Falkland Islands today, and our trip to the penguins. This was the one port we’d really wanted to make it to, and it can be iffy at times because of the weather. However, we lucked out and ended up with some absolutely perfect weather. In fact, as we sailed away at the end of the day, the captain said he’d been coming to the Falklands for 30 years, and doesn’t remember having weather that good ever before. We had pretty clear skies, high around 60 degrees. In fact, we ended up not using some of our layers of coats because it really wasn’t necessary.
We’d booked with Patrick Watts for the Volunteer Point penguin trip, and managed to get off on what was probably the second tender of the morning. At first it was looking like we were going to be in the 4×4 with Patrick himself, but because he’s the organizer, he was still trying to wait on a few more people that hadn’t showed up (and apparently never did), so he passed us on to one of his other drivers. Our new driver was Caris, and this turned out to work out pretty well. She was able to give us a lot of information about living on the islands as we went to and from Volunteer Point. It also seemed like half her family works as drivers for the various tour companies that do this trip (they seem to work somewhat interchangeably for Patrick or FIC depending on need).
Now, for this trip they load you up 4 passengers to a 4×4. For the first part, you’re on the main road on the island (there’s apparently 1 main loop road) that varies between occasional patches of tarmac and mostly gravel. After a little while on that, you get to the sheep farm that Volunteer Point is on, and the rest of the trip is cross country, basically following previous tracks they’d taken. It’s pretty rough, and if it was wet at all I imagine it would be pretty iffy, because most of the trip is over areas of peat. All this is done with the drivers personal 4×4 vehicles, and I’ve got to think that the maintenance has got to be pretty brutal. We heard tales of getting bogged down in the mud, broken axles, various other broken parts. At one point when we crossed a small wooden bridge (ie, basically some boards that were laid down over a ditch), some wires on the back of our vehicle caught the boards up and started dragging them along. (Caris said the previous owner of her car had a boat, and it was the trailer wires that had gotten caught up in this). When doing this trip, the groups travel in a convoy, so that if something happens, at least they have the ability to stop and help each other out.
Total time out to Volunteer Point seems to be a little over 2 hours, and over half of that is the off-road portion of the trip. Then you finally arrive on the top of a hill over a beach. And there’s lots of penguins. This area has 3 types of penguins: king, gentoo, and magellenic. There’s a variety of lines marked out with either sticks or white rocks, and the general rule besides don’t go past the lines is that you’re not supposed to go within 20 feet of the penguins, but the penguins are allowed to approach you if they want. (There were a fair number of people that weren’t really paying much attention to this rule, but the wardens weren’t giving them a hard time about it either).
We were late enough in the season that most of the penguin chicks had already had a chance to grow some, but many still retained large patches of their baby down. For king’s especially, once they shed that they’re hard to distinguish from the adult penguins, because they’re already close to full-size by that point.
We had about an hour and a half to wander around the area and watch penguins before getting back in the 4×4 to head back to Stanley. Wandered around briefly and looked through a couple of gift shops before heading back to the ship. BTW, Stanley has a population of around 2000, and the entire islands have a population of about 3000, so when they get a large cruise ship in like ours, it basically doubles the population.
Oh, one other update, apparently our late passengers from Buenos Aires may have made it on the ship somehow. The people in our 4×4 said that they’d heard that. And apparently some of those missing passengers may not have been first offenders on being late back to the ship. I imagine they might have gotten into a little trouble.
Since it’s New Years Eve, tonight’s formal night. I doubt it would normally be a formal night because of the port day (with so many sea days, there’d be no reason to do it on a port day). A little weird, because you could tell people definitely didn’t start dressing up until somewhat later in the evening. (Of course, that could also tie in with how late people tend to eat on this trip. I think we finished dinner shortly before 8PM or so, and the dining room was still mostly empty.) Watched the hypnotist show largely to kill some time, and it was ok. He did have an issue where partway through the show they announced a “Code Sierra” for a cabin number, and that seemed to wake up some of his volunteers.
No idea what a Code Sierra is, but it seems to be something involving security. The cabin was on the same floor as us, and I could see security personel hanging around near that end of the hallway. Cathy also says someone she talked to had problems getting to her cabin going one way, because there was a number of security personell not letting people through (and apparently, the next morning there was still a security person outside the cabin door).
On this ship, all the New Years stuff was happening indoors. I guess they must have decided it was too cold to do things outside (plus maybe too windy). Seas have started to pick up a little, so we’re moving more than we had up to now on the ship. It’s not quite the same experience to ring in the new year when you’re not out on the top deck, and made for a much more crowded experience. They did do baloon drops in the piazza and a couple of the lounges. Off to bed after that.