Antarctica on a Plate: She Came, She Saw, She Burnt the Toast

‘SHEER EXUBERANCE. A CAPTIVATING STORY OF THREE ADVENTUROUS MONTHS ON A CONTINENT THAT DEFIES DESCRIPTION’. - Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE (explorer and author) Imagine you are a young woman with a stellar career but an increasing dissatisfaction with life. Imagine that your idea of a ‘remote location’ is the distance between a taxi rank and a shoe shop. How do you shrug off your growing ennui? Simple. You apply for the position of cook in the coldest place on earth: Antarctica. Antarctica lends itself to tales of adventure and heartbreak. The landscape is polarised - beautiful and deadly in equal measure. But Alexa doesn’t scale mountains or trek to the Pole. Instead, armed with an old cookbook, she attempts to create three course meals with no electricity or running water and struggles to defrost meat in sub-zero temperatures.
Life in a thin nylon tent in the company of scientists, explorers and eccentrics soon begins to take on absurd dimensions. As 120-kilometre-an-hour winds blow and tensions rise, friendships - and love - are forged in this frozen neighbourhood.
What Sarah Turnbull did for Paris in her best-selling travel memoir “Almost French”, Alexa Thomson does for Antarctica - but in this case, it’s “almost frozen”!