Features / From North Roe school to South Shetland Islands as travel dream realised three decades later
WHEN June Johnson was seven years old, she thumbed her way through an atlas at the North Roe Primary School and spotted the South Shetland Islands.
Intrigued by another group of islands named after Shetland, many thousands of miles away in the Antarctica, June told her teacher that she would visit there one day.
Showing that childhood dreams can come true, she has eventually made it there – some 29 years later.
“Maybe not all childhood dreams are silly childhood dreams,” she reflects as she speaks to Shetland News.
“These are things that might take a long time, but you’ll get there.”
June – who works in marketing and now lives in Lisbon – visited the South Shetland Islands on the tall ship Bark Europa, which lets people experience Antarctica.
Departing at the end of December from the southern end of Argentina, she spent around three weeks on board – realising a childhood dream in the process.
“I always enjoyed looking at atlases,” she explains, and “and I really clearly remember finding the south Shetland Islands in an atlas one day at school.
“I remember my brain just exploding at this concept that there were these mirror islands somewhere else in the world.
“I remember asking my teacher about it, and I just thought ‘I’ll go there’. I suppose it’s always been in the back of my mind my whole life. I wouldn’t say that it felt really real, but I just felt like it was a possibility.”
The dream inched a bit closer when June – who grew up in Lochend, near North Roe – took a last-minute trip to Chile a couple of years ago while remotely working.
“I booked it and just left the next day,” June says.
“I took my laptop and at the start of the year in January they are only three hours behind us, so I went and I worked six in the morning to two in the afternoon. I didn’t tell my employer I was there.”
After travelling further south she met people who had been to Antarctica, and the seeds started being sown for her sailing trip of a lifetime.
June had heard from others who had gone to the Antarctic, including someone who had experienced it from a hot tub on a cruise ship – but that was not for her.
Getting stuck in on a sail training vessel was “more aligned with my values”, she said.
While on board the passengers – around 40 of them, from ages 24 to 65 – had to do four-hour shifts around the clock to keep things in check.
Most of her peers were seasick but despite a bout of feeling unwell for a couple of hours, June said she was fine – perhaps it is the island upbringing.
“It was just a very surreal experience,” she recalls.
“It’s incredibly peaceful, and you don’t have WiFi, you have no access to the internet the whole time you’re on the trip, which was amazing.
“You could literally feel that your brain had been rewired by the time you got back on land.”
With passengers able to go on guided walks, June was able to immerse herself further into the experience – seeing animals such as penguins and seals, for example, amid the dramatic landscapes.
When she reached the South Shetland Islands, June was “very happy and content”.
“I think it was realising that you can promise yourself something when you’re seven years old, and it can happen.”
She also says that some of the rugged parts of Deception Island reminded her of the Shetland she calls home.
“It was really nice to be in this place that looks so much like home, while you are so far away from home,” June says.
“It probably gave me a sense of peace, that this thing I’d hoped for as a kind of quiet, innocent child with not much idea of the world, I made it there in the way that was right for me – on a sailing boat, not on a cruise ship. It feels still a bit surreal to think that it did happen.”
She also says there is a lesson from her experience for adults too – to pursue your dreams, otherwise you might regret it.
June’s love of travelling can be traced back to her childhood, when she was often heading abroad.
There was one time too when she was 17, flying out to family in Canada on her own, which she said was “exhilarating” – and drew her towards solo travelling.
“I realised at a very young age that if I waited for somebody to be by my side to all those things, I was going to miss out on a lot of things,” June says.
Reflecting on her journey from an atlas in the North Roe school to stepping foot in the Shetland South Islands, she added: “It’s almost more important I think when you’re a child, to realise you can make whatever you want to happen, happen.
“Nothing is really stopping you, if you just decide that’s what you want. It might take 29 years, but I got there in the end.”
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