That's what it says on my luggage ticket this time around. I was travelling home from Mount Pleasant Airfield in the Falkland Islands to the military airbase at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. It wasn't a comfortable flight – the seats only reclined the width of three of my fingers – but I didn't really care – it was going north. We only had a couple of hours in Ascension (not like last time) and, before I knew it, I was stepping off a plane at just after midnight. Brize doesn't have those fancy tunnel things you get at commercial airports to leave the plane, so I walked down a flight of steps and onto the tarmac. I looked up to a beautiful clear sky and saw northern stars for the first time in months.

Home.

Well almost. I still had to negotiate customs, immigration and a final roundabout route involving Oxford, Heathrow and an amazing taxi ride through Regents Park (trees! green!!) before I finally walked through my front door at 0630.

Our voyage from Rothera to Stanley had been relatively quick – but certainly not boring. Just before we left the base we got a cloud free satellite image that showed the local sea ice conditions. Now Rothera base is on Adelaide Island – but this island is separated from the Antarctic continent by gap only a few hundred metres wide. With mountains thousands of metres high on either side the gap is called The Gullet. In all my visits to Rothera I had never been through the Gullet because it has always been blocked by ice. This time was to be different. With a satellite picture show ice-free conditions the captain made the choice to take us on the inland route.

To tell the truth my photos of the day were not great. The light was poor and of course there was not much of it! Having said that it was magnificent. When you are standing out on the bow of the ship the only thing you can hear is the wind – not the engines or anything like that. You just take it in. When we reached the narrowest part of the channel it seemed a bit stupid to be surprised by the fact that an iceberg virtually blocked the channel. The problem was that the satellite can only see things bigger than a certain size (this is determined by the resolution), and this particular iceberg – although too small for the satellite – was large enough to almost stop us in the tracks.

The image on the left is a photograph of the ship’s radar at the time. The Bright yellow on either side of the image is land, and the blue patch from the bottom left hand corner to the upper right hand corner is water. The yellow blob almost in the middle of the picture with the green line coming from it is our ship – the green line shows our direction of travel. You can see right across the middle of the blue, and in front of us is a yellow bar – this is the radar reflection of the iceberg that almost stopped us. We were heading right for it!

In yet another outrageous piece of seamanship the Captain managed to squeeze the ship through the tiny gap on the left of the berg. Amazing.

Being out at sea again on the way back the Falklands we soon left the last iceberg behind.

So now I am home at last, sitting in the sun and enjoying the long daylight hours. At home when you go from winter to spring you almost miss the extra minutes of daylight that arrive every day until suddenly it is light for all of your waking hours.

To jump from early winter to late spring in one go is an unsual and wonderful thing.

I have to say I now really love the colour green!

It’s a strange thing to wake up and find the ship not rolling after so long. We had been tied up at the base for a few hours before I got up and walked into the main lab to catch up with what had been going on. Rothera is the largest British Antarctic Research station and it is about half way down the Antarctic Peninsula. It's an amazing place with research labs, accomodation, workshops, and it is the home of the air unit. Of course no air unit can operate without a runway and so Rothera is dominated by the 1 km long strip of gravel on the edge of the island. You can see what I mean in this photo. As it's nearly winter all the little red planes have headed north long ago so the gravel is started to get buried by the snow.

It's actually a strange time to be at Rothera because although during the short Antarctic summer there can be upwards of 120 people working here, now there are only about 45 - and half of those are leaving Antarctica on our ship leaving just 22 people to make it through the Antarctic winter.

There is an amazing amount of work going on. We are the last people leaving and so its the last chance to make sure everything that needs to go north is on board. Whilst some of the stuff coming out with us is obvious - for example we have a couple of mechanical diggers already loaded, some is a bit more obscure. For example I bet you would be surprised at the amount of rubbish we are bringing out. You see, people often talk about how Antarctica is under threat, but in reality compared with some vunerable areas of the planet you should be pleased to find out we have some of the strictest environmental laws on the planet.

