Random Writings

I’m rapidly becoming very smitten with the Falklands – when we arrived the place looked bleak and forbidding under a leaden overcast sky. Saturday morning, however, was dry and bright with a light breeze, and the brightly coloured buildings in Stanley gleamed in the spring sunshine. Tom and I walked along Ross Road, the main road along the seafront, and looked at the various wrecked ships in the harbour: Stanley has long been the final resting place for vessels mortally wounded by gales off Cape Horn. We also found the Museum, which was closed, but looked promising. We then headed back to the hotel for lunch, with the intention of heading out for a walk in the hills that afternoon. Sadly, as we were drinking our coffee, the heavens opened and so we sataround in the hotel reading and downloading our photographs until a bus drew up outside and disgorged 26 BAS employees who had made the 30-hour journey to Stanley via Madrid, Santiago and Punta Arenas. Dinner in the hotel was followed by a mini-pub-crawl around three of Stanley’s hostelries, finishing in the Globe, where large numbers of young Falkland Islanders were having a good time, and we did, too.
Today we went out to Gypsy Cove, which is about four miles from Stanley, and has gorgeous white sandy beaches and a colony of Magellanic penguins, which live in shallow burrows on the headland. Although the sun was shining, the 30mph wind was keeping the penguins tucked up underground, but we enjoyed the view and the bracing weather! After getting a lift back to the hotel for lunch, Mark and I wandered down to the museum, which is a large miscellany of Falklands life, although the most interesting feature for us was the Caple Reclus hut, an old BAS hut used in the 1950s that was taken to Stanley a few years ago when it became surplus to requirements. It’s very eerie inside – stuck in a perpetual 1957, the last year it was used to winter three men. There are four wooden bunks, a tiny kitchen with two Primus stoves and a wind-up gramophone, and it smells of old newspapers (of which there are many) and dry timber.

Todays other event was the arrival of the James Clark Ross, which is picking up the team that arrived on the Chilean flight yesterday. They’ve all moved onto the ship this afternoon, so the hotel will probably be very quiet again this evening!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Antarctica.