Why I wanted to go
Plain curiosity, mostly.
Look at a map of the South Atlantic and the thing is absurd. There is an archipelago sitting just off the Argentine coast, close enough to feel like part of the geography, and it flies a different flag. People live there. For them it isn’t a paradox, it’s a Tuesday. I wanted to see what that looked like up close.
The language was what really caught me. English-speaking corners of this continent are rare — Guyana, and Belize if you’re willing to count Central America. Otherwise it’s Spanish and Portuguese all the way down. And then, at the very bottom, a few thousand people speaking English into the wind. How do they understand where they are? That was the question I never got answered.
What happened when I asked
I mentioned it more than once to colleagues. That I’d like to visit the islands one day.
What came back wasn’t information. It was a question of its own: why would you want to go there? Not anger. Something quieter and more closed than that. The sense that this was a subject they would rather not keep open.
After it happened a few times I stopped raising it. That was one of the things eight years taught me. Some topics are delicate because opinion is divided. This one is delicate because it isn’t.
What happened when I searched
I did look into it. Someone had told me there was a flight from Santiago de Chile.
Type it into a flight search and the route would appear. The schedule wouldn’t. I moved the dates around, tried different months, got the same blank. I assumed I was doing something wrong. Then I assumed the flight must be irregular, chartered maybe, because who really goes?
The answer, obviously, was the pandemic. The service was suspended and the search engines were showing me the skeleton of a route with no flights hanging on it.
But here is the part worth saying out loud. The obstacle was never the distance or the money. It was information.Almost everything I could find online was years old, and nothing told me which parts were still true. I never made it as far as planning a trip. I got stuck at the stage before planning, the one where you’re trying to work out whether the thing is possible at all.
So let me write down what I couldn’t find.
How you actually get there
Via Chile — the usual route. LATAM flies from Santiago every Saturday and comes back the same day. The aircraft stops at Punta Arenas in both directions, and that’s where Chilean customs happens. Once a month, the flight also stops at Río Gallegos, in Argentina.
Via Brazil. There used to be a midweek service from São Paulo. It hasn’t restarted since Covid. If it does return, it’s expected to call at Córdoba, Argentina, once a month.
Via the UK. The Ministry of Defence runs flights twice weekly from Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, refuelling at Ascension Island. Out of Britain on Sundays and Wednesdays, back from the islands on Tuesdays and Fridays. Civilians can book a seat through the Falkland Islands Government Office in London — though these are subject to last-minute changes, so don’t book anything tight on either end.
On arrival. Everything lands at Mount Pleasant, on East Falkland, which is part of a complex run by the British MoD. A bus takes you to Stanley and drops you at your accommodation. If you’re travelling independently, both your lodging and your transfers have to be arranged before you arrive. This is not a place you improvise.
Now look again at that first route. Río Gallegos is a domestic flight from Buenos Aires. Once a month, there was a way to leave from Argentine soil and land on those islands.
I lived there eight years and never knew.
Where I went instead
Ushuaia, in 2018.
They call it the end of the world, and the marketing is doing less work than you’d expect. Standing there, Antarctica stops being an abstraction. Whatever the actual distance, the direction gets into your body.
While I was there I saw the cruise packages. Fifteen days, north of ten thousand dollars. I remember thinking I would plan that properly when I got home.
I didn’t go.
So the two places I never reached ended up filed in the same drawer. One out east, one down south, both of them just off the edge of where I actually was.
Later
Writing this, I found something out.
More than forty cruise ships include the Falklands in their austral summer itineraries, calling there as part of a wider South American or Antarctic voyage. Which means the two places I missed were never separate trips at all. They were one. That ship I saw in the harbour at Ushuaia was very likely going to both.
If I go back to Argentina, that’s the one I want. The islands and the ice, in a single crossing.
The plane still leaves on Saturdays.
