2014/02 Falklands trip - Stanley |
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Tuesday February 4th
Some of these paragraphs and pictures are only available via the family's userids and passwords. Family references on this public page have been de-personalized. |
It was a nice morning. And F was taking us into Stanley for the day. She had a list of errands to run and we had to pay for our flights over the next week. Back in November, we’d asked her to organize an itinerary for us so that we could see the best of the Falklands’ wildlife. We were a bit surprised to get back a list that had us hopping around from island to island, but that’s where the wildlife is. Rats and cats and dogs have taken their toll on the two big islands, whereas the smaller ones were either free of them or they’ve since been removed. On some of the islands even the livestock has been removed to give the native vegetation a chance.
It was a long drive into Stanley. The Falklands have two speed limits, 40 mph and 25, and with good reason; the gravel roads are good but they follow the rolling contours. Beyond Mount Pleasant, where we’d landed, the road is blacktopped to Stanley. It’s tough to remember that all this is new; before the war Mount Pleasant didn’t exist and there were no roads at all outside of Stanley. The trip from Darwin would have taken days on a four wheel drive track. It’s difficult country with its bogs and stone-runs, areas where freeze-thaw cycles have eroded a mountain into a pile of jagged rocks.
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Stanley countryside |
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Stanley’s also changed, about three times its size before the war. F would point to streets and businesses that used to be common land, with livestock. She was annoyed to find out that there was a cruise ship in town. The visitors’ money is good for the town, but bringing thousands of them into a town Stanley’s size causes a whole lot of problems. Buses take some out to see the penguin colonies around town but there aren’t enough. Townspeople often take a day off from work and drive the tourists in their vehicles to visit sights or penguins; most don’t realize they are in for hours of 4wd bouncing. F said we’d leave our visit to the penguins at nearby Gypsy Point for later when the visitors had left.
We went to the Falkland Islands Government Air Services office to pay for our flights. There is no fixed schedule. Every day, FIGAS looks to see who needs to go where and makes up the
schedule, giving passengers a radio message in the evening to tell them when to show up at their local airfield. There’s a capped rate for the locals but tourists pay more. Because of our family connection we got the capped rate, and even better, the capped pensioner rate, about a third of what we’d expected. The only downside was that we had the 14 Kg luggage limitation instead of the tourist’s 20 Kg. “Wear your heavy clothes and boots”, was F ’s advice.
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Stanley town (7.04) |
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The Falklands are a British Overseas Territory with an elected legislature and a Governor representing the Queen; we saw him jogging along the street. F gave us a tour of Stanley, interspersed with errands. Like many remote places it has its world signpost; the red spot at the top is a maple leaf, but Sandie didn’t put it there!
The harbour is dotted with hulks, mostly ships too badly damaged after rounding Cape Horn to continue their voyages. Some of these had been used for storage, sometimes for decades, until they fell apart. The Lady Elizabeth here is typical. The SS Great Britain was one of them for many years; it was barged back to England in the seventies and is now restored and on display in Bristol. There are many more wrecks scattered around the islands.
At the supermarket there were many familiar British brands, not surprisingly as almost everything has to be shipped in. Fresh foods were expensive; I remember a $15 pineapple and $5 cucumber. F said most goods were past their “best” date by the time they arrived.
We went to the outdoor whalebone exhibit, all put together by one of the locals to show the evils of whaling. He has a display of skeletons and harpoons and a harpoon gun, in use until the 1960s. He also has a live reindeer, descendent of a herd brought to the island of South Georgia by Norwegian whalers as a food source. Now
that they’re no longer being hunted they’ve overrun much of the island and are to be culled this year.
Just about all the pre-war buildings in Stanley are odd or historic. We visited the pensioner’s cottage, an interesting piece of history, on Pioneer Row. It was one of a dozen or so built back around 1850 for some of the first immigrants, Chelsea (military) pensioners and their families. These pensioners were about forty years old, still young enough to survive a transplant into a tough environment. The only heating was with peat fires. Over-enthusiastic peat cutting caused peat slides which destroyed parts of the town and killed some people.
The museum was great, an amazing amount of history squeezed into Britannia House, all the way from wildlife displays to ship models, uniforms, and relics of various wars. The Falklands used to have a large predator, the warrah, a kind of wolf that probably found its way from South America long before humans arrived.
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Surf Beach (6.52) |
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We eventually left to go see some penguins. We’d already been to rugged Surf Beach that morning and found the beach buried knee deep in foam, a sign of wild weather somewhere. The birds are steamer ducks.
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This time we were going to Gypsy Cove, home to a small colony of Magellanic (jackass) penguins. Down on the sand was a familiar-looking group, the same kind of penguins we’d seen in Chile, but on the edge was a stranger, towering over the rest. This was a king penguin, come ashore to molt. Presumably, there’s some advantage to waiting out the molt in the company of other penguins, but this one seemed to realize that it was an outsider and it hovered on the edge of the group.
We didn’t get any closer to the penguins as there were these signs that told us the mines had been cleared but warned that some others could be washed ashore by currents.
We were enjoying the penguins and the flowers and birds, mostly new to us. The birds are a meadowlark, a night heron, familiar to Minnesotans, and a slight fuzzy red-backed hawk. Then these Peales dolphins showed up and gave us a show.
Up on the hill we found this view across the harbour to Stanley, also this WW II naval gun for anyone wanting to take pot shots at cruise ships.
Then it was a quick zoom around Stanley to finish the errands. Their 4WD runs on diesel which sells for close to American prices, whereas petrol is at the UK price, twice that 
in the USA.
F then had a two hour drive back to Darwin, followed by cooking us an Antarctic toothfish, also known to fishmongers as a Chilean sea-bass. I’m not usually a fan of fish 
but this was excellent. Then we set about whittling down the luggage, with much use of the suitcase scale Christina gave us, packing for cold, wet, and windy weather, a good choice as it turned out.
We had to listen to the radio to hear the announcement of the next day’s flights giving the itinerary and passenger names. The Hancocks would be on the day’s second flight and would be going from Darwin via two other islands on our way to Pebble Island. The radio followed this with the weather forecast, including the “sheep chill” factor, important if you were planning a shearing.