Day 22- The Falkland Islands

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

Friday night when we went to bed headed for The Falkland Islands, we had entered bigger seas and we could feel the ocean swells as we drifted off to sleep.  It was a long night though - as our fog horn blew every 20 minutes  for what seemed the entire night - but I never looked at the clock.  I kept thinking it was time to get up as I had an early tour.  We finally decided at 6:15 a.m. to get out of bed as we expected to make land by 7:30.  

I am not sure why I hadn't really understood how beautiful these islands would be, but in spite of the rugged, barren nature, they are truly captivating.  The day was a stunning one.  

I think we all thought we were suddenly going to freeze to death, or be soaking wet from rain, so most passengers were overdressed - and I was one of them.  Bruce the cruise director announced as we dropped anchor, that the outlook was 70F - What? as I stood there in the atrium wearing long underwear, my cross country ski wear, AND clutching my winter coat, mitts and hat!  But we had been told, like New Zealand, we could experience all four seasons in a day, and that last year they had mud, rain, and howling winds, so we were prepared.

This is a tender port, and for the 3rd time this year there were two cruise ships in port - ours and the Star Princess.  The latter is a much larger ship than ours, but given the population of the island is only 2000 people, you can only imagine what happens when double that population disembarks for the day! - First of all there is only one small pier, secondly, every available driving person is pressed into service for the various tours, and  the availability of these limited tours is divided between the two ships.  

Barry and I had elected to go on two separate tours due to his spinal surgery.  He went to Bluff Cove to see Magellan Penguins - and I went to Volunteer Point to see King Penguins and Magellans.

The only city of these Islands is Port Stanley - and we couldn't see it till we were approaching by tender.  Situated on the East Island, it is in a natural small cove harbour.  Picture the city (really just a town) as the body of a crab, and the legs and pincers forming the  sheltered cove.  Our ship was anchored outside in another larger harbour.  The tender took about 20 minutes and upon approach, I felt as if I was home in Newfoundland, Canada, except for the obviously British style buildings.  The homes are simple, neat, white, with red or green roofs.  By now, at 8:15 a.m.,  the sun was out, and it promised to be a gorgeous day.  

Volunteer Point

I was met by John, a British expatriate who had come to the island on a 6 month contract in 1991.  We had been divided up into 4x4's with 4 of us in each.  I spent the day, with 3 new people - Chuck and Marilyn from San Francisco Bay, and John, from Sydney - and we had a great time together and had the biggest adventure of all!  We were told it would take us 2 hours to get out to Volunteer Point and that the last stretch would be true off roading over rough terrain - Ok we were ready! (or so we thought).

The "paved" roads, were rough enough, then they turned to gravel, which explained why the windshield of the vehicle was completely cracked. As we soon learned this is one rocky land.  Our driver John, is a plumber who was pinch hitting for the day, and said he hadn't been out to the point for a while... and we were the lead car by quite a bit.  Ok a small bit of concern was expressed with raised eyebrows.  About 45 minutes into the trip, on a road where the gravel was small rock size, we had a sudden loud bang, from the left rear of the vehicle - which I knew was the tire. Sure enough, when John brought us to a stop, we all hopped out and saw the most incredible sight - our tire was completely shredded cleanly all around.  He kept saying, I can't believe it, this is a brand new tire.   He hustled out and started to try to change the tire - but he didn't have a carjack.  Other 4x4's were whizzing by - obviously not part of his company - but it surprised us that they didn't stop as we were truly in desolate country.  Finally someone stopped, with a car jack, and within 10 minutes they had the tire changed. The other cars had left, along with the car jack.   There was only one problem... we could see that the probable cause of the shredded tire was a metal mudguard that was bent and scrapping the tire - and would soon shred the spare tire, and we didn't have another one.  John mangled it some more, and told us that we were only 2 miles from the farm - and rallying point.  So on we plodded alone - no one in our car too happy about our safety at this point.   In another 20 minutes we crossed into the farm which is the private sheep ranch on which Volunteer Point is situated.  The first buildings we had seen in an hour were here.  You have to picture that this is a treeless island - covered by peat, rocks and and low scrub grass, and all that was visible of human habitation was dozens of 4x4s convoying up hill and down dale across the landscape.  We found our convoy and hopped out.  

The wind was tremendous here and we all felt like we were going to be blown away, and we quickly put on our warmer coats - hair flying wildly in all directions.   Two of us went to our group person and said we wanted to make sure someone fixed the metal hanging down, and that we wanted to travel in a convoy from here on.  Well this is the wild south - and 3 of the local guys, with tire irons in hand wrested that metal mudguard right off the car for good, and we were off over the rough part of the journey.  Thank goodness it was not raining or we would have been up to the window ledges in mud.  

Someone told me we were at the half way point - and it was only 10 km - but this part took another 1.5 hours!  No road baby - just over the land - on some tracks sometimes -- down steep banks that looked like we would drive into the sea, then, sharply turned to the beach - and back up another steep embankment.  I, the whole time, was thankful that Barry was not on this trip - although I wished I had a titanium plate in my spine for the trip.  The landscape was vast large sweeps of open land, with distant bowls of hills, that looked like rivers of gravel spilling from them ( that gravel was really large boulders), and valleys leading to the many inlets of the seas.  We had learned about these old volcanic flow formations in a lecture... the rock is turned on its side completely. 

