24 December - Penguins

I am lying in bed listening to the local Falkland Islands radio. It has a slightly amateurish and a very local feel about it. The first item was about the cruise liners that are visiting Port Stanley today and the numbers of visitors the town might expect. There was also an item on a recent Chilean air crash near South Georgia and details on the change of Ambassador in Argentina. It is very much statements of fact, delivered in a very impersonal manner, but it is unquestionably less insular than when I was last here: I recall then one item asking for 'the person who posted a letter at Stanley to Mrs Smith at Fitzroy to return to the post office because they had forgotten to put a stamp on it.' 

The two cruise ships here today mean Stanley will be busy as they offload passengers throughout the day for trips to the town and beyond. Notably the total number of passengers on the two ships currently moored in the harbour is three times that of the entire Falklands population. One of the more common destinations for cruise passengers is to Bluff Cove some forty minutes away where they can visit established penguin colonies. Emma sometimes works there helping to manage the tourists and today friends of her parents are on one of the ships so Nigel has agreed to provide a more personal service for them and I will be tagging along. I have not previously been to Bluff Cove although it was a place often visited by  people during my previous time here. In those days visits were completely informal: a drive down to Bluff Cove, park up near the beach and walk to see the penguins. Now everything is much more managed, a proper paid for tourist attraction. Given the difference in numbers between the occasional Land Rover of military then and the numbers that might visit from a cruise ship now it makes sense that a more structured approach is in place. I am interested in seeing how this has changed the feel of things in the last few years.

Bluff Cove is a wide expanse of white sand with grass and tussock gently descending to the beach. King and Gentoo penguins hang around in small groups on the grass and Magallanes play on the beach. It is only a few miles on gravel track outside Stanley, although the last mile or so to the beach is totally off road. Locals assemble at the top of the track to meet minibuses from Stanley and then take the passengers on to the beach over the rough final stretch with their Land Rovers.

 In some ways things are very different now, highly managed and monetised, the location has become a 'go to' attraction rather than simply a place of passing interest for those on the islands. Yet the manner in which all the locals work together reminded me of that sense of community that existed all those years ago; it seems things are much the same as far as the spirit of these islands is concerned. Overall everything seemed very well managed with people being shuttled back and forth, the number never swamping the site but the continual stream of people keeping everybody there constantly busy.

On our return to Stanley I agreed to walk the dog: Emma was still working at Bluff Cove while Nigel had some work he needed to complete. I walked out towards the Stanley racecourse beyond the fringes of the town and then back along the waterfront. There I came across something that was definitely not around during my previous time here: part of a scale model of the solar system. I first found the small metal disk representing Venus, the other planets were further behind me, up to four miles into the hills, while ahead lay a large rusty sphere representing the sun. As I walked towards it I could see scattered along the waterfront evidence of something more relevant to the islands' history: the remains of decaying hulks of old ships that poked out of the harbour’s water, ships that due to bad weather had many decades ago made it here but no further. 

As it was Christmas Eve Nigel and I wandered into town for a drink, popping into the town hall on the way to see the local children visiting Santa and a little later doing some carol singing under the Cathedral's iconic whalebone arch: so far from home and so geographically isolated and yet here was still a sense of normality for the season. Not long after we were in one of Stanley’s pubs. It was small and in the manner of a dated town pub back home but it served some very nice beer, brewed locally with topical local names such as ‘Rockhopper’ and ‘Longdon Pride’. They were a great improvement on the tins of cheap, shipped in British beer that was all we could get in the Mess in Mount Pleasant all those years ago. We rounded the evening off with dinner in one of the town's restaurants. By any standards the meal was good, but even more so given the availability of foodstuffs in the islands. It turned out to be another long night.