FALKLANDS Pt. 2

Sailing all day and a nite, through some of the most trecherous and unforgiving waters on earth, we enter Stanley Harbor on the eastern-most island of the Falklands. A pair of dolphin greet us in front of shore batteries that protected the British from the attacking Argentine junta in 1982. It was a brief but bloody war, costly on both sides, and for what? A remote, barren and mostly gloomy rock, 8,000 miles from England, and 350 miles offshore from Argentina, which still lays claim to The Rocks, but lost the war. Life has changed for the remaining 3,500 British here ... good fishing, tourism andabout 240 sheep per inhabitant. Outside the village of Port Stanley, however, life is a bit bleak -- children are schooled by radio and phone calls, mail service connects to England once a month, and there are still about 17,000 land mines buried in the sand. (Which explains the text on a jeep at the pier, "Bomb Squad." We walked past an aging ship half sunk in the harbor, the "Jhelum" built in Liverpool in 1840, but condemned as unseaworthy in 1871 -- and now the most intact aged ship in the area (see photo). Christ Church Anglican Cathedral was built in 1892 -- the southern most church in the world, with a huge set of Blue Whale jaw bones near the entrance (photo). While both the summers and winters are more temperate than you might expect this close to Antarctica, many home gardeners raise edibles and flora in their sunrooms or glass green houses using hydroponic techniques. And lest we minimize the importance of penguins for tourism, they are the larger King variety here (3.5 feet high) -- while the Magellans in Argentina were knee-high, and the man-size Emperor Penguins reside in Antarctica.