Encounters at the End of the World Page #5

It's one small silver and two elongated ones

I don't know what it is

We have to do the DNA, too

We don't know

HERZOG:
Is this a great moment?

- Yeah, yeah, this is

- Yeah, any time you increase

the known diversity of these types

of creatures, it's pretty exciting

Yeah That is very special

(BOWSER PLAYING GUITAR)

Apologies to rock musicians everywhere

(LAUGHING)

HERZOG Once the importance

of the discovery has sunk in,

Sam Bowser and his group plan to celebrate

the event in their own way

(GUITARS PLAYING)

They are rehearsing for

a late-night outdoor concert

(PLAYING ROCK MUSIC)

After the helicopter had dropped us off

back at McMurdo,

nobody was around The sundial showed

that it was close to 100 am

It did not feel like night,

so we had a look around

This unobtrusive building

had raised my curiosity for quite a while

Here amongst unripe tomatoes,

we ran into this young man

How did he end up in this place?

Oh, yeah, well, you know, I like to say,

if you take everybody who's not tied down,

they all sort of

fall down to the bottom of the planet, so,

you know, I haven't been

That's how we got here, you know

We're all at loose ends

and here we are together

I remember

when I first got down here I sort of

enjoyed the sensation of recognizing people

with my tribal markings

You know, I was like,

"Hey, these are my people"

PhDs washing dishes and, you know,

linguists on a continent with no languages

and that sort of thing, yeah It's great

Yeah, specifically I was in

a graduate program, and we had lined up

to do some work with

one of the people who was

identified as a native speaker

and a competent native speaker of

one of the languages

of the Winnebago people, the Ho-Chunk,

I think is how they pronounced it, and

HERZOG To make a complicated story short,

he ran into New Age ideologues who made

insipid claims about black and white magic

embedded in the grammar of this language

Some of the oral tradition

that had been passed along

Hence, in this stupid trend of academia,

it would be better to let the language die

than preserve it

you know, I could document a language

He had to destroy his entire PhD research

So just imagine, you know, 90

of languages will be extinct

probably in my lifetime

It's a catastrophic impact

to an ecosystem to talk

about that kind of extinction

Culturally, we're talking

about the same thing I mean,

you know, what if you lost all of

Russian literature, or something like that,

or Russian, you know? If you took all of the

Slavic languages and just they went

away, you know, and no more Tolstoy

It occurred to me that in the time

we spent with him in the greenhouse,

possibly three or four languages had died

In our efforts to preserve

endangered species,

we seem to overlook something

equally important

To me,

it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization

where tree huggers and whale huggers

in their weirdness are acceptable,

while no one embraces

the last speakers of a language

McMurdo is full of characters

like our linguist

The bleak Motel 6-drabness of

the corridors is misleading

Behind every door there is someone

with a special story to tell

JO YCE Back in the '80s, I took a garbage

truck across Africa from London to Nairobi

That was a trip Four months in

a garbage truck It was horrible

On numerous occasions we came pretty

close to, I don't know about dying,

but pretty close

to being in some straits where

we didn't know if we were gonna get back

out of it, you know

We got taken over by the military in Uganda,

and we were kidnapped, basically

Truck was turned around

and we were going back to Entebbe

We got out of that one

We were trying to wait for

this ferry in Wadi Halfa,

the one that blew up and 800 people died

Well, we didn't get on that one

We took off across a desert,

and we got stuck We got stuck for five days

of absolute agony, of clawing

this truck with We were using plates,

just the dinner plates that we were using

for dinner, clawing at the tires

We had no water

He had used all the water tanks for gasoline,

so basically we had a cup of water a day

or two cups

HERZOG Her story goes on forever

She dealt with a bout of malaria,

with a herd of angry elephants pursuing her

through tsetse fly-invested swamps

Got caught in a civil war,

spent a night in a bombed-out airport,

with rebels fighting and shooting

in a barroom brawl,

and was finally rescued

by drunk Russian pilots,

slaloming around crater holes

in the runway

This is how you get yourself

to any place in Antarctica

HERZOG At the so-called Freak Train event

at one of McMurdo's bars,

Karen is, not surprisingly,

one of the most popular performers

This is her famous

"Travel as hand luggage" act

WOMAN:
Yeah, take her home

(ALL CHEERING)

- Thought of another one

- Yeah

I traveled from Ecuador to Lima, Peru

in a sewer pipe

(LAUGHS) Forgot to mention that

I hitchhiked once from Denver to Bolivia

and back up,

and we got a ride from a truck in

It was a flatbed truck with three huge sewer

pipes on the back, so I spent It was days

in the back of this truck, in a sewer pipe,

watching the world go by just like that

That's all you could see

HERZOG Travel for those who have been

deprived of freedom means even more

These are the ones you'll find in Antarctica

Libor Zicha works as a utility mechanic

He lived like a prisoner

behind the Iron Curtain

HERZOG:
You escaped

And how big a drama was that?

Oh, it was, wasn't a drama, but

The tragic events surrounding his escape

haunt him to this day

If we can

- You do not have to talk about it

- Okay Thank you

For me, the best description of

hunger is a description of bread

A poet said that once, I think,

and for me the best description of freedom

is what you have in front of you

You are traveling a lot

- That's right, yeah

- Show us

That's my freedom,

and I will be glad to show you

HERZOG He keeps a rucksack packed

and ready to go at all times

Inside is everything he needs

to set out in a moment's notice

a sleeping bag, a tent, clothes,

cooking utensils

How much weight is this all?

It's I usually don't go over 20 kilos

That's my limit,

and it's a limit also for airlines

Some of the contents of his backpack

are quite surprising

That's about the size of the raft

- How quickly can you leave?

- Oh, I am always ready

My bag is always prepared,

and I am always ready for adventure

and exploring new horizons

HERZOG Back in the days of Amundsen,

Scott and Shackleton,

scientific exploration of Antarctica began,

and this opening of the unknown continent

is their great achievement

But one thing about the early explorers

does not feel right

The obsession to be the first one

to set his foot on the South Pole

It was for personal fame

and the glory of the British Empire

This is Shackleton's original hut,

preserved unchanged for 100 years

But, in a way, from the South Pole onwards

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