Day 232 – 53°20’ S, 42°53’ W, South Atlantic

This is our sixth day on the ship now and we’re settling into a nice little routine. Breakfast is generally at 07:30, followed by lunch at 12:30, afternoon tea with cakes and biscuits at 16:00, happy hour in the bar with snacks at 18:30 and dinner at 19:30. This is in addition to pre-breakfast coffee and tea with pastries at 06:30 and constant hot beverages throughout the day. As if that wasn’t enough, lunch is a three course feast and dinner is four or five courses depending on whether they put the cheese out or not. My trousers now feel like they’ve all shrunk and I’m having to loosen my belt by a new hole every few days. It’s terrible; I’m going to be enormous by the end of the trip and I’m frightened that if I breathe out a little too quickly I’m going to take someone’s eye out with an errant button from my straining waistband. I tried skipping lunch yesterday but inevitably I felt starving by 14:00 as my stomach was missing its [almost] hourly feed.

There are some interesting characters on the boat. On the first day, Rich and I were talking to a couple from Sevenoaks who were telling us about their previous trip to Easter Island. As Rich had been there in 2004 he had something in common with them and starting recounting his experiences and stories that he’d heard. The woman he was speaking to, Meg, a demure and diminutive old bird suddenly snapped and told Rich how juvenile the story was and immediately dismissed it all as poppycock. We excused ourselves and left her and her grinning, mahogany coloured husband to wallow in their own middle-classness. While sharing a table with her at lunchtime yesterday, Rich had another run in with her as she blithely dismissed the impact of global warming. Fortunately, the people in the cabin next to us are more down to earth. Joe, a freelance factory designer and his stepson Chris, a writer for The Times are much more easy going but prone to leaving the connecting door to our shared bathroom locked. Rich went round there last night to ask them to unlock it and was greeted by Joe, a weathered 50-something, dressed in nothing but a pair of snug-fitting briefs. He came back quite pale.

Our first stop was one of the Flakland Islands, or more specifically Carcass Island where we saw hundreds of Magellanic Penguins all huddled around busily moulting. The millions of feathers flying around and littering the ground looked like a thin covering of snow. They get really quite grumpy during this three week period as they can’t feed or drink and their little bodies are all swollen and sore by their new crop of feathers pushing out the old ones. They look really scruffy, too. After wandering around the island and the beautiful clean, white beaches we walked across the coastline to the only settlement on there which is inhabited by Rob and Lorraine McGill and a few Chileans. We were told to expect a welcoming tea but were blown away by their hospitality. Our group, nearing a hundred people, all traipsed through their house to be greeted by a dining table literally groaning under the weight of scones, cakes and biscuits. It seems that whenever they are expecting a boat to come, all the neighbouring island’s inhabitants go into some sort of baking frenzy and send trays and trays of home-cooked goodies to the McGill’s place. It’s a nice little money earner for them but they were genuinely lovely hosts as well.

In the afternoon we went to Saunders Island and were treated to the sight of hundreds of Magellanic, Gentoo, Rockhopper Penguins, as well as Caracaras, a few King Penguins, Black-Browed Albatrosses and King Shags. It was a fabulous sight to see the little Rockhoppers perched high up on the hillside, hundreds of metres from the sea and bounding from one stony perch to another. They were like little feathered mountain goats. We walked down to the beach on the North East side of the island and sat there a while amongst the hundreds of Gentoo Penguins. We’d only been there for ten minutes before a small group of them starting walking towards us and eyed us with more curiosity than we were paying them. It was a fantastic feeling to have them come so close without any fear and the more we pretended to ignore them, the bolder they got. They really are spectacular little creatures.

The next day we landed at Stanley which was an almost surreal experience after seeing so much of it on the TV back in 1982 during The Falklands War. There’s a very touching museum with all the usual maritime memorabilia but also a collection of photos taken by some of the locals at the actual time of the invasion. The images look as if they were taken from someone’s bedroom, peeking through the net curtains which gives the whole thing a very dark and anxious feeling. Throughout the town there are little references and monuments to the conflict and street names such as Thatcher Drive and H Jones Road serve as stark reminders to that time. The whole place exudes a feeling of gratitude towards to UK and its troops and the warm welcome provided by the people there reinforces it further.

Shortly after first arriving at Stanley we were bussed out to Gypsy Cove which is an area of coastline that’s pretty well protected now due to the large number of fenced off areas that potentially contain mines left over from the war. Of course, in fencing off those areas they are now havens for wildlife and we saw dozens of penguins enjoying the seclusion of the long white expanses of beach. Dolphins played in the kelp that drifts lazily around the shallow waters and meadow-larks competed with cormorants to find the sunniest spot. All very idyllic, I just hope the penguins don’t get heavy enough to set off a landmine though, otherwise the explosion of feathers and flippers is sure to frighten off the diverse fauna enjoying their unbroken solitude.

Stanley is a beautiful little place, and has often been described as a distillation of all things English. I can see why. Red telephone boxes still stand on the corner of the streets, little corner shops sell everything from tea-towels to pots of jam made from the local diddle-dee berries (I’m not joking) and the local airport has a daily announcement of who is flying where so there is no chance of flitting off to a neighbouring island for a discreet liaison with someone. Even the pubs serve fish and chips and chicken curry – how English could they possibly get?

We left Stanley two days ago now and have been sailing solidly since then towards South Georgia. I managed to put my back out a few days ago so I’ve been lying on the cabin floor willing the pain to go away between meals and lectures. I really thought that the sailing between places would be boring, but we’ve been thoroughly entertained by a series of talks by the staff on the ship about everything Antarctic including tube-nosed petrels, the unique odour of elephant seals and the impact that scientists are having on the environment in the area. We’ve been given very strict guidelines about the bio-security measures we need to take prior to landing on any of these islands, including sterilising our footwear and waterproofs every time we get back on the boat, hoovering our bags to remove seeds and any organic matter and brushing our clothes down with an old toilet brush to remove any traces of bird poo. However, we hear stories of how the scientists blast ice crevasses to fill them in so they can drive more easily from one place to another (thus contaminating the area with poisonous explosive residue), digging holes in the snow to use as latrines and filling boreholes with diesel fuel to stop them freezing over again. It all seems a little hypocritical to me.

We’re due to reach South Georgia by around midnight tonight. There are huge colonies of elephant seals and king penguins which I’m really quite excited about seeing – despite their rich aroma. They’re not called ‘smelly-ellies’ for nothing.