Christmas Eve in Antarctica! No rest for us today though, we were still up and skiing before 8am this morning and the sastrugi have continued with a vengeance. A very rough surface punctuated with some big sastrugi up to 1.5m in height often blocking our path. Where we can we go over them but sometimes they’re just too big and jagged so we have to go round. It’s truely punishing terrain, heaving our sleds up ridges where they constantly jerking us backwards or running up behind us, no two steps are the same. It’s tough on our kit as well, the sleds bang down the other side of the ridges with great force and my poor old spoon, so long it sticks out of our kitchen bag, has broken again, another repair job coming up!

We’ll be celebrating our Christmas tomorrow evening after another day’s skiing but Merry Christmas to all our family, friends and supporters in Australia and New Zealand who are already into Christmas Day, have a great day folks!

Suunto Stats

Skiing Time 9h 15mins

Distance 22.25km

Gareth

Average HR 120

Max HR 163

Calories burned 6964

Richard

Average HR 118

Max HR 165

Calories burned 6767

What do you pack polar explorers whom have scrutinised every gram in their sleds for Christmas?

A lovely 120g Classic Christmas pudding (to share) some freeze dried vanilla ice cream

and 60ml of Glentauchers Scottish Whisky (to share) from the amazing company https://whisky-me.com that make pouches of whisky they ship all over the world.

Our lovely Christmas treat has been decorated by our families to remind us of home. My daughter Lucia has asked Father Christmas in her Christmas card to stop at our camp and give us a hug from her on this special day. I hope we don’t have to share our rations of Whisky and pudding with him!