London, Dec. 30: On the South Pole, the local time was 2309 on December 29, in London it was 0209GMT and in Delhi, Reena Kaushal Dharmshatu’s hometown, it was 0739 in the morning and already very noisy.

The all-women Commonwealth expedition got to the South Pole after skiing 900km, often uphill, and sometimes tiptoeing around treacherous crevasses hundreds of metres deep.

On her long journey through Antarctica’s icy wilderness, Reena had been iPod-less and alone with her thoughts and did not feel shy in admitting she had often felt close to God.

But she told The Telegraph her initial reflections on approaching the South Pole were ones she would soon take all over India as she addressed impressionable schoolchildren.

“For me the real expedition is just beginning,” she said. It would be about protecting the environment and at one level, be pretty basic when she dealt with the question of cleanliness and what many Indians did or had to do by railway tracks, for example.

The girls, revealed Reena, had left nothing behind in Antarctica — and she meant nothing. “All the human waste has been bagged and brought back,” said Reena, who used common slang for human waste. “Over nearly 40 days, that has been quite a lot.”

Since the girls had forgotten to take a thermometer, they could only guess at how cold it was but it was “very, very, very cold”.

As it was summer in the Antarctica, it was daylight 24 hours. The landscape was undulating white in a 360-degree sweep.

Reena found it difficult to raise corporate sponsorship in India even though the expedition is marking 60 years of the Commonwealth, which now has an Indian secretary-general (Kamalesh Sharma).

Reena Kaushal

An Internet company, Kaspersky, which makes software protection, stepped in and agreed to fund the entire expedition.

“Hello, this is Felicity reporting that at 2309 on the 29th of December; the Kaspersky Labs Commonwealth Antarctica Expedition arrived at the Geographic South Pole,” British team leader Felicity Aston said, using her satellite phone.

“We’re all incredibly happy and we’re standing here, seven women at the bottom of the planet with the biggest smiles on our faces right now,” she added.

She described her location: “We’re all standing around the mirrorball that sits at the South Pole and surrounded by the flags of all the Antarctic Treaty Nations with the South Pole base in the background.”

She added: “I’m incredibly proud of the team and I think the feeling that we’re all feeling right now is that if we can do this, you can do anything that you like to and that’s the message that we really want to send to everyone.”

Felicity went through the team members “who have remained friends” despite sleeping in two tents since they began skiing on November 22.

She said: “Standing next to me is Era Al-Sufri, the first Bruneian ever to ski to the South Pole. Next to her is Stephanie Solomonides, the first Cypriot ever to ski to the South Pole. Next to her is Reena Kaushal Dharmshaktu, the first Indian woman to ski all the way to the South Pole. Next to her is Sophia Pang, the first woman from Singapore to ski to the South Pole. Next to her is Kylie Wakelin, the first woman from New Zealand to ski to the South Pole. Next to her is Helen Turton (reserve member from the UK) who has fulfilled a long-held ambition to ski to the South Pole and I’ve also fulfilled an ambition to take a team of inspirational women all the way to the South Pole.”