OK, feeling a bit better now... Two days of continual uppy-downy behaviour was more than my feeble constitution is equipped to deal with, I'm afraid.
At noon today we docked at Stanley, and there was much rejoicing from all and sundry because:
- Stanley doesn't go up and down all the time
- Stanley has shops
- Stanley has pubs
We were met at quayside by a fleet of very British buses for a bit of a tour; we stopped to photograph three of the dozens of old ships which have been simply condemned and left to fall apart where they lay in the harbour, then on to see the airport (which is basically a building the size of a small house plus a few sheds), the local neighbourhood minefield, the small but completely excellent museum, the garden of an anti-whaling activist containing whalebone sculptures and his pet reindeer that thinks it's a dog, a garden overrun by garden gnomes, and the memorial to the fallen of the 1982 war.
The atmosphere of Stanley is an odd combination of sombre and grateful remembrance of the Task Force that liberated them, and raving eccentricity in the best British tradition. In fact it's more British than anywhere I've seen in Britain: Union flags abound, all the cars are Land Rovers, every purveyor of food specialises in fish & chips, and there are red phone boxes on street corners.
And there are pubs. Obviously, as the only Englishman on the ship, I was duty-bound to squeeze in a quick pubcrawl: sadly there's no proper beer in the Falklands, so this exercise was more rewarding in a spiritual sense than in a thirst-quenching one (I'd forgotten just how disgusting canned Boddingtons really is), but the final pub score was Englishman 3, Everybody Else 1. Hooray.
Sadly for my bank balance and my hopes of avoiding multiple excess baggage charges, I found a bookshop. I was, I think, by my standards, very restrained...
The injured passenger, by the way, is now in the hospital: it turns out that it's a double pelvic fracture, whereby the bottom part has... Well... Come off. It sounds absolutely dreadful, but apparently he's now in a body cast with enough sedatives and painkillers to seriously inconvenience a rhino.
Tonight we're sailing around the north of the islands, heading for a spectacular place called Steeple Jason Island: it's by no means certain that we'll be able to land, as rough seas could prevent it, but if we can get ashore we'll be joining roughly 300,000 black-browed albatrosses, amongst other winged wonders. Time to unleash the long lens again...
