A Letter From The End of the Earth

Jana’s much anticipated letter from Antarctica arrived only 16 days after she had mailed it. A fairly speedy arrival when you think it had to go out on a supply ship from Scott Base, Antarctica to New Zealand’s postal office and then routed to Victoria BC. It is interesting, and also very rare these days, to receive handwritten correspondence at all, never mind from an exotic and distant location like “Scott Base Antarctica”, so we took the time to look at the envelopes and postmarks in detail. The version of the “Ross Dependency Stamp” is remarkable (we can assume Jana purposefully chose it to affix to the envelope) as it bears the tagline “Race to the Pole” and has both the British and Norwegian flags on it. The envelope left Antarctica sometime after the 26th of September, 2012 and arrived at the Christchurch, New Zealand post office around October 4, 2012 when it was postmarked. It arrived at my desk 8 days later on October 12th, 2012 at around 1pm.

I was delighted to see that Jana had included a series of postcards from Hedgehog House.

The stunning photographs poured out of the envelope. Hedgehog House, a self-described Specialist Photographic Library is “Dedicated to increasing awareness of the need to preserve wild landscape in New Zealand and in the polar and mountain regions throughout the world”. They have generously allowed us to use the images on their postcards to accompany the blog posts. The nine postcards have Jana’s written responses to questions from children in Victoria BC. Jana brought letters from curious children with her to the South Pole and future blog posts feature postcards she has mailed back to answer them. What do you eat?, Were there dinosaurs in Antarctica?, and Where is the toilet? were just some of the questions asked. Her answers can be surprising!