Step inside Antarctica's frozen time capsules where history still lingers

Picture this. It's a February morning and a tour guide walks up to a simple wooden hut set a short distance back from a rocky beach, puts a key into the lock and opens the door to a time machine.

You step into this explorers' hut and are taken back more than 110 years to the "heroic age" of polar discovery; taken back by the smells, the objects, the dimly lit space and an atmosphere so evocative you feel all sorts of emotions rising within you.

There are their cups and plates and cans of food. Their scientific instruments. Books and magazines. Their sleeping bags laid out on bunks. A balaclava that looks like it was set aside just yesterday.

The feeling you have is unlike any you've ever experienced at a historic site - and you've been to a few - and it's all the more special because precious few people will ever have this privilege.

There's a vivid sense of human presence here. It's like the occupants are still out there dragging sledges in an icy hell and you're an intruder who'll be caught out on their return.

This enchanting place is Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans, deep in Antarctica's Ross Sea. Here you are among the southernmost people on Earth at a monument to one of mankind's great endeavours - the reaching of the South Pole.

"Opening the door of a hut, the smell is so evocative. You get that waft of blubber and grease and man smell. It transports you to another time in history, seeing the enamel cups and tins of stewed brawn and cabbage," historian and guide Gerard Baker says of the Scott hut.

"They're only a few generations away but they feel so foreign. It's like opening the door to another world. It's like time travel really."

In this part of the world they, the explorers, and we, the very fortunate tourists, talk in latitudes. At 77'38 South, Ross Island - permanently locked into the continent by a vast ice shelf - is dominated by the mighty volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror.

Its jutting headlands are scarce solid land amid all the ice, and so became home to a concentration of expedition staging points for Scott and Ernest Shackleton during the Heroic Age of Exploration (1898-1922).

Precious few people get to the Ross Sea each year, most taking the much shorter route to the Antarctic Peninsula via Chile. Far fewer still get to set foot in these huts (I'm told more people attempt to summit Mount Everest each year than visit this area), but it is a very strong motivation to take the less-travelled journey from New Zealand.

Sea conditions and, more importantly, ice can make landings by zodiac boats impossible. When you travel to this remote place of wonder, you have to accept you're playing a game of jeopardy.

On one single day, on an expedition cruise aboard Ponant's Le Soleal, we hit the jackpot, visiting two of the three huts in the area: Scott's Cape Evans hut and Shackleton's Nimrod expedition hut at nearby Cape Royds (the other is Scott's earlier Discovery hut).

The Cape Evans landing was simple on a clear, still morning. After first visiting the poignant cross standing on a hill above the hut, a memorial to three men who died as part of the Ross Sea Party supporting Shackleton's trans-continental Endurance quest, we step in through a low doorway and into a darkened place that scrambles the senses.

I take with me printouts of photos taken during the expedition and go searching for those places. Scott's writing desk, a set of five bunks, the table where the group celebrated Scott's birthday.

Later, we walk through the annex, seeing (and smelling) a pile of seal blubber cut for burning as fuel. We're shown some of the stranger elements in the stables, which housed the ill-fated ponies, who helped (as well as they could) depot-laying in the year before the South Pole expedition.

In one of the dark stalls there's even a pile of emperor penguin carcasses, also stacked for fuel. Another stall houses a bicycle. And in the last one, the bones of a dog, whose reason for being there is a mystery given that others were taken with the survivors of the Ross Sea Party, the last time the huts were used.

"You can almost hear the ponies whinnying, the dogs barking, the sounds of the blizzard in the dark. You imagine three-and-a-half months of complete darkness and the men wouldn't have even known when the sun was even due to come back," Baker says.

We're elated by the experience when we return to our ship. But knowing the fast-changing conditions might cruel us if we delay till the next day, our tired but committed expedition team decides to try for Shackleton's hut the same afternoon. This is happy news for the many passengers who come down on the side of Team Shackleton in the parlour game of comparison between him and his rival Scott.

But landing at Cape Royds is never simple, and some of the experienced guides on our trip have been down here time and time again and never had the good fortune to land.

It's not looking at all promising for us when our zodiac arrives at the cove and we see slush and chunks of ice building up around the landing point, where the expedition team has hacked three steps into the ice to get us ashore. With the outboard motor revving hard, we push through most of the jumble. But just when we get a metre from the ice edge and the outstretched hands of the landing crew, our progress is stopped. I start to think I'm going to fall inches short of one of the most difficult-to-reach historical sites in the world.

But with a wiggle of the outboard, a few hard revs and a puff of smoke, we close the distance. We scramble up the steps and, after a short hike, we are again stepping back in time.

Shackleton's hut is smaller than Scott's but the sense of atmosphere inside is just as strong. We have only a few precious minutes in there due to the strict capacity rules and the risk that we may not get back on board our ship (every landing is accompanied by huge tubs of emergency shelter and provisions to keep a ship-load of people supported for a night stuck on shore).

But even those precious minutes make the thousands of kilometres journey feel worthwhile.

"It takes a lot to get to the Ross Sea. A lot of time, a lot of saving up for many of us and a lot of patience, and there's a jeopardy you may have too much ice, too much wind," Baker explains.

"It's not guaranteed you'll get to the huts. So when you do get there, you're almost frantic to drink in as much as you can."

New Zealand Department of Conservation manager John Taylor, who was aboard our cruise as an official observer due to strict biosecurity requirements for the New Zealand sub-Antarctic islands, has a second life working for the Trust on the restoration. He regales us with stories of the extreme working conditions and the extraordinary discoveries, most notably in 2010 when a stash of whisky was found under Shackleton's hut. Samples taken from three bottles were used by the original maker, Mackinlay of Scotland, to reproduce the century-old formula. The limited-edition batches yielded a windfall dividend for the Trust, while a more common variety is on sale in bottleshops for Shackleton admirers like me. And a portion of the sales go to the work of the Trust, making you feel even better about that wee dram.

I catch Taylor when I walk out of Shackleton's hut, where he draws my attention to a vat that once held Speight's beer.

It's just one more little treat, one more little easter egg of fascination at a place that is unlike any you will likely ever see.

The big Kiwi has been in these huts countless times now, but is still in awe every time he sets foot inside.

"It doesn't cease to blow you away every time you walk in there," he says meaningfully.

"It's so, so cool."

The writer was a guest of Ponant