How a watch took me on a new adventure

Sometimes, just like that, dreams come true. Usually, you have to work for them, and usually really hard, even if, like me, you start with an unfair head start from that rock-solid launching pad called white male western middle class privilege. But sometimes, things just happen. And so it is that I find myself the winner of a competition, along with three others from around the world. One is Malaysian, and he’ll be my room-mate on the adventure I was lucky enough to win. The other two are a mystery for now. It’s been arranged by a Japanese promoter, and we’ll have the opportunity to meet and interact with an American named Eric Larsen. He’s an explorer specializing in polar regions. One of those polar regions has been a dream destination for me for much of this century.

And now I’m going.

I was about 10 when I was first given a wristwatch by my parents. That was back in the days before quartz and digital watches were an affordable item – they were still pretty new technology. My watch was old-school: handwound with a red sweep hand and a little date window. It had luminous dots around the hours and luminous lines on the hands and I would lie in my bed under my blanket and look at the glowing face until I fell asleep. To me, it was the most amazing thing I had ever owned, and I looked after it carefully (we weren’t poor, but neither were we wealthy, and even at that age I recognised that this gift had required some sacrifice). Once, at a scout camp, I was so concerned to preserve it that I resisted giving it to some older scouts I didn’t know. They were helping a sheep deliver a lamb and needed a way to time…the contractions? Only when they applied a good dose of guilt did I relent. “Well, okay then, if you want the lamb to die…”.

Later, like almost every kid in high school in the mid-80s, I had a Casio digital watch (long since gone to me, though I recently got a G-Shock for the nostalgia kick). At around 4 pm, everyone’s alarms would start beeping, like R2-D2 finally losing his marbles. School’s out, man, school’s out. But I never lost my love of that first watch and mechanical watches in general.

Other watches entered my collection over time, especially as focusing hard on my education eventually translated into reasonably-paid jobs. Before watch collecting became such an expensive thing during the last ten years, pricing me out, I scored a couple of good pieces. One was the beautiful 1970s Tissot Navigator I found in Hong Kong and also still have. I used it on my mission to compare the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train to the plane.

But ten years after our wedding and honeymoon in Sapa – where I’d worn that original childhood watch – Yon decided to give me a watch for our anniversary (I gave her a ring which we designed together). I went for the then-new Citizen Altichron, a wonder of titanium and solar-power which told the time, pointed north, and gave your altitude all with a traditional hands-and-dial display. (That’s right, “hands-and-dial”, not “analogue” – because a watch that’s not digital is not ipso facto analogue. It’s just a traditional watch).

By that stage in my enjoyment of watches I was less fussed about mechanical vs quartz. What I cared about was my own connection to it. I liked the old school “hands-and-dial” approach but wasn’t as focused about what was inside. The eco-drive technology in Citizens is really cool – the newer ones can hold a charge for months, so they basically never stop and never need a new battery.

The Altichron was awesome and I quickly started looking around for high mountains to carry it up. By 2014 we were expecting our first child, and Yon was busy wrapping up her professional yoga therapy training in Chennai, India. I flew over to India to meet her afterwards and we travelled to Kashmir. After years of prioritizing travel at the expense of pretty much anything else (no mortgage, no car, no giant TV, no alcohol and fine-dining weekend benders), this was going to be our last trip together as a pair before we became a trio. In Kashmir, I climbed the 6,137 meter mountain called Stok Kangri. It was an incredible experience – though it didn’t require technical mountaineering skills it certainly was not an easy hike – and one I won’t ever forget. But one photo I took on that trip has a key role in the rest of this story.

It turns out 2019 was the 30th anniversary of Citizen’s Pro-Master line of watches. These were outdoor-oriented watches, including diving watches with depth meters, climbing watches with altitude indicators, and pilot’s watches which displayed various timezones and had stopwatches, countdown timers and alarms. They were, and still are, pretty cool. My Altichron is one of the Pro-Master series.

Somewhere, I saw a contest to celebrate this anniversary. It was easy – post a pic of your Pro-Master on Instagram with a few hashtags. I posted the Stok Kangri wrist-shot – after first downloading the app and creating an account – and added the hashtags (#savetheBEYOND was the key one).

I put it out of my mind and moved on with the busy multiple lives of work and parenthood. Later it popped back into my consciousness briefly and I looked on the hashtag on Instagram. There were a lot of pictures of “sexy male model” types simpering in Blue Steel while wearing a Pro-Master in a leather car interior, or a trendy urban streetscape. Mine was about the only “action wrist-shot”. If this is about anything other than random chance, I thought, I’ve got a shot at winning.

Again, it fell from my mind. Then, one morning, lying in the kid’s bedroom after a long night of her restlessness, I checked my phone. “Open Quickly! You’ve Won!”.

Usually e-mails like that go straight to spam where they belong, but this was in my in-box. Half asleep, I clicked on it.

I had indeed won. And as it would turn out after some cautious e-mailing back and forth, I’d won a trip to Antarctica.

I’ve wanted to go there for the longest time. In 2009 I narrowly missed winning another competition – this time a proper photography competition. I came third in that amidst a little controversy over whether I shouldn’t have come first. But I didn’t. Then we had a kid and only very recently did I let the idea of Antarctica float once more into the forward part of my consciousness.

In those years since missing out on the competition, I’d pushed it down so far and so hard that now that I’m going, it’s been tough to really accept and believe that I have had this fantastic luck. Until the last minute, I had scarcely rustled up any excitement at all.

But now after years of quietly dreaming and wondering, I’m going. All, one might say, thanks to a little glowing wristwatch I had when I was ten. I think back to that shy little kid, hunkered under his blanket, looking at that red sweep hand, already making plans to see the world, and I still recognize him. He’s all I’ve ever really been.

As this is posted, I’m at Reagan in DC boarding my flight to Miami, Buenos Aires and Ushuaia at the bottom of the western hemisphere. Well, not quite the bottom. Because if I survive the seasickness on the Drake Passage – the roughest seas on Earth – I’ll finally set foot in about a week on that most mysterious southern continent, Antarctica.