Eastern Falkland Islands

The Falkland Islands contains roughly 700 islands but two are bigger and more famous than the others, the western which I visited yesterday and the east which I took today. On the east island the capital Stanley (Port Stanley) is located and with its population of 2500 its the biggest city in the country. However even if it was just here we landed I didn’t stayed for many minutes.

instead I took a tour to see some rock hopper penguins and after 1 hour of 4wd driving we arrived. The was no road to this place and the Land rover drove over rocks, through water holes, over mountains and through valleys to get there, a bit shaky tour but well worth it and once we arrived there was plenty of rock hopper and even a Macaroni penguin. They are similar but the Macaroni is a different kind and this one was just confused and lost.

It started to hail and then snow but what does it matter, the penguins was just there, hatches their eggs and looking semi interesting on us with their bushy eyebrows. A few brave one approached us while other were just walking around in the colony, they were noisy and smelly but oh gosh, so beautiful

We were running out of time but me, Morten and Jesper took a chance and convinced our driver to take us to Gypsy cove. This place is not packed with gypsies as you can think, instead the name probably come from back in the time when the people in Stanley went here camping and with all the tents…yea you understand. Today its different, during the conflict 1982 Argentina spread a lot of mines here which makes one of the nicest beaches I’ve seen impossible to use. The positive side effect us the the natural life is thriving here instead, at least that’s what they told me. I didn’t see anything except one single, frozen Magellanic penguin in the distance and running out of time we had to rush back to the zodiacs.

In the zodiacs we were welcomed back by two commerson dolphins but of course I had my camera in the bottom of my backpack.

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