The world’s most remote post office is open for business

In a quaint rendition of reality, summer jobs mean working as a camp counselor or scooping ice cream. But four women from the UK are in for something more far-flung: This southern hemisphere summer, they’ll be working at the world’s most remote post office.

Clare Ballantyne, Natalie Corbett, Lucy Bruzzone, and Mairi Hilton’s five-month posting will take them to the post office, museum, gift shop, and research station of Port Lockroy on Goudier Island by the Antarctic Peninsula.

Each woman has been hired to take a specific role at Port Lockroy, which is a popular tourist destination with around 18,000 guests each year. Corbett, who has a background in retail, will run the museum gift shop. Hilton, a conservation biologist, was chosen to monitor the colony of around 1,500 gentoo penguins that share the tiny, mostly snow-covered island with the base. The work of handling the roughly 80,000 postcards and letters the island’s visitors send each year—postage is USD$1, no matter where it’s headed—will fall to Ballantyne, the postmaster. Bruzzone will run the base, coordinate with visiting ships, and manage the team.

“Who wouldn’t want to spend five months working on an island filled with penguins in one of the most remote places on the planet?” Corbett told BBC news. The non-profit that runs the base, the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, got over 6,000 applications for the four jobs.

The once-in-a-lifetime summer job does lack some creature comforts—Corbett and the others won’t have any running water (that means no flush toilets) and no wifi. They’ll be limited to ten minutes of phone calls each week, and their communication with faraway friends and family will be mostly confined to snail mail.

Port Lockroy’s history is as old as that of modern Antarctic exploration, and much of Britain’s legacy on the continent is on display at the “living museum.” First established as a whaling destination at the beginning of the 20th century, then a British military outpost during WW2 before transitioning to a scientific research base, Port Lockroy was reopened as a historical site in 1996. This year’s team is the first to staff the facility since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This will be my first time in Antarctica and I’m very excited to set eyes on the white continent. I have no idea what to expect when we get there,” Hilton says. “Will we have to dig our way through the snow to the post office?”