Port Stanley, Falkland Island

We have a 7 hour tour today so it was an early wake up.

We managed to make it to our gathering point in the restaurant by 7:15 AM but managed to forget both of our sunglasses and our wallets.

We were quickly called to head down to the Landing area where we boarded the tender AKA life boat for the quick trip to the Port. The Octantis' life boats are beautiful boats with doors that fully close-good to know that if we ever need the life boats down here in the frigid south, we will be safe and warm.

We walked to our number 3 lollipop and were introduced to our driver, Jo.

Soon the other couple, John and Marti, arrived and we departed towards Volunteer Point to hopefully see gentoo, Magellanic and King penguins.

The roads were quite smooth and well maintained until we got to within about 11 miles of Volunteer Point at which time we began the offroading portion of the adventure. We have been on a lot of 4 X 4 excursions with Viking and they all have been relatively tame. We hit the peat tracks and began a very wild ride. At one point we didn't make it up a hill and had to back down. There were also times when I thought we were going to get stuck in the boggy peat. We loved very minute!!

When we got to Volunteer Point, we had to walk through a disinfectant to protect the birds from disease.

Jo encouraged us to go to the beach first and then to the colonies. On our way to the beach, the sun came out and we saw many Gentoo penguins warming themselves outside their burrows.

When we got to the beach, there were many King Penguins. Since it was such a calm day, we were able to get some picture of King Penguins being reflected in the tide pools. Jo said she has never been able to get shots like this and she is a native! The sun is usually not shining. When the sun does shine, it is usually windy. We are very thankful for the great weather!

We then walked to the colony. We observed adult, juvenile and baby King Penguins. We saw parents feeding babies. We were even able to see adult penguins rotating their eggs in order to keep the eggs equally warm.

Next we headed to the Gentoo penguin colony. This colony was small due to the fact that the Avian flu has arrived in the Falkland Islands. The Gentoo population has been affected more than the King Penquin population.

We then had a boxed lunch before we headed back to the port via another wild ride.

Back onboard, we unpacked and watched the Daily Briefing & Recap via the TV in our stateroom.

We headed up to the World Cafe for....you guessed it...Surf and Turf.

We hit the hay early as we have an early morning Biosecurity Inspection followed by a Manadatory South Georgia Briefing. We were hoping to be able to sleep in...ugggRead more