Mazbaev of the Antarctic

ALMATY | People Ordenbek Mazbaev’s age typically do not trek across Antarctica.

But over two weeks in December, Mazbaev, 57, and six others traveled about 4,600 kilometers (2,875 miles) from Russia’s Novolazarevskaya research station on the frozen continent to the South Pole and back. In three trucks outfitted for the arctic terrain, they zigzagged through the dry, snowy desert of the planet’s oldest and most unforgiving continent.

Mazbaev takes probes of the snow at 89 degrees south latitude.

A geographer at Kazakh Pedagogical University, Mazbaev wanted to be among the first of his countrymen to plant the flag at the South Pole, 100 years after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen led the first team to reach the bottom of the world.

The Kazakhs started out on 4 December, aiming to reach the Pole 10 days later, when Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg would host 300 international visitors to mark the centennial of Amundsen’s achievement. Mazbaev said he wanted to shake Stoltenberg’s hand and offer a message to Norway: “Thank you for Amundsen, who was a committed explorer.”

The trip did not get off to an auspicious beginning. Mazbaev’s truck got stuck before getting even 500 meters along the route. The tires and wheels on all the Kazakhs’ trucks cracked in the cold, though their engines never stopped running.

The idea for Kazakhstan’s first Antarctic research mission was hatched in 2010 by Nurlan Abduov, chairman of the Kazakh Geographic Society, which sponsored the expedition. It followed a decision the previous year by the Foreign Ministry to seek to join the Antarctic Treaty, which bans military activity and preserves the white continent for scientific research.

Meteorologist Berik Baimagambetov, a member of the Geographic Society who sat on the Foreign Ministry-appointed panel that recommended joining the treaty, said he hopes the country will sign this year.

Kazakhstan would become the fifth former Soviet republic to sign the treaty, following Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, and Belarus. After doing so, it could set up a research station in Antarctica, for which Baimagambetov has his eye on a temperate plateau in the east.

One of the first Kazakhs to sail to Antarctica with a Russian expedition in 2007, Baimagambetov said the December pole mission could be the first step in Kazakhstan’s taking part in important meteorological research on the continent.

At minus 37 degrees Celsius, the Kazakhstan flag froze in a blizzard.

It could also give the country a shot at exploring the mineral resources sealed under Antarctica’s ice shelf.

“When the Antarctic mining ban expires in 2041, how the continent will get divided remains a question,” Abduov said.  “We’ll see the story unfolding right at our fingertips.”

SIX-DAY WALKS

Long before he went to the pole, Mazbaev was honing his tolerance for harsh conditions. As a silver medalist in the 1989 USSR motor rally, he trekked 5,000 kilometers across Kazakhstan’s Betpak Dala desert and Central Asia’s Tyan-Shan mountains.

Mairash Taikenova, Mazbaev's niece, recalled that her uncle used to lead walking tours through the mountains from the city of Almaty to Issyk Kul lake in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, a journey of six days and 110 kilometers. “The natural ability to survive in hard conditions is in his DNA because his father survived mass starvation in the early 1930s,” Taikenova said.

The Kazakh pole expedition braved temperatures of minus 40 degrees and 70 mile-per-hour winds, which made for slow going.

When trucks would break down – it happened about 10 times – an Icelandic driver and mechanic, familiar with Arctic conditions, would fix them on the go.

Still, Mazbaev’s biggest fear wasn’t being stranded or frostbitten – it was losing his sunglasses. In the Antarctic summertime, the sun shone constantly, which, in addition to making it difficult to keep track of days and nights, made snow-blindness a constant threat, he said.

An arctic-equipped truck blazes a trail.

Every two days, the team stopped to rest in extreme-weather tents “as comfortable as a three-star hotel,” Mazbaev said,  outfitted with sleeping bags rated for minus-65 degrees. In case of a blizzard, the crew of seven could survive in the tents for a month, provided their 565 kilograms (1,250 pounds) of food didn’t run out.

They shoveled snow into thermoses and boiled the melt-water for tea. “The crystal-clean snow, which was OK for eating, felt dry and scratchy like sandpaper,” Mazbaev said.

“After driving in a deathly silence for hundreds of miles across the vast desert, you lose any sense of space,” he added. “Boredom really gets you. You even begin to see mirages. From afar, the mountain chains start to look like skyscrapers.”

The expedition took eight days to get close to the South Pole, then stopped for two days in order to arrive on the target date, 14 December. But on that last day they were delayed by bad weather; the centennial celebration had started before they arrived, and Stoltenberg, the prime minister, had left only minutes earlier.

A crestfallen Mazbaev said he thought of the great British explorer who had been beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen.