Southern thrills:
Go South catches a boat to Antarctica.
Go Further South is the follow-up to the Go South train journey documentary. The new programme is a boat trip which starts at the southern end of New Zealand and ends in Antarctica. Go Further South producer Spencer Stoner (right) tells Sarah Nealon what’s in store.
It’s fair to say that not many of us will visit Antarctica. The icy continent is a long distance away and it’s not cheap to venture there either.
Let’s not even mention the chilly temperatures or the fact that accommodation options are extremely limited.
Thankfully, we can now experience Antarctica via a 12-hour documentary called Go Further South.
The programme is the sequel to the popular Go South which was largely a train journey the length of New Zealand from Auckland to the deep south.
Just like Go South, Go Further South falls into the ‘Slow TV’ genre in that it is a long programme with no commentary.
However, this time around the method of travel is an ocean vessel.
“It’s a character in itself,” says Go Further South’s producer Spencer Stoner. “It’s an old Russia research vessel from the Soviet era that has been sort of retrofitted to accommodate passengers but it’s very industrial.”
The new show begins at Bluff, in Southland.
From there, it detours to various islands before sailing to Antarctica with the journey eventually finishing at Scott Base.
“There’s so much to see,” says producer Stoner, who is part of the four-person film crew which spent a month capturing the documentary’s footage.
“We don’t go straight to Antarctica. Along the way we stop off at the different islands.
“So the whole first half of the journey is actually made up of
all of the amazing New Zealand sub-Antarctic islands.”
Islands explored include The Snares, a group of islands south of Stewart Island, where Stoner saw penguins, albatross and sooty shearwaters.
“It’s amazing how much bird life is out there,” says Stoner.
“You’re talking about sections of the ocean where there’s very little fishing activity and where there’s very little human activity. So you go to these islands and the bird life there is almost like it was before people arrived. It’s just totally primordial.”
Other islands featured include The Auckland Islands, Campbell Island and Macquarie Island. Then there is the sea itself. “The Southern Ocean obviously has this reputation for being this sort of monstrous place with heaving seas,” says Stoner.
“It’s just amazing to look at the waves and the shifting nature of the light, and seabirds that have come right into the boat. You have icebergs that appear and disappear, sea ice...
“So the whole first half is really chocka-full of really amazing, interesting things to see that most people will never get to see in their lives.”
And it seems the Southern Ocean did at times live up to its reputation. Stoner recalls one particular incident.
“We had 15-metre swells and the boat would rock at about a 45-degree tilt. So when it was really bad, like you couldn’t actually walk across the boat at all because it was like going up a really steep hill.” On the plus side, once the film crew members got to Antarctica, they were in awe of its sheer size and beauty. “A lot of people think of Antarctica as a single place, but it’s a continent that’s bigger than Australia,” says Stoner. “Within the New Zealand section of Antarctica, you’ve got the Ross Sea, which enabled us to have the really interesting privilege of being able to sail south while being in Antarctica because we’re able to sail along the coast of the Ross Sea. “You see all these historic huts built by early explorers like Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. “You see modern research bases, so we stopped off at the Italian
Research Station, you see the Korean research station. Obviously there’s McMurdo Station and Scott Base that everyone knows about.
“You see icebreakers through there. You see people doing research and so much wildlife. So you know, it’s not truly a journey just to Antarctica because you get to Antarctica about halfway through the programme.
“The entire second half of the programme is really exploring Antarctica in a way that a lot of people don’t even get to see in nature documentaries.
“We spend quite a bit of time in Antarctica. We were actually filming in Antarctica for more than 10 days. And the journey continues once we’re there so people will see the changing, shifting landscape within Antarctica. You’ll see crazy black cliffs, volcanoes.”
When Stoner visited Antarctica it was summer which meant 24 hours of daylight. He sometimes worked in the middle of the night because he says the light was often at its most beautiful.
He says it is difficult to pinpoint a particular highlight of his visit to this part of the world. “It’s stunning,” he says. “It totally caught us off guard because we all went down there with this preconceived idea of what Antarctica was going to be like. “People feel like they’ve seen it from watching like a David Attenborough project about, you know, penguins. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s flat and icy’. I think what we saw is with going down there with Slow TV in mind, rather than doing a penguin documentary, we saw a completely different side of Antarctica. And it was so much more stunning than we’d expected. “It’s just the topography. It’s so extreme. The peaks are so, so tall. It’s so dramatic. You’ve got the size of the colonies and the wildlife. It’s just so encompassing. It’s every direction around you. “It’s not like you show up at these places and you don’t know which direction to point your camera. There are so many interesting things going on.”