Stanley, Falkland Islands
Our first expedition day was a tale of two cities; or perhaps we should say, a tale of two capitals. After an early breakfast in the magnificent Chilean capital of Santiago, that we had become briefly acquainted with on the previous day - how delightful to eat al fresco before heading so far south! - we headed for the airport for our charter flight south to join the M/S Endeavour in port at Stanley. There is no such place as Port Stanley (as marked on the atlas), the local guide informed us, but the Falkland Islands capital of Stanley does have an excellent port. The locals here feel strongly about this as on other matters. After flying half the length of the long thin country of Chile (not named after the vegetable it so closely resembles on the atlas, apparently) we were escorted by RAF tornadoes into the landing strip at Mount Pleasant.
It is now twenty years since the Falklands War, here known simply as The Conflict. A war to preserve the status quo, it had the paradoxical effect, as major conflicts invariably do, of changing nearly everything. BC to islanders means Before the Conflict. There are BC residents and post-conflict residents, BC buildings and post conflict buildings, the latter including the islands’ first cinema. And a tourist industry, still in embryo, is very much a post-conflict phenomenon.
What we saw on the drive from Mount Pleasant air base to Stanley was a scene of utter desolation. Open treeless moorland, poor tussock grass and peat bog, an average wind speed of 17 knots and near constant South Atlantic humidity, the Falklands have been unable to support any worthwhile economic activity save for traditional sheep farming, now a very depressed sector. (It costs more to shear the sheep and send the wool to England than the wool fetches on the market and because the local abattoir is judged substandard, lamb for the Sunday roast at the army base is imported from South America.) International journalists sent to cover this improbable conflict twenty years ago had heard that the Falkland Island was an impoverished sheep farm the size of Wales (or Connecticut) with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Were these islands worth fighting for? The journey to Stanley convinced most of them that it wasn’t. There must be some other explanation, they speculated: a rich oil field beneath the waves that the respective governments knew about, perhaps? Twenty years on, still a bit too soon for historical perspective, the view is forming that this was a freak conflict between a nostalgic fascism and a nostalgic imperialism. It does seem stranger, as each year passes, that the number of deaths in the conflict exceeded the number of people who lived here.
But there is no better place for a tonic of wildness. No publicity is bad publicity, they say, and the Falkland Islands have been discovered for their unique wildlife habitats. Traveling in to Stanley, our geologist transformed that utter desolation into a uniquely interesting periglacial landscape that had us off the bus with our cameras seeing with new eyes. And, too light to detonate the 30,000 land mines that are fenced off on the islands, are the penguins. We hope to get up close to them tomorrow.
Our first expedition day was a tale of two cities; or perhaps we should say, a tale of two capitals. After an early breakfast in the magnificent Chilean capital of Santiago, that we had become briefly acquainted with on the previous day - how delightful to eat al fresco before heading so far south! - we headed for the airport for our charter flight south to join the M/S Endeavour in port at Stanley. There is no such place as Port Stanley (as marked on the atlas), the local guide informed us, but the Falkland Islands capital of Stanley does have an excellent port. The locals here feel strongly about this as on other matters. After flying half the length of the long thin country of Chile (not named after the vegetable it so closely resembles on the atlas, apparently) we were escorted by RAF tornadoes into the landing strip at Mount Pleasant.
It is now twenty years since the Falklands War, here known simply as The Conflict. A war to preserve the status quo, it had the paradoxical effect, as major conflicts invariably do, of changing nearly everything. BC to islanders means Before the Conflict. There are BC residents and post-conflict residents, BC buildings and post conflict buildings, the latter including the islands’ first cinema. And a tourist industry, still in embryo, is very much a post-conflict phenomenon.
What we saw on the drive from Mount Pleasant air base to Stanley was a scene of utter desolation. Open treeless moorland, poor tussock grass and peat bog, an average wind speed of 17 knots and near constant South Atlantic humidity, the Falklands have been unable to support any worthwhile economic activity save for traditional sheep farming, now a very depressed sector. (It costs more to shear the sheep and send the wool to England than the wool fetches on the market and because the local abattoir is judged substandard, lamb for the Sunday roast at the army base is imported from South America.) International journalists sent to cover this improbable conflict twenty years ago had heard that the Falkland Island was an impoverished sheep farm the size of Wales (or Connecticut) with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Were these islands worth fighting for? The journey to Stanley convinced most of them that it wasn’t. There must be some other explanation, they speculated: a rich oil field beneath the waves that the respective governments knew about, perhaps? Twenty years on, still a bit too soon for historical perspective, the view is forming that this was a freak conflict between a nostalgic fascism and a nostalgic imperialism. It does seem stranger, as each year passes, that the number of deaths in the conflict exceeded the number of people who lived here.
But there is no better place for a tonic of wildness. No publicity is bad publicity, they say, and the Falkland Islands have been discovered for their unique wildlife habitats. Traveling in to Stanley, our geologist transformed that utter desolation into a uniquely interesting periglacial landscape that had us off the bus with our cameras seeing with new eyes. And, too light to detonate the 30,000 land mines that are fenced off on the islands, are the penguins. We hope to get up close to them tomorrow.
