Andrew Regan on Antarctica

We all swan around being senior lion in our own little world, don’t we? But out there, no matter who you are, where you are, what you are – you rely on yourself and your teammates. You have to sort a problem out, and you have to find the solution or you’re going to die.

There are lots of harsh environments in the world, and you have to be aware that there are a lot of things that can kill you – and that things can change very, very quickly. You have to be able to deal with it.

The first time I was lucky enough to go to Antarctica, it affected me in a positive way. It’s a brilliant sanity check, being there. It’s a wake-up call about what matters in life. It’s made me more intolerant about wasting time. You should be trying to enjoy yourself as much as possible – I can’t stand people who moan…

Antarctic gives you this massive big picture. You micro-manage your life, and then you just see how enormous this place is. You realise you’re so lucky – you’re only here once and you have so little time. When your time’s over, it’s wasted if you’ve been sitting there waiting for something to happen, and then you look back with unfulfilled wishes. Well I’m not going to do that. I’m going to try my best to achieve my goals.

You have all the time in the world when you’re there. It’s either full-on, or very, very monotonous. For example, you spend a lot of time boiling water. Seven cups of ice make one cup of water – it’s the driest place on earth, so you have to be careful you don’t dehydrate.

Remoteness of Antarctica
Once you get on the Ilyushin [a Russian cargo plane] and leave Punta Arenas [in Chile], you make your last phone calls, you really notice it when you come into land on the ice. You come over the Patriot Hills. The wind has blown down to the bottom of the mountains for millions of years and created blue ice, which forms the ‘runway’. Blue ice is a bit squashy, and you land on that. You come into land on the ice in an aeroplane with wheels, not skis, and you have no means of braking besides reverse thrust. The number of flights each year is entirely weather dependent.

When the Ilyushin takes off – it dawns on you – we’re not getting out of here until that thing comes back. Because you are landing when the weather is not bad, you immediately see the beauty of the place – it’s like – wow.

The scariest moment was when we were in a whiteout. You can’t stop or the engine will freeze, and we didn’t know whether we were in a crevasse field. You don’t really remember those things, because the most amazing things stick in your mind.

If someone does an expedition in Antarctica and says they weren’t scared, they’re either kidding themselves or they’re too scared to admit they were scared.