#girlswhotravel #lifegoals
Recently dumped and going nowhere, Jennie Jamieson decides it's finally time to listen to all those inspirational Instagram hashtags and do something with her life.
A visit to Antarctica has always been on her bucket list...
I showered and tarted myself up—as much as you can when you're in fifteen layers of thermals—in the hopes of seeing Ruben that night, but he informed me through a series of increasingly frustrated texts that he couldn't get away from Suzie, so it wasn't going to happen.
I didn't join them as I was still sore over Suzie's shouting at me that morning, and fragile enough to not want to face her.
Instead, I stayed in my sleeping bag pupa, listening to There in the World on my headphones and Googling Argentinian politics.
It turned out Argentina had had a legally recognised Neo-Nazi party since 2014—Partido Bandera Vecinal—but I was struggling to find much information about them in English, and my Spanish was more of the "Ask for two beers" variety than "Analyse the state of Argentinian nationalism", so I wasn't getting very far.
Besides, something about it all still didn't click, and I felt like there was a big piece of the puzzle I was missing.
Namely, I suppose, how we were connected to all this.
Dispirited, I tried another tack, and started searching for "death Antarctica Tom InTrepid" to see if I could find out anything more about Luca's partner's death, see if that turned up any clues.
I found news coverage pretty quickly.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I grimaced. Apparently it had been impossible to retrieve Tom's body.
I wondered how many corpses there were, frozen into the ice on this dark lifeless continent.
Explorers, adventurers all.
All dead.
How many Scotts were there for every Shackleton? How many anonymous frozen team members, unremembered, long unmourned?
I closed my eyes and sunk into my sleeping bag chrysalis, icebound bodies looming over me.
All had Sam's face, his salting of crystalline snow.
I shuddered. I had to get a control of myself, stop spiralling like this. I flicked to my messages, sent a meaningless question to Ruben, just to make contact, just to get a reply.
Just so he could pull me back to sanity.
He didn't respond, so I went back to his Instagram, thumbing through his pictures, trying to ground myself in everything good about him.
The penguin image of Suzie had even more likes now.
He'd posted another one too, only a few minutes ago. It was Suzie in the Ice Hotel hot tub, on a little outdoor verandah just next to the sauna and steam room.
He'd managed to angle the shot so you couldn't see any of the hotel, or the cabin the sauna and changing rooms were in. All you could see was the snowy mountains in the distance, the white valleys up close, that stunning array of stars.
