Hello there to the Students & Teachers of Ms Smith, Ms Adamo, Ms O'Reilly Class, and all Students and Teachers of Ipswich!!!!

My name is Tim Page, and I am writing to you from a ship in the Southern Ocean on the way to Antarctica.   I live in Australia, a country famous for being very hot, so it may take some adjustment to the cold.  I know you are already used to cold!!  I have been in Massachussetts many times, and oh boy was it freezing there too!  I live in a northern state called Queensland, which is a very hot place, because down here in the Southern Hemisphere it gets hotter the further you go north and colder the further you go south!!

You may ask just how I came to be writing to you.  Well a few months ago I went whale watching to see Humpback Whales.  These are the same species of whale that you can see off of Massachussetts in the summer.  While on the ship I met your teacher-librarian Ms Kelly.  She is also very interested in the sea and she told me her daughter had also been to the Antarctic, so when I heard I was going to Antarctica, I thought it would be fun to keep in contact by email.

Let me tell you about myself.  I was born in England, but I grew up in the United States and went to school near New York City in a place called Rye, New York.  I now live in Australia, which is a beautiful and strange country, with many very unusual animals.  Animals are what I am most interested in, and I try to help with zoological projects whenever I can.  I have helped study whales, kangaroos, wallabies (like small kangaroos), birds and koalas.

When I got the chance to go to Antarctica I jumped at it!  I am helping with a survey of Seals that live on the ice.  I went down to Hobart, which is the capital of the southern island state of Tasmania.  Here we were trained in how to do a survey and about safety on the ship.

Yesterday we left Hobart on a big ship called the "Aurora Australis" (which means Southern Lights, similar to your Northern Lights you can get in the sky in the winter).  It is an icebreaker, which means that when we get to where the sea is frozen, we can smash through it and keep on going!

When we get to the edge of the ice, we will start our survey, which we will do from the bridge of the ship and from helicopters flying over the ice.  I will explain why we are doing the survey in the next email.

I hope this was interesting.  I will try to send an email every few days, letting you know what is happening down here.  Thank you for your photos and Charlie Chowder the clam.  I will try to photograph him in some nice Antarctic scenes and then send you some pictures when I get back.

You can find out where we are today by looking on the internet on my website, which is : http://www.oocities.org/RainForest/Canopy/2681/     and having a look at "Antarctic Stuff".

You can email me with any questions you like and I will try to find out the answers.  If I don't know, there is a ship full of people here who probably will!

Bye for now

Tim Page