At The Gates Of Antarctica

Mauritia Kirchner falls in love with the far­flung Falkland Islands.

- Mauritia Kirchner

Land Rovers, machine guns and fishing rods. It is a sad fact that most of us associate the Falkland Islands with the first two rather than the third – a war zone afflicted by armed conflict in the early 1980s, somewhere in the South Atlantic. Hardly anybody knows much about the fishing possibilities of the Falkland Islands, neither the Internet nor magazines offer any deeper insights. Following the quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “You only see what you know,” I decided to venture on that trip to get an impression of the Falklands for myself. My travel companion Eddie Jensen and I used the so-called airbridge, a regular direct flight with an Airbus A330 operated by the Royal Air Force from the Brize Norton military base in England. The flight, which is also open for civilians, takes about 18 hours including a short stopover, landing at Mount Pleasant base. (You can also get there with the Chilean airline LATAM via flights from the South American continent.)