Little Bit o’ Britain near the End of the World

January 29, 2019, Port Stanley, The Falkland Islands — One of my Trivia buddies said this was his third try at the Falklands. Both other trips, weather and rough seas prevented landing, or even anchoring. Viking planned on two days here. We anchored in the a.m. in relatively calm seas, and we tendered in for our excursions. But when we were lined up to tender back out in the late afternoon, we were told the weather was turning and we had to pull up anchor and skedaddle outta there pronto. So pronto, Viking crew members ran around to all the bars and pubs in Port Stanley collecting Vikings to get them back to the ship, even if they hadn’t finished their excellent fish ’n’ chips.

So two days in Port Stanley became one, and one day in Ushuaia, Argentina has become one and a half. The Falklands, btw, are a British Overseas Territory of around 800 small islands.

In Port Stanley, I had opted out of doing the Penguin Parade that 600 out of 900 passengers were desperate to do. I chose sheep instead of penguins and spent a couple hours at a 23,000-acre sheep farm on Long Island, where we watched Paul, sixth-generation sheep farmer, cut peat for heating the house....

... spotted nearby... love the close-up capability of my new camera...

We watched Paul’s mother Glenda command the elderly sheepdog with whistles as he rounded up a bunch of sheep... this isn’t a great photo but it shows that sheep are so stupid, the dog could stop them in their tracks with his posture... I think the dog is kept on just for the tourists. Paul told us they herd sheep nowadays on ATVs!

We had tea and coffee in the house (the TV was tuned to the news, as the British Parliament prepared to vote on Brexit)... then watched a sheep-shearing. The 2,500 sheep on the farm are shorn once a year. A couple of shearers come through to do the job — one shearer can do 200 sheep a day.

I did feel a bit like I had gone to sleep and woken up in an episode of ‘All Creatures Great and Small.’

Some shots from around the farm. Note the windmill. What you can’t see is the TV dish!

View from the goose yard. The animals can drink the brackish water.

View from the quonset shearing shed.

We didn’t get rained on, but somebody did. Well, only if there was anybody out there! That’s a pile of peat, lower left, for heating the house.

Despite the very stiff wind (Paul guessed it was 28mph, but it felt like more!) and only 22 inches of rain a year, Glenda has a flower garden.

The Falklands is rough country. Trees were felled generations ago for building and not replaced. There were no glaciers, but all the freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing over thousands of years broke up the sedimentary rock and left this behind...

The excellent dirt road we were on was only built in the 1980s!