The Falkland Islands have a lot of inlets, and therefore with very few roads, to get from point A to B, you either go overland or by water and you certainly cannot go as the crow flies.  I have brought Mandlebrot's books on fractals on my Kindle, and think this island is a perfect example of fractals. I will let you know if I am correct, when I read it.  John told us that the it rarely snows here, and the weather is pretty temperate year round - but what they have to contend with is wind.  By the way, all the locals had bare arms, some shorts, and all of us had winter clothes on.  They seem pretty hardy here.  They import almost everything except mutton - lots of sheep and cattle here -  the big ranches are run by a handful of people each.  No fishing trawlers go out to get the daily catch, and so unbelievably the local famous fish and chip restaurant imports its fish from the UK! Lots of squid here, so calimari is a big menu item. When it snows they don't plow the roads, unless there is a big plane coming in. Prices are, as you can imagine, very high for everything, and when they get visitors, like today, it is all hands on deck to take our money - as it should be.  Also given there are no trees they burn the peat for fuel.  We also were warned and saw the fenced off and well marked buried land minds from the 1982 Falkland War between Argentina and the UK which were planted in last desperate measure by  Argentina - shame on them a this goes on for generations.  We remarked it was a good thing we hadn't absentmindedly stepped back into one while the tire was being changed, as we weren't even thinking of this still being a war zone. Luckily the penguins are two light to set them off. 

Finally there was a height of land ahead, with a line of cars riding on "flatter" ground and the open sea in the foreground and suddenly we were at Volunteer Point - 12:00 p.m. - and we are told we have till 1:30.

Volunteer Point  has the largest King Penguin colony outside of Antarctica, with 1000 birds. They are the second largest penguin, with distinct, grey, black and orange markings.  Very handsome indeed.  There is also a large colony of Magellans - hard for me to measure by eye, but seemed even bigger in size - and there is an obvious advantage to this site as the magnificent sand beach forms small dunes with burrows that are hardened and in which the chicks can hide and get away from predators and the weather. 

I had to take in the scene to get oriented as it was a bit of a circus - I had thought my private tour would offer a small exclusive group - Ha Ha - way more humans than penguins  literally sweeping in waves over the site.  There were marshalls to keep us all in our respective territories, and we had been told - no flash on the cameras, you cannot approach a penguin, but they can approach you,  and no feeding.   I grabbed a bag lunch and headed for the Kings, and my friends Lynn and Erika who was taking pictures on my behalf as Barry had our camera.  I miraculously found them.

The penguins seem unconcerned with humans - and they are quite independent little beings, although the Kings are not so little.  It's like "I think I will go down to the beach, through all these humans, and go for a swim" .. and off he goes.  We also saw lots of weird contortions by a few weird humans trying to entice the penguins to touch them.  Someone told me that one of the Princess passengers had a 6 month old baby who was crawling in the poop amongst the penguins - honestly no brains there. 

We were lucky enough to see one male with an egg and Erika got some great shots of him repositioning it.  The Megellans are moulting so there was lots of fluff around and lots and lots of penguin poop.    One little side note we learned about Emperor Penguins who we will not see - they are the ones in March of the Penguins - those males stand for 90 days or more in the worst conditions on earth keeping their eggs warm, then once they hatch they march back to sea to feed which is over 100 miles.  But if the last days were not bad enough, they then spend 30 days moulting and the biologist said they feel like we do when we have the worst flu ever.   Please never send me back as am Emperor male penguin.   

Before we left Rowan thought I might want to take her King Penguin Sunset to Antarctica with us to visit his pals.  Rowan I took some pictures for you that you can show Sunset as that is as close as he might get. 

There was a very interesting vegetation on the beach - a large sea succulent with orange flowers.. probably holds the sand from erosion.

I was back in time to catch the 4:30 tender.  Over to Barry for a description of Bluff Cove and Stanley. 

Bluff Cove

After we tendered to Port Stanley I waved goodbye to Jane and joined a group from our ship who had tickets to the Bluff Cove Penguin Reserve.

Jane's trip description warned that people with back problems should not go to the much farther Volunteer Point  reserve because of the rough terrain.  Because there was no mention of such a hazard going to see penguins at the Bluff Cove site I thought that if I wanted to see penguins that was the excursion for me.  We started out in 10 person vans and soon were on a long flat gravel road into the desolate island.  After a while we stopped at a roadside depot to transfer to 4 wheel drive Land Rovers, each carrying 4 persons.  

Because I am tall I took the left front seat, the vehicle being a right hand drive.  Almost immediately we went off road across open terrain of bottomless peat, which was up and down like a giant washboard.  We really did need the 4 wheel drive almost all the time as we were in rut after rut up and down.  I had to keep my neck very tight because of the whiplash effect of the rapid undulations.  This went on for several miles until we reached the beach where we saw lots of penguins, among them KING Penguins which Jane had gone so far to see.  I saw lots of those birds in their formal dress.  This little fellow came right over to see me and seemed quite at ease.

Here are some of the Kings I saw going about their business.

I think that chap with his head way down low had an egg underneath him.

During this whole scene the wind was blowing about 50 mph so I was glad to find their tea room for a wee spot with the best home cooked lemon loaf which Hattie (the owner's wife) had baked.  Then we re-assembled to our Land Rovers and returned across the peat bog the several miles to the main road to Port Stanley.

Port Stanley 

I had time to walk around the small town and see some of the sights.

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The church picture above shows the sculpture made of the jaws of two Blue Whales, from the old whaling days. 

Sail Away

Everyone felt windblown, but elated with such a bracing day, after the heat of SA.. and the sun stayed with us for the sail away.  They have the plaid blankets out on deck for us - so Erika, Lynn, Barry, Pauline and Mike and I sat out on the back Lido deck enjoying the sail-away sitting in the sun, drinking in the vistas and hearing about Mike and Pauline's adventures and dreaming about our next 5 days in Antarctica.   I got a nice movie of a beautiful beach with some penguins and a lighthouse - which might be the last one we see for awhile. 

Dinner in the dining room, was really enjoyable.  We laughed about a lot of things and compared notes on our day.  We were going to attend the movie on the Scott Expedition, but chose to go to bed and get up early instead.