In December 2010, a Russian icebreaker, Professor Kromov, registered in Vladivostok, set sail from Bluff on the south coast of New Zealand. We endured ferocious seas that kept us strapped in our bunks for days at a time, hiked across sub-Antarctic islands with mega-herbs and fearless wild animals, and then crashed our way through pack ice to Mawson's hut at Cape Denison in Antarctica.