Sunday, January 10, 2010

Welcome the Xue Long...

Welcome the Xue Long... The Chinese research and supply vessel that visited Davis just before Christmas.

(The Xue Long.. at 130 odd meters long its about 20m longer than the Aurora Australis and a serious looking icebreaker)

Waking up one morning and trudging off down the hill towards breakfast in the LQ (living quarters) i noticed a big white ship parked out front of the station. 'Strange' i thought, 'that wasn't there yesterday'...

Soon enough, our station was taken over by small pods of Chinese expeditions in bright red jump suits. They had come to visit for the day, to check out the station and tour the buildings or more realistically to photograph anything man or otherwise made. I had seen the Xue long before, last year at Casey it had come for a week to pick up some dignitaries that were flying into Wilkins runway on their way to the Chinese station, just down the coast from Davis. Most of the station was able to visit the ship and had a very 'merry' time. We were unlucky working hard that day, and didn't get a chance to vi st the ship. After our Friends departed, my thoughts soon turned towards the possibility of getting the chance to jump on board. Sure enough, Cath the science manager asked if i wanted to vi st... 'Hell yeah' was the cry.

Later that evening we jumped into our own red jumpsuits (immersion suits) to board the large helicopter for the 33 second flight over the water and onto the Xue long. 20 lucky expeditioners got the chance to vi st for dinner and swap a few stories with our Chinese expeditioner comrades...


The dignitary lounge, where the high ranking Chinese officials (and us) get to hang out, it was seriously plush...


The bridge, it is so big you can of fit 6 table tennis arenas inside and still have room for an ice cream stand.



Dinner, Sadly it was just us, the rest of the crew had eaten hours ago, and strangely were all asleep by 7pm... we never saw anybody except our 'minders'. (Note the 'Antarctik' beers. They collect the water from a glacier, ship it back to china, brew it there, then ship it back to Antarctica. You can only get it on their station or on the ship....We just brew ours in big buckets.



'Baby water'...They just loved that thing... it was their mascot or something.














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