March 5 – March 26
We sadly had to leave Antarctica for the remaining 120 days of the cruise and return to Puerto Williams in Chile, the southernmost city in the world.
Our first stop in the segment was the Falkland Islands which featured history of the 1982 war between Argentina and the United Kingdom. We found the islands to be quite barren with little wildlife apart from penguins, seals and birds. We hiked to the top of Mount Tumbledown. We did not in fact tumble down.
Falkland is one of many islands considered part of the British Territories but Argentina has long felt it belongs to them due to their proximity, along with the neighboring island of South Georgia. In 1982 Argentina took control of the islands but the UK sent warships 8000 miles to take them back. Nearly 1,000 people died needlessly and it remains inhabited by Brits to this day.
A few interesting facts for you: the islands get 40% of their electricity from a handful of wind turbines; there are no native mammals on the island; they are facing a severe water shortage due to lack of rain and snow due to climate change; surprisingly, 70% of young adults return to the island to live after going off to college.
The next island was South Georgia. I had never heard of this island until we booked the cruise but it proved to be quite remarkable.
Amazingly, it turns out that South Georgia is home to over 400,000 pairs of penguins and their young chicks! The experience of walking around and mingling with all of them was just incredible. The noise of their trumpeting sound is overwhelming. You hear them all the way from the ship before you can get close enough to see them.
After South Georgia, we moved on the several islands that are truly in the middle of nowhere, well over a thousand miles from any land. One of the islands is called Tristan da Cunha, which is the only one inhabited by permanent residents, 235 people, all of whom share only 9 surnames.
This island is incredibly difficult to land on due to weather and high swells. One person I talked to on the voyage had tried 12 times and never made it. We made it on the second day we tried. A day after we left a storm system moved in that will apparently make it inaccessible again for weeks.
It is known as the most remote human settlement in the world. There is no airport and the nearest continent is South Africa, 1700 miles away. Getting off the island typically requires booking a freighter that visits the island every 2 months with supplies. The island, as with the others nearby, is volcanic and they had an eruption in 1961 that nearly wiped out the homes there but stopped just a few hundred meters short.
There are several nearby islands, including one with a perfect name – Inaccessible Island. Here are a few more of my favorite pics from the islands.
There are two main historical themes in these islands as well as Antarctica.
One is the incredible exploration voyages of Ernest Shackleton in the South Atlantic and Antarctica in the early 1900s. The book Endurance makes for an excellent read about him.
The second is that you can’t escape the impact that whaling had on these islands. By any conservative estimate, the number of whales killed during the height of whaling was in the hundreds of thousands and likely over a million. In the 1800s before the advent of electricity, whale oil extracted from their blubber was in heavy demand as a major fuel source and globally was one of the major industries at that time. Think about having to kill thousands of whales in order to supply fuel to the host countries. Most other parts of the whale found uses as well for cosmetics, clothing and other non-essential needs. While most countries have long abandoned whaling, it unfortunately continues to this day in Iceland, Norway and Japan.
I end this segment with this public service message.
