This past January, I was able to partake in an amazing adventure to the Falkland Islands led by Ralph Paonessa. This group of islands is about 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, but the islanders are full British citizens–they don’t care much for the Argentineans after the spat in ‘82. Take a look in the galleries for a selection of images from the trip. I’ll include some of the behind the scenes images in this post.

To get to Stanley, the capitol of the Falklands and the southern most capitol in the world, you typically fly into Santiago, Chile. It’s good to get there early because there’s only one flight a week to Stanley. You can’t just fly standby on the next flight.

Santiago was quite hot, easily 80-90 degrees, but it was my first time in South America and a neat experience. Appropriately enough, right outside our hotel, there was an apartment building with a large Canon ad on top. The group of us traveling on to Stanley met up here (for the most part), and we had a great dinner at Como Agua Para Chocolate.

The next morning, we got up early and headed to the airport. After running back and forth and dealing with ticket agents who really didn’t speak English, we made it into the airport. There was a mad dash onto the plane, and it was quite full. The plane makes a couple stops, one of which would be in a popular cruise ship port (hence why the plane was full). On the way out, we passed over amazing mountains by Santiago as well as Patagonia.

At the first stop, they had us disembark, we essentially walked in a circle, and then we got back onto the plane. To let this flight travel to Stanley, we had to fly over Argentinean air space, and their government requires that one flight a month stop in Argentina. Our plane touched down, and I think it was only there long enough for a couple people to run onto the plane.

Finally, we landed in Stanley. And boy did we land in style, at the Royal Air Force base, Mount Pleasant. There were enlisted men basically telling us not to glance in certain places, and I’ve never seen a more intimidating customs stand. Once we all made it through, nearly everyone from the plane was loaded onto a bus and driven to Stanley to our different hotels. Along the way, we passed different areas that had been roped off due to land mines still left over from the ‘82 war.

Roughly 3,000 people live in the Falklands, and 2,000 or so of them are in Stanley. This small capitol city has a plethora of colored roofs, and two satellite dishes that handle all communications to and from the islands. It’s quite amazing. The Union Jack is pretty much everywhere, and we had rather British food at our hotel.

During the summer, the temperature is roughly 50-60°, but it’s frequently windy (I was wishing I’d been able to bring my kiteboarding gear!). What’s amazing is how windswept and treeless the islands are. The only trees we saw were ones people imported and took careful care of. The natural vegetation is all low-lying shrubbery.

The next day, after meeting up with the last two in our group (they took the once-a-week RAF flight to Stanley), we went to the Stanley airport for our FIGAS (Falkland Islands Government Air Service) flight. Because these planes are quite small, there are extreme (20kg for your luggage and carry on) weight restrictions. They also weigh you to balance the planes. The flight was perfectly fine, and thankfully they provide ear plugs! An hour after taking off, we arrived at Saunders Island.

Saunders is a really amazing island. It’s one of the largest islands in the Falklands yet completely privately owned by Tony and David Pole-Evans, and it’s mainly a sheep farm. After we landed, we had a quick stop at the Settlement, and then we took a 10-mile, hour long trip in Land Rovers to an area called The Neck. The Neck is an incredibly beautiful area with a white, sandy beach and colonies of gentoo, magellanic, rockhopper, and king penguins, to say nothing of the albatross and other wildlife. There’s a port-a-cabin that the islanders have improved over the years. It slept all 8 of us (plus a few bugs, much to the horror of one of our group members), had hot water (there’s 1 bathroom, and you do shower out of a bucket), and even has electricity via a generator now! The 5 nights we were here were completely worth it (thankfully we all got along quite well!), and we had some of the best shooting of the trip here, despite some bad weather.

About a year ago, I started to get this vision in my head of an underwater shot. Despite being told that I was going to catch hypothermia, be eaten by a killer whale, and scare all the penguins away, I brought my gear with me and decided to try for a shot. It took 6 hours or so of lying in the cold South Atlantic, but I managed to get my underwater penguin shots, and I’m quite pleased with them! The other group members were amazed I was willing to lie in the freezing water for so long and found it rather amusing.

The last day, despite wind gusts around 60mph, FIGAS flew in the next group, and the island crew brought them to the cabin to trade places with us. But going back to The Settlement meant that we’d get to stay in a really nice converted farm house with a shower! Plus we had great home-cooked food from Biffo and Suzan. Probably the most amusing part, though, was when Suzan mentioned how she gets up early every day to milk a cow, and my dad asked if he could try his hand at milking. Apparently he didn’t realize how…organic the experience would be.

The next day, we took a great trip to an albatross and rockhopper colony. It was an adventure climbing down into the rockhopper colony for some cliff-side shots!

Before we knew it, our time on Saunders had come to an end, and we jumped on a plane to take a short hop to Carcass Island. Carcass’ owner, Rob McGill, greeted us enthusiastically at the runway and took us to their guest house for smoko.

One of the great highlights on Carcass was visiting an incredibly large King Cormorant colony. What was very weird to me is that off to the side, there was a huge field of abandoned clay pots, which the cormorants build to make their nests in. It was very odd, wondering where all those birds went.

The other great highlight was taking a boat trip to West Point Island. There was an amazing albatross colony on West Point where the birds were flying so close I ended up doing flight photography with a 16mm lens!

The people on Carcass were a lot of fun, especially the people from National Geographic working on filming a TV series. Dinner time was always full of stories, as everyone ate together. However, towards the end of our stay, a rather unpleasant couple arrived. The husband insisted on calling all the Americans and Falklanders “colonials.” However, I heard that the universe balanced things out, and I hear he got rather sick during the crossing to West Point.

Seemingly in the blink of an eye, our time on Carcass came to an end, and we headed back to Stanley in preparation for our flight back to Santiago. Yet we had one last adventure planned, a trip to Volunteer Point, where there’s the largest colony of King penguins outside of South Georgia.

After a two-hour Land Rover ride from Stanley, we arrived at this rather amazing rookery (you always smell penguins before you see them). We were very fortunate because there was a group of roughly 3-week old chicks resting on their parents feet, and we were about ten feet away from them. They really look like little dinosaurs! There was also an elephant seal dining on penguins. Although we saw the seal come onto land, we didn’t see him catch a penguin at all, and the penguins were definitely quite wary of the water!

Sadly, all good things must end, and the next day, we caught our flight back to Santiago. After a day playing tourist in Santiago and enjoying the heat, we all made our way back to our respective homes. It was really an amazing trip, and I can’t wait to go back!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 8:37pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.