each other in driving the oddest means. Each one queerer than the other, that would stir everybody’s imagination: long and tall spiders, big lizards with huge eyes, wide and very flat turtles, iguanas with a long muzzle…. only the thought to classify them causes a headache.

But all, without distinction, have one thing in common: a cable, with a dangling tap coming out of the front bonnet. There is an electric circuit heating the engine in the parks, that, as you can see, are all equipped with current.

As far as I know I am not the only one suffering cold.