A destination wedding played backdrop to a once in a lifetime adventure on the ice sheets of Antarctica.
Words by Richard Lyster
Images by Corrie Uys and Richard Lyster
I think I’ve led a reasonably interesting life. I have done a range of unusual things in strange places, but when I was asked in January this year to conduct a wedding ceremony on a remote base on the Antarctic continent, I knew immediately that this eclipsed all the others. For most of my adult life, it would be fair to say I have been obsessed by two destinations: Mount Everest and the Antarctic.
In 2011 after much planning and anticipation, I hiked to Everest Base Camp and thought I’d be able to die happy, even though I might never make it to Antarctica. As the Rolling Stones say, you cant always get what you want. But, I continued to dream about it, immersing myself in the extraordinary diaries of the famous explorers of the heroic age – Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton and many others. Then, in early January 2024, I got a call from an old friend, asking me what I was doing the following week. I painted a picture of some highlights of my average week, probably go down to the Bean Green in Glenwood, and have a cup of my favourite coffee in Durban, with the owner, my old friend Peter Winter, and then take my long board and go down to the beach for a wave. He said that that sounded nice, but what did I think about going to Antarctica to marry a couple on the ice. I hesitated for the proverbial nano-second and that was that. I flew to Cape Town a few days later, and boarded a cargo plane, destination: ‘The Ice’.
The company that charters the plane is Ultima Antarctic Logistics, based in Cape Town, and it supplies many of the research and weather bases on the continent with fuel, food, machinery, vehicles, generators and the like, as well as transporting scientists and researchers from Cape Town to Antarctica and back. My fellow passengers were a mixed bag of scientists, glaciologists, technicians and doctors, from Russia, India, Belgium and South Africa, along with a few paying guests, eager to experience one of the furtherest flung places on Earth. Also on board was photographer extraordinaire, Corrie Uys, who came along to take the wedding pics.
Ultima runs a small lodge for paying guests (Ultima Antarctic Expeditions). The lodge manager is Imke Meintjes, and it so happened that she and her partner, chef Jesse Wollenschlaeger, had decided that of all the dozens of places around the world where they had worked as chefs and hospitality managers, Antarctica was without question, the only place where they wanted to be married.
Barely six hours after leaving Cape Town, and in a completely new world, we landed on an ice sheet in Eastern Antarctica. We were met at the runway by Juan, an Argentinian mountain guide, briefly contracted to Ultima in the southern hemisphere summer. We made our way in a fabulous, ice-adapted Toyota Hilux six wheeler to the lodge, which is snuggled into a mountainside, peeking out of the ice shelf, some 12 kilometres from the runway.
The small mountain range is known as the Schirmacher Oasis, and is essentially a nunatak – a mountain which sticks up out of the massive ice sheet, or glacier, which was at that point about 300 metres thick - making its way, at a glacial pace which means it creeps wider at the rate of a few metres a year - to the coast of the Antarctic continent. The accommodation is a small wooden lodge. It’s an old scientific base, abandoned and refurbished to cater for adventure tourists.
I don’t have the creative ability to properly describe the outrageously exquisite scenery, and I hope that the snaps that accompany this article will go some way to conveying that this is the most superlatively beautiful and mysterious place on earth. The weather was perfect for days, the sun never, ever disappeared, even at midnight, and the temperature never went much below -10 degrees.
The wedding ceremony was held a few kilometres from the lodge, on a short promontory overlooking an icy valley. Jesse and Imke, in their beautiful wedding dresses, with ice crampons on their white sneakers, led Corrie and I over a frozen lake to the spot they had chosen, their arms and shoulder bare in the freezing, late afternoon temperatures. After vows were exchanged and love warmed the air around us, we trudged back over the ice to the lodge, welcomed by champagne, Irish whiskey and a feast, prepared by the chef from a nearby base, who’d come across to give Jesse and Imke the night off.
Along with its beautifully fitted kitchen and dining and relaxation room, the lodge has a state of the art Bean to Cup coffee machine and it was into that very machine that I poured a couple of kilograms of Ethiopian beans, supplied by my long time dealer, Peter Winter. Never say that Peter doesn’t go the extra mile to deliver beans to his customers.
The lodge is perched on the side of a mountain which is snow free in the Antarctic summer. This means that you can hike, rock climb, bird watch, and even swim, if the sun is warm enough to briefly melt one of the shallow fresh water lakes. Like kids at an all night funfair, too excited to sleep, Corrie and I hiked from midnight to three in the morning, the exquisite yellow light burnishing the ice.
I think that says it all. What an incredible experience. If you have a bucket list, scratch out “Swimming with dolphins”. I am lucky enough to live in a place where you can do that almost every day, come visit anytime! Write down – “Antarctica.” Truly, a once in a lifetime experience.
ED’S NOTE:
If you’re interested in planning an adventure of a lifetime, find out all the information on the company used above:
