Hello, it's Robert Anderson calling from Antarctica 2003. Very happy to say I'm now reporting from Antarctica, after a number of false calls a couple of days ago, and then a couple of hourly waits. Yesterday we finally flew out about 6pm. Four hours down here in an amazing cargo plane. Twenty feet wide and 20 foot high ceilings. Sandwiches made on board, and so we all hit the ice about 10:30 last night. It was blazing daylight, of course, about as bright as it can get, and the sun won't set until we leave again.

It was a surprisingly warm evening, very, very pleasant. Almost no wind. We took the mile walk over to the Patriot Hill station that Adventure Network has set up here, and tucked into some dinner. After that we pitched the tents out on the ice, and went back, had a few cups of tea and got into bed about 3 in the morning.

With this much daylight I find that you can stay awake a lot longer than you normally would, so we're taking the best advantage of that. Got up again this morning, after a pretty good night's sleep, a little bit different sleep where you need to put the ice aids on all night. Once we got up and looked out at the mountains around here and out across the plateau, all the way out to as far as you can see the distant horizon is just all white as you look to the north. And then we've got some very dark hills and mountains around us.

We've got about 100 kilometers to fly today. The first flight has gone over to Mount Vinson, should be back soon and we hope to be out there this afternoon. So that'll be about an hour to the east, and we'll drop down there into a little valley that we've organized, Adventure Networks will fly us into. We don't believe anybody's really been in there before. They don't have any record of it here, and since we're the only ones really flying, it's probably pretty much new territory.

So we'll report back as soon as we get in there. Everybody's doing well, we're all very happy to be on the ice. Talk to you later.

— Robert Anderson, expedition leader and MountainZone.com correspondent