Cape Town - “Tractor Girl” Manon Ossevoort is visiting Cape Town after successfully completing a 5 000km trip from Russia to Antarctica on a tractor.
Ossevoort, a Dutch actress, said: “I wanted to make a real story. The idea of a girl driving a tractor to the South Pole seemed impossible. Growing up in the village none of the boys ever lent me a tractor to drive.”
The first tractor trip to the South Pole was made by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1958.
Ossevoort started her epic journey in 2005, taking four years to drive her tractor from Europe to Cape Town. Delays meant she missed the ship due to take her to the Antarctic, and she put the journey on ice for four years.
Then Massey Ferguson came through with sponsorship, and she set off from the Russian base of Novo for the pole, sharing the driving with a French mechanic.
Her Massey Ferguson 5610, a model widely used across Europe for agriculture, was specially prepared for the expedition, with an insulated cab, auxiliary fuel tanks, heavy duty batteries capable of withstanding the cold, and additional heaters, including one to stop the transmission from freezing.
It also had special tyres for traction on snow and ice.
After nine years of planning her tractor trip to the South Pole, Ossevoort said “it was well worth it”.
The biggest challenge was the weather. While the obvious high point of the expedition was arriving at the pole, Ossevoort said the lowest point was on the way there, when she encountered very soft snow.
“The trip was cold; driving the tractor on the snow was the most surreal thing. It was like driving in a frozen ocean – sometimes it had big waves and sometimes small waves like the soft snow.”
Throughout the expedition the tractor had to be running non-stop to prevent gas loss, so Ossevoort and her team rotated shifts in driving.
Ossevoort and her team return home today, by aircraft this time. Her tractor, still at Novo will be shipped to Beauvais in France, where it will be displayed in a museum alongside one of the tractors used by Hillary. – Additional reporting by Sapa
Cape Argus