KD's World Tour: Antarctica (Ch 1)
If you followed my Pan-American Trek, welcome back! If you’re new to my virtual travels, hello! You can read more about my love of Google Street View here, and how I approach virtual photography.
As I mentioned in the last blog of the Pan-Am Trek, it took me about 20 months of calendar time to go from the tip of Alaska to the tip of Argentina. What could I do that was even bigger? I noticed that Google Street View was present in many parts of Asia, and also in Russia, running east to west along the Siberian Railroad. I wanted the trip to have some coherent theme – some reason I was following the path I was. After deliberation, I decided a grand tour could be designed by following the path of human migration, “Out of Africa”. Only I was interested in going backwards, so the path is one of Reverse Human Migration.
We start in Antarctica, where about 5000 people live in the Antarctic during the summer, and around 1000 during the winter. I’ll leave it up to you to guess the rest of the path forward.
Unlike the Pan-American Trek, I decided that I would not follow a strictly contiguous path on Street View. This tour is quite a bit longer in length, and I didn’t want to take 5 years to do it, so while I followed a path, I tended to jump directly to towns or cities and skip most of the rural landscape in between, with exceptions. Also, unlike the Pan-Am Trek which had already been completed when I started to post blogs to LinkedIn, the World Tour is still going on today.
The quality of the raw Street View images was a bit problematic, so I have “post-processed” all the images in this post, in various ways.
Ross Island is off the coast of Antarctica, and Cape Royds is on its west side. This area was visited by Shackleton in 1908. This shack is probably not hugely different than the one he built.
Away from the coastline, it quickly becomes a very lonely and large landscape.
Memorial, with the research station in the background.
Here we see the shadow of the Google Street View walker, with the camera on top of his or her helmet.
Moving to Arena Valley, a real moonscape...
And into Taylor Valley.
Note in this last image, it looks like people are in their t-shirts.
See you next time as we'll virtually fly from the icy Antarctica to some balmy Pacific Islands!