Twelve men have walked on the moon. But how many have spent an entire season with the Emperors in Antarctica? Maybe more, likely less.
Lindsay McCrae, cameraman for the BBC's Dynasties series, shared his wonderful and frank story - My Penguin Year - at Hay Festival Winter Weekend on Saturday.
When the BBC asked BAFTA-winning cameraman Lindsay McCrae to go to Antarctica to film emperor penguins he was thrilled. After discussing it with his wife Becky they agreed that, although it would mean him being away for 11 months, he should do it. But then she became pregnant and it seemed like the worst idea in the world – not just to miss the birth of his first child, but the first 7 months of his life.
There were lines of penguins and blizzards, but there was also the emotional turmoil of being separated from his home, his new wife and his unborn child. All his musings and observations combine to produce a compelling tale of the man, those extraordinary birds and that lonely place at the end of the earth.
"The weather is so unpredictable in Antarctica that you are stranded, no way in and no way out, for at least eight months of the year," he said. "Being isolated had consequences I wasn’t aware of. For those eight months there was an enormous amount of training. It was a three year process to get ready."
"I’d been worried about us being left alone at the station for those eight months, but when the day came we all felt excited… Very quickly though we learnt that the landscape we were living in is one of the most dangerous on the planet," he added.
"The payoff for our working in the extreme winter months, was witnessing behaviours few people have ever seen," he said. "We saw things that the three of us had dreamt of all our lives."
Explore the full Hay Festival Winter Weekend programme here.