Ashore on the Falklands

There is a certain degree of smugness in that blog title. The past two years, cruises that scheduled stops here were unable to make them because of rough seas. Stanley, you see, doesn't have docking facilities for big cruise ships, so the ships drop anchor out in the bay and send passengers ashore in small boats called tenders. (The tenders for the Amsterdam are the largest of the boats we would use to evacuate in an emergency.) The tenders are certainly seaworthy in rough seas, but "seaworthy" is not the same as "luxuriously comfortable". On the way over we got fairly liberally sloshed with sea water, which, I can personally testify, is indeed salty.

Stanley is a q British fishing village transplanted to the end of the Earth. Before the Panama Canal, it was a crucial stop for commerce between the western Pacific and Europe as well as for the whaling fleet. Now its 2000 inhabitants live on fishing and tourism. Yesterday, it was mostly the latter as two cruise ships, the Amsterdam and the much larger Star Princess both disgorged passengers onto shore, crowding the half-dozen gift shops near the pier and clogging the streets and pubs. Several tours offered transport to the penguin rookeries, which are, understandably, at the far end of the island. I'm holding out for Antarctic penguins, so I chose to just wander the streets, admiring the tidy houses with their beautifully tended, brightly blooming gardens. A stop at the Victory Pub (named for the British victory in the 1982 war with Argentina over control of the islands) for fish and chips and beer seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I stumbled on the downhill trek back to the pier and gouged a deep scratch across one lens of my glasses, I had to wonder whether I just can't hold my liquor reliably. I'm fairly sure I brought a backup pair of glasses, but I can't find them. So I'm trusting to my brain to see past the scratch. Thus far, that seems to be working.

It was on the way to Stanley that I realized that I had left Dmitri behind on the ship. And of course everywhere one turns in Stanley, one sees images of penguins. Penguin hats, penguin shirts, penguin pins, penguin refrigerator magnets, penguin shot glasses, penguin hand-knitted sweaters and scarves, penguin coffee cups, penguin pendants. If I had brought him, I would have been hard-put to find a place to pose with him that didn't already have a penguin something-or-other in it.