If you think about it it seems obvious that you should take your rubbish out of Antarctica. But of course it wasn't always that way. In the golden olden days research stations just put their rubbish out on the sea ice in winter, and when the summer came and the ice broke up, that was it - gone! The first time I came south was with the US Antarctic Program and I spent time talking to writer who had dived at McMurdo Research Station. He told me how once he found an ironing board on the sea floor! I couldn't imagine bringing an ironing board to Antarctica, let alone throwing it away!! That could just not happen now. Everything comes out thanks to the most amazing set of rules.

When we leave there will be just 22 people left and entirely on their own. There are actually only three scientists on the base over winter - but it takes a lot of people to keep the operation running. You have a base commander, a doctor, a builder, a mechanic, a chef, an electrician a plumber, a comms person and some mountaineers. And that's it. The average age is I think about 26.

I'm sure they want us to go as soon as possible so they can get on with organizing themselves, but for the last couple of days they not only cope with us, but one of the mountaineers (an architect on holiday for the year) took us out into the local hills. It was great to stretch my legs away from the base, and take a skidoo ride for a few kilometers.

I really hope they have a succesful winter.

If you want to see it get dark and tough it gets for them at Rothera you can always take a look on the webcam.

Oh and I nearly forgot. I finally got some chocolate from the Base. OK, so it was 6 years out of date but after what seems like forever, it tasted great.

Next stop the Falkland Islands.

We finally arrived at Rothera Research Station last week. Another stage of my journey over, and another begins. Actually before we docked was the last serious science for me on the trip. I have had some equipment sitting on the seabed off Rothera for the last two years measuring the temperature, salinity and ocean currents as part of my climate research. One of the really special things about this bit of kit is we also had a couple of sediment traps down their as well. Now a sediment trap is just like a huge yellow funnel about 90 cm across that catches the debris that falls through the ocean down to the sea floor (we call this marine snow). This snow is always falling in the sea, but in this part of the world it is a bit more interesting because lots of algae grows both in and on the bottom of the sea ice. So when that stuff melts and the algae falls out you get a kind of blizzard falling to the sea floor. What makes the sediment traps really good is on the bottom of the big yellow funnel is a computer controlled sample unit that swaps a sample bottle at the bottom of the funnel every couple of weeks – and that means you get a time series of how much of this snow falls through the year. And of course we put this together with the ocean current data and can try to understand the regional link between climate and biological activity here.

I said the kit has been on the sea floor for a couple of years – but that is not strictly true because every year we have visited and recovered it from the sea floor to download the data, then redeployed it again. But the fact that you have got it back before doesnt mean it is any easier to get this time....

The whole point of this sort of science is you can leave the stuff and it works through the whole winter when you are not around. But out of sight is definately not out of mind. I have woken up loads of times over the last year dreaming of icebergs running the kit over and destroying it.

So it's now about 14 months after the last time I deployed this bit of kit and I am close to where we dropped the kit off.

We stop and lower our hydrophone (a big waterproof microphone) and shout "hello" (an acoustic signal at a special frequency that tells the kit to answer us).

Silence.

"HELLO".

Silence.

My heart starts to sink and I have a mental picture of the iceberg that must have destroyed the kit. It's one of those moments you plan for but hope won't come. But it has. OK, option A doesn't work, try option B, then onto option C, D and so on.

By 15 minutes I was up to option F and still no answer. Then I heard a tremendous WHOOOSH. A couple of Minke whales were on the surface next to the ship and breathing. I guess they had probably heard our hydrophones and come to investigate. I didn't have time to look but they did distract the people not involved in the science from watching me struggle.

I was pretty tense by option K when finally we got an answer. It was still there and on the sea floor! But was it OK? It took another 20 minutes of struggling before I thought we had finally persauded it to come to the surface.

I turned to the bosun to tell him, and was just in time to see him point, smile and say "there it is Mark".

My large orange float was about 100m from the ship.

In the open ocean with kit floating on the surface it can sometimes be a bit tough getting it on board, but with this ship, this crew and in calm waters I knew the job is done.

It's hard to describe the relief. But it was soon followed by the most amazing tiredness. I have had a couple of months of nightwatches now and I guess every day you are a little more burned out.

As soon as the kit was on board that was me in bed. It was the end of my last night shift of this trip.

When I woke six hours later we were alongside at Rothera.