ANTARCTICA/ BREAKING THE ICE

Manual Magazine, September 2003

It’s a hook all too easy to sensationalize: two deskbound Pinoy yuppies literally sail through twin hurricanes straight out of The Perfect Storm—but in the subfreezing waters of Drake’s Passage, just off the coast of Antarctica, where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans collide. Seventy-five-knot winds hurled sixty-foot waves towards their ship every seven seconds for 64 hours out of their 72-hour-long escape back into Ushuaia, the southernmost port of Argentina. They missed seven meals for fear of throwing up; their ears rang from the noise of metal crashing into wall after wall of water; their cabin was turned inside out and upside down; and they stank of penguin shit for days afterwards. When their expedition leaders declared it the worst storm of their lives, they found no reason to disagree.

The yuppies played the incident down, however, demoting it into a mere footnote at the end of this interview. They spoke in themes and insights, repeatedly requesting that their story not be treated like a mere snapshot album of a wild junket. Professional modesty called for it, I suppose. But if that’s all there was to it, then damn it, they’re good. They acted a bit like the disoriented rookie photojournalists fleeing Basilan in 2000. One of the yuppies read excerpts from his diary, while the other waxed existential over the photos in his Power-Point presentation. Both of them hold cushy directorships at Coca-Cola, and they really seemed to be trying to come to terms with their corporate-sponsored near-death experiences.

“Are you sure your company likes you?” a US consul even supposedly asked one of them, when applying for a transit visa through Los Angeles.

“Yes, of course,” the yuppie answered naively. “They’re sending me to Antarctica.”

“That’s why I’m asking if your company likes you,” the consul retorted.

X-ICE
Antarctica is a land of extremes: On one hand, it is the harshest continent on earth. It is the coldest, windiest, and driest continent, with temperatures averaging –12oC in summer, plummeting to –79oC in winter. It is also the highest continent, its glaciers reaching 3kms above sea level. On the other hand, it also has the most fragile ecosystems. It holds most of the world’s freshwater reserves, and its ice, which has practically suspended biological decay, still preserves many of evolution’s primordial secrets, waiting for us to unlock them.

Despite its practically nonexistent humidity, therefore, Antarctica is still a scientist’s wet dream. Many countries maintain research bases there. Their governments retrieve garbage and send supplies each summer, the only time the continent is accessible. Unfortunately, summer is between December and March, and therein lay our yuppies’ problem: their expedition left Argentina only last February 22.

Alex Panlilio, 34, flew westward to the meeting point in Buenos Aires, passing through Bangkok and Frankfurt. Ed Razon, 38, took a more complicated route through Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Sao Paolo. The team then flew together Ushuaia, otherwise known as “Fin del Mundo,” where their ship, also called Ushuaia, awaited. Theirs wasn’t a cruise ship, because this wasn’t a junket. It was a real expedition.

Their mission was three-fold: to draft a waste management plan for Bellingshausen (the Russian Base); to draft, together with experts, an environmentally safe plan to dismantle nine huge, rusting oil tanks, also at Bellingshausen; and to propose sustainable energy sources for the research bases.

With this in mind, the 37-man expedition was broken down into several multicultural teams with varying “missions for the day.” They typically breakfasted at 7:30, received their briefings at 8:30, and given 10 minutes to dress up for deployment. Dressing up in 10 minutes was harder than it sounds, because their daily outfits consisted of head covers, neck warmers, thermal underwear, jeans, long-sleeved shirts, Gore-Tex parkas and pants, three layers of wool socks (covered by plastic bags), waterproof gumshoes, and two layers of gloves. Teammates usually helped each other dress up.

Deployment from the ship was precarious as well. The waters were choppy, and people had to wait for “windows” of calm, when they could safely jump into their fiberglass-bottomed rubber rafts and speed for shore. This was very dangerous, because: a) their bulky clothes made movement clumsy, and accelerated drowning; b) the rubber rafts were slippery when wet; c) the choppy ocean was so cold you froze to death 3-6 minutes after falling overboard; and d) the ship’s engine was always running, so anyone who fell overboard got left behind until the ship could either circle back or launch a rescue raft. As a matter of fact, two crewmembers actually did fall overboard. The ship’s harness snapped as they were being hoisted out of the water, throwing their raft back into the ocean. Luckily, the Pinoys were on their way in as well. They fished the shocked crewmembers up before they froze to death.

A TALE OF TWO CITY-SLICKERS
Razon and Panlilio make for an amusing study in contrast.

Razon is the field guy. He may now be the Marketing Director for Coke’s bottling arm, but he came from the truckers, and it shows. He’s warm and genial in an unpretentious probinsiyano sort of way. His English is fluent, of course, but you could tell that he is not native to the language, and that is integral to his charm. He’s the sort of traveling salesman that stevedores and storeowners would trust around their wives. It was he who read diary excerpts during the pictorial, and who chatted with me at length by phone the night before.

Somehow, it wasn’t surprising that he could scribble into his diary during their Perfect Storm. He’s from Coke’s Pampanga plant, you see. Between Central Luzon’s volcanic ash, crumbling flood-dikes, impoverished whorehouses, aggressive communist rebels, corrupt politicians, extortionist policemen, and fearless drug lords (the last three sometimes the same thing), Antarctica was probably just another near-death experience for him, and a mercifully quick one, too, at that, if ever.

Panlilio, on the other hand, was clearly the academic. Simultaneously formal and accommodating, he seemed bred specifically for his Coke position, which is Brand Director for carbonated soft drinks. He is inquisitive, approachable, and very helpful. But Coke truckers will probably think twice before escorting him into the dubious outskirts of Southern Luzon—takaw-kidnap kasi; tisoy, flawless, pulido ang ngipin, at mainit sa mata. It was he who whipped up an idiot-proofed Power Point presentation, by the way.

He was obviously shaken by their Perfect Storm, and confessed to have asked “Is this worth it?” in medias res. Even though our interview was already five months after the fact, he still sounded old and secular, like a veteran bittersweet over war. Very existentialist-with-the-rug-pulled-out-from-under-him. It’s a peculiar mindset, his deconstruction of Pinoy comfort zones. So when his office eventually revealed that Panlilio was an Atenean, I wasn’t surprised. In him were echoes of Fr. Roque Ferriols.

At our bird-filled sunny Tuesday morning pictorial at the blatantly tropical Edsa Shangri-La Hotel, I tried to visualize them during those stormy nights, starving and seasick in a cramped cabin in a tiny ship in an endless expanse of churning ice water, struggling to remain professional despite the chaos. It was almost beyond me. Not wanting them to perspire, I tried shooing them away from the sun while I set my camera up. But they wouldn’t budge. They liked the sun, they said.

SWAN'S SONG
There is only one thing stranger than Coke sending two Pinoy yuppies to the Antarctic expedition: the fact that Coke actually funded the whole thing.

It was apparently caused by a man poetically named Robert Swan (swans and ice: very Mallarmé, yes?), and it is he whom the yuppies play up. Swan was the first man to reach both geographic poles, a rugged Brit who since childhood dreamt of walking to the South Pole, like his idols in the expeditions of old. It’s a 1300-mile walk from the nearest shore, so his plan was insane at best. But he did it. Three people, three sleds, 300 pounds of supplies, 1300 miles. His ship just dropped him off, then sailed back to fetch a plane to pick him up. Because of the huge hole in the ozone layer, UV rays burned his face, and his eyes changed color. But he didn’t notice this until much later. What filled his mind as he reached the US Base at the South Pole was the news that his ship had sunk, crushed by icebergs that formed around it (now, that is so morbidly Mallarmé).

Swan next traveled to the North Pole. There he encountered an opposite but equally deadly problem: the ice melted prematurely—so prematurely in fact, that his eight-man team frequently found themselves floating on blocks of ice.

This finally convinced him that man’s actions really did have an impact on the environment. He believed that the solutions lay with business and the youth, so he took his story to the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro. He was only given five minutes there, but his presentation inspired John Major, who asked him to do “something” involving the youth, and to present his results in the next World Summit. Swan rose to the challenge, bringing young people into Antarctica for clean up drives every summer between 1996 and 2000, eventually clearing 1000 tons of garbage from Bellingshausen alone.

He presented his case at the recent World Summit in South Africa last August 2002. This time, he was given ample time to speak, and his presentation inspired Doug Duff, who is Coca-Cola’s Chairman. Duff immediately met with Swan, and by October 2002, Coca-Cola was already screening its global manpower pool to staff the February 2003 planning expedition to save Antarctica.

The next expedition is already being organized. I don’t know if Coke can fully fund or staff this one as well. This time, you see, the mission is to act on the plans drafted by the first expedition, and to actually dismantle the 9 giant rusty leaky Pandacan-like oil tanks in Bellingshausen. This expedition sails in 2004.

PRIVATE LESSONS
I ask the yuppies what they learned from it all.

Panlilio mentions a cleared sense of vision, a renewed energy, and a new respect for punctuality and adaptability. Teamwork, too, from an incident when the Asian Team was caught by a blizzard halfway up a glacier, near the Polish Base.

Razon, for his part, says he realized that “in the day-to-day conduct of our daily lives, we take so much for granted, like trash and energy. This expedition made me realize that time is running out as far as the Earth is concerned. It’s high time for us to take positive action.”

He says that Swan’s team was called Inspaia (an offshoot of “inspire”), with the (rather verbose) motto “Whom you really think you are, versus what you can really be.” He adds, “There is so much potential in people waiting to be tapped, if you just take positive action one step at a time, and start with a clear vision.”

I was a bit confused by the term positive action, so Panlilio explained, using the story of Swan’s right-hand man as an illustration: “Peter kasi is ex-Greenpeace. He’s the type to do protest action. But…that’s negative action—throwing oil… stunts like that. Si Robert, positive. That’s why everything we did at the expedition was constructive, helpful. His mission kasi, and the reason why we were tapped, is to bring back positive news despite what’s happening in the environment, the positive things that can be done even in the remotest areas. What more in our own areas? Also, positive messages about ourselves, about working in a diverse setup with different nations, about landing in a place you don’t know anything about, where in an instant you can be in danger because of the weather. But still, positive experiences out of that.”

Razon adds: “According to Swan, what the world lacks is not information, but inspiration. We know that there is something that needs to be done, but are we inspired to do it? Do we have the fire in our bellies? You can be a champion if you believe in yourself. If you have inspiration enough to do positive things, you can do a lot. A mission is something you take upon yourself because you want to do it. And you do it with passion.”

Panlilio closes: “So, if you think you can do something, do it today. Tomorrow might never arrive.”