Polar exploration

[luzula]

I've just finished listening to an audiobook of Roald Amundsen's book about his Antarctica expedition, "The South Pole". Very interesting, and I like listening to stuff like this while doing housework: "we were now at 88 degrees 15 minutes south, and there was a northerly wind blowing..." There is something about the repetition in travel stories and journals that I find very soothing.

Amundsen seems to have been a total equipment nerd. He can spend paragraphs talking about which kinds of ski bindings are the best. Then again, all that attention to detail paid off.

It's also interesting that they had people skiing alongside the dogsleds--or more specifically, they had one guy skiing ahead of the dogs to give them tracks to follow. Speaking from my experiences with dog sledding, I wouldn't have believed that possible, since dog sledding is so fast. But then again, they probably had more heavily loaded sleds. Also, the guy skiing ahead was one of the champion skiers of Norway. *g*

Now I want to listen to Amundsen's book about the Northwest Passage, too--he was the first to get through all the way with a ship, and also seems to have learned a lot from the Inuit about dog sledding. Alas, it's not available as an audiobook. But anyway, I have plenty of stockpiled podfic that I should get around to.

In unrelated news, thanks to ficfinishing my Big Bang fic is now over 8000 words! \o/

Comments

[luzula]

Thanks for the rec! It sounds interesting. Theoretically, I guess I could read in Danish, but it's a bit of an effort for me, so I'll probably hunt it down in Swedish if I want to read it.