Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
although it was pulling me back to the south, a voice inside whispered urgently, 'Escape while you
can!'
At Rio airport George led an assault on the duty-free shops. We bought a bottle of red wine, a
slab of goats' cheese and a box of crackers and had a picnic by the top of the escalators. When we
reboarded, a flight attendant marched down the aisles spraying us with disinfectant from an aero-
sol held aloft like a flaming torch in a Viking raiding party.
We landed at Mount Pleasant airport on East Falkland, the sky a low miasma of blues and pinks.
A line of people on the end of the strip were holding up placards inscribed with numbers. They
were marking the pilot out often for his landing. In the terminal a pair of soldiers stood on the ca-
rousel and held up an array of missiles we might like to avoid stepping on; there were, they said,
over a hundred minefields lurking in the tussock.
A bus conveyed us across the island to Port Stanley, and I asked the driver about the runway
placards. 'That's what we're reduced to down here,' he said, 'to pass the time.'
George was depressed by the news that we were staying at FIPASS, a government-owned pon-
toon dock, rather than the fabled Upland Goose on Stanley's main street. I asked the driver how
long it would take to get there. 'It depends on the traffic,' he said, although we had not yet en-
countered a single vehicle. It was very dark, but, when we reached civilisation two pairs of whale
jawbones were illuminated outside the cathedral like wishbones. We went on, until we passed
again into the gloom. 'Welcome to Alcatraz!' the driver said as he deposited us in driving rain at
the bottom of a flight of metal stairs.
The Falklands Intermediate Port and Storage System, FIPASS, consists of a series of oil-rig
barges built in Middlesborough and shipped in by the Ministry of Defence after the conflict. The
Falkland Islands government purchased it from the Ministry of Defence in 1988. It was a perfectly
acceptable place in which to stay, although there was a turd in the toilet bowl and a sex novel under
my bunk. When I asked for a lightbulb, the nightwatchman handed it over with a sinister remark
about how nice it was to look after a lady for a change.
∗
With George around, I could abnegate all responsibility for my life, as he planned it out for me in
minute detail. It was very agreeable. In the morning we located my kitbag, which had been lan-
guishing all season in the bowels of FIPASS. It contained all my British-issue cold-weather gear,
which I had tried on months before, on a sweltering day in Cambridge, and which had been sent
down by ship at the beginning of the season. Myriam picked us up in the British Antarctic Survey
Land Rover (every other vehicle was a Land Rover in the Falklands). She was the BAS represent-
ative, a saintly figure who deciphered scrawled faxes from the ice requesting goods for which she
was obliged to scour the streets of Stanley. She showed me some of these request sheets. For some
reason, there was a run on olives. I wondered what this could mean.
We strolled around Stanley for an hour, George in the lead, past the corrugated iron roofs and
exuberant flowerbeds of Jubilee Villas and a vast new school that would have been filled with at
least half a million pupils in the U.K. The roof of a small house in the trellis of quiet streets on the
hill was painted with a Union Jack.
