What a start to the day! I got woken up at 6:20am (despite by intention of sleeping until around 7:40, a bit before I was due to leave). This was due to the purser coming around knocking loudly on people’s doors to get them awake and ready to go for the taxi leaving at 6:30. After helping people get ready and out of the door, and seeing them all off, I had plenty of time to shower, pack and get myself ready before we departed around 9am.
As we were staying on the island, we had to go through the formal immigration procedures before getting dropped off at our accommodation. We are staying at the Lookout lodge, which was traditionally constructed from shipping containers and we were quite apprehensive about it because we had heard many horror stories about it. We were actually incredibly pleasantly surprised! They had clearly done it up a lot since previous visits and we were warmly welcomed by Mandy into the lodge and shown to our very warm and comfortable rooms. There were only three guests (including myself and Evelyn) staying at the lodge and so although the rooms weren’t en-suite, we had about 8 loos and showers between 3 people, so very luxurious.
Having failed to go to Volunteer’s Point the previous day, we were very keen to try and book a tour, so phoned up many many tour operators from the lodge phone. After calling quite a few we received a 99% yes on a tour for Thursday, he just needed to check a couple of things. At one point the phone was literally ringing off the hook as we called out and tour operators called us back.
We then went into town with Povl to see the sights, and after a guided tour of some of the monuments (including the mizzenmast of the SS Great Britain) we went to the dockyard museum. It was incredibly cool, with exhibits on the 1982 war, the wildlife, life on the islands and the maritime history of the area. They even had a section on Antarctica, BAS and a recluse hut like those used in Antarctica, that you could look around. I also found the history of the Falklands war fascinating, I had no idea that mere months/years before the war the Argentinian and British governments had essentially agreed a handover only to be stopped by local resistance. I was also amazed that they ran the longest bombing run in history, all the way from the UK to the Falklands, without a working map of the South Atlantic. In 1982, they actually navigated from the UK to the Falklands using a map of the North Atlantic, turned upside down and with the Azores relabelled as the Falklands, truly incredible! I also discovered that icefish can grow to 1.8m long and 100kg in weight, somewhat terrifying.
At the end of the day we went back to the lodge where we discovered, to our horror, that our booking for the Volunteer’s Point trip had been cancelled. Thankfully, after some frantic calling, we managed to book another tour operator for tomorrow and we went to bed very excited for our trip the next day!
31/01/23
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