It has been twelve hours since we lifted off the runway at Christchurch, New Zealand, seven since the C-17 touched down on the Pegasus blue-ice runway and brought me back to The Ice. It is very, very moving to be here again. It has been seven years, but it seems as if little has changed. I find this extremely comforting, especially in a world so replete with convolutions of so many kinds, natural and human induced.

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As predicted in my last transmission, we sweltered in our Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear for four hours before being ushered into a line for the final screening for the trip to the real south. The peculiar thing about this was that it wasn't peculiar. We had to pass our carry-on bags through a scanner, and walk through a metal detector, endure a pat-down: all the things one does at a commercial airport. But this is a military transport to literally the ends of the earth! I'm sure the oddity has a rationale somewhere.

Military transports are not designed for creature comforts. The interior is cavernous, designed for versatility in the discharge of numerous tasks, and all the mechanicals are exposed: wiring, hydraulics, ducts, everything. In this context, the 'pallets' (removable sections of floor) holding our regular airline seats seemed incongruous, like a business suit at a truck pull. Other than the seats, the actual flight closely resembled my previous trip to The Ice in a slower, turboprop military LC-130 transport: the bag snack, the vibration, the noise necessitating earplugs, the windowlessness. One advantage, though, is the C-17 is jet powered, and thus transits the 2,500 miles in a bit under 5 hours, about half the time needed for the 130.

During the flight, I am eager to get some photographs of Victoria Land, the coast that juts out north of our destination, but this is not to be. I manage to get an invitation to the flight deck where there is adequate glass, but a cloud deck is all I see. During the last half-hour it shreds a bit, and I am able to get a few shots of ice floes drifting in patterns, and a few snow-covered peaks, but they are more effect images than anything that will tell a story.

At 1451 we touch down on the ice of McMurdo Sound, and ten minutes later the 50 of us stumble out of the plane, stiff from our ride, into the brilliant 24-hour sunlight. Mt. Erebus, the 14,000-foot volcano that dominates Ross Island where McMurdo Station is, is hidden in clouds, but some of the majestic Royal Society Range peaks gleam hazily in the western distance. I recognise a few of the odd vehicles about us, including the enormous all-terain bus that will take us the eight or so miles to the base itself. It has a name: Ivan the Terra-bus'.

After an initial 'in-briefing' at the National Science Foundation headquarters where we a given a brief orientation to the base routines, we are given our room assignments, and we scatter to out various dormitories to begin to settle in. As a group, we have been quite cohesive for a few days in transit, but now we begin to disolve into the general population of 'Mactown.'

Tomorrow: McMurdo